Here's a great example of why disabled-owned, managed, and run businesses
are so important. Such businesses are more than employment opportunities
for people with disabilities. As the article describes below, they can
serve the vital function of understanding the barriers and problems that
people with disabilities face and create solutions that fully and
successfully resolve those barriers and limits.
kelly
>Web enabled
>S.F. start-up helping disabled access the Web gets big boost from new
>federal law
>Lizette Wilson
>A new federal law requiring government agencies to make their web sites
>accessible to people with disabilities could mean descriptive voiceovers
>for blind people, enriched graphics for deaf ones -- and a possible
>windfall for a San Francisco startup.
>
>SSB Technologies, a 10-person company composed of friends and former
>fraternity brothers, has developed two software programs in the past year
>that government agencies and companies doing business with those agencies
>can use to find and fix accessibility violations.
>
>The company has already licensed its software to the U.S. Postal Service,
>the State of North Carolina, Oracle Corp. and PeopleSoft, and, if things go
>as expected, will have a slew of new customers buying its software so they
>can comply with the feds' summer deadline.
>
>Company President Marcos Sorani is pleased with those results -- for
>reasons that go beyond the bottom line.
>
>"We're creating technology that is literally the lifeline to the world for
>a lot of people," said Sorani, who has been in a wheelchair since he became
>paralyzed six years ago in a freak surfing accident. "I use voice
>recognition because I can't use my fingers."
>
>After graduating with an engineering degree from Princeton, Sorani worked
>at Andersen Consulting and then at Oracle. He left his position at Oracle
>managing financial software after four years to launch SSB Technologies
>with some friends last year.
>
>"Some VCs were looking for an `old guy' ... I was 30 at the time," Sorani
>laughed. "You know, anything with a three in front of it."
>
>The company didn't secure any VC funds, but did score $750,000 from angel
>investors, including Ray Kurzweil, a popular patron of blind causes.
>
>The original company, dubbed EmpowerD.com, was a content and community site
>for disabled people.
>
>It didn't work.
>
>Not just because Internet pure-plays fell out of favor last spring, but
>because Sorani and others in the company realized the audience they were
>trying to reach often lacked basic tools to access web sites, let alone to
>shop online or hang out in chat rooms.
>
>Although there are tons of end-user programs like Freedom Scientific, GW
>Micro and IBM's Homepage reader, these software programs are only as
>helpful as the code they read allows.
>
>For example, a reading program will process a web page, giving auditory
>descriptions of text and fields so a blind person can navigate it. But when
>it comes to a picture or hyperlink -- graphics which the rest of population
>uses as informational and interactive cues -- the automated voice will
>announce, "image 53," or something equally unhelpful to a person trying to
>interact with the text.
>
>SSB developed a program, InSight, that automatically scans each web page
>for glitches. The companion program, InFocus, fixes them -- to provide, for
>example, auditory descriptions of graphics and pictures.
>
>"They're really very innovative in the market. I believe they're the only
>ones doing this," said Rod Loucks, CTO for the City of San Francisco.
>Loucks said the city is always looking for ways to make services more
>accessible to the public, and is concluding negotiations with SSB
>technologies now to license their software.
>
>The alternative to SSB, Loucks said, is not appealing.
>
>"You'd have to be going through and manually review everything -- reviewing
>the right things and the same things for every page. This software makes it
>consistent."
>
>Problems include colors that don't contrast enough, tabs without captions,
>images that don't include descriptions and mouse commands without a
>keyboard alternative.
>
>The National Federation of the Blind sued AOL last year over such problems.
>The federation prevailed, and AOL agreed to make its 6.0 version more
>accessible.
>
>Curtis Chang, director of technology of the National Federation of the
>Blind, was on the federal advisory board to craft the new accessibility
>guidelines now going into effect.
>
>He praised SSB Technologies' software, for providing web developers with
>easy-to-use tools to make sites more accessible. He said the new mandate
>will help bring agencies into compliance, but major changes are still
>needed in people's mindsets before blind people can achieve full access.
>
>"They strengthened the law, they tightened the loophole so the burden of
>proof is now on the agency to show complying would be an undue burden. It's
>good," he said. "We're taking that next step down the road of enforcement.
>It's a continuum."
>
>Lizette Wilson covers Peninsula technology for the San Francisco Business
>Times. [log in to unmask]
>
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