Hi All,

Despite a couple glaring inaccuracies in explaining screen reading software
and the status of the NFB legal action against AOL, this article makes some
good points.



 From the web page:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/09/biztech/articles/05hand.html

September 5, 2000

Online Deliveries Lighten Burden for the Disabled

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Empowerment, Not Just Convenience, for an Unexpected Class of Consumer
By JAYSON BLAIR



Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
Using voice recognition software and online delivery services, Mary West,
who is blind, can buy all sorts of groceries from sites on the World Wide
Web, including food for her cat Alice.
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Mary West stumbled across YourGrocer.com, an online grocery store, one
afternoon a few years ago and quickly became a fan of its fresh blueberry
muffins and fast deliveries.

Ordering her groceries by computer made Ms. West like any other shopper,
and for this she was grateful. Now, Ms. West, who is blind, does not stand
out the way she once did in D'Agostino's or Gristede's.

"I was looking for a place to do a lot of my shopping," said Ms. West, 35,
"because I am visually impaired and I can't read labels and things on the
grocery shelves." In the past, she had to rely on the help of store clerks
and friends to shop for groceries and perform other tasks.

Before she had access to online delivery services, shopping had become so
difficult that she had given up, ordering her favorite, although much less
healthful, takeout instead.

"It really helps me out because I have a bad back, bad knees, diabetes and
I can't really go the supermarket anymore," said Ms. West, who lives in
Chelsea. "Four or five years ago I was not able to cook my own food because
I did not have any, so I was ordering out, and that was not helping my
health or my pocketbook."

Now she uses special voice recognition software to surf the Web for
everything from dishwashing detergent to vegetables.

People like Ms. West, who have a temporary or permanent disability that
makes it difficult to handle everyday chores on their own, are increasingly
using online delivery services to rent movies, pick up cleaning supplies
and buy groceries.

The advantages of information technology are pronounced in places like
Manhattan, advocates for the disabled say, because crowded streets, the
lack of access for the handicapped to cabs and subway stations, and other
factors complicate their lives.

To the disabled, the growth of online delivery services has been
empowering. To their advocates, it represents progress. To some owners of
such businesses, it has become another piece of a shrewd business equation.

Noble as it may be to help the disabled rent a movie from Blockbuster or
buy fresh vegetables on their own, to J. Maxwell Enoch, the chief executive
of YourGrocer .com, it is about capitalizing on a market his company's
founders did not even envision.

"Undoubtedly, the sort of people we are talking about have found a way to
our service," Mr. Enoch said, "and it is very meaningful to them."

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For those with trouble getting around, a godsend.

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People with permanent disabilities, like Ms. West, and those who are
temporarily off their feet, like women recovering after childbirth and
runners with sprained knees, have created a new marketing niche for Mr.
Enoch's company, which is based in Eastchester, N.Y., and serves New York
City and some of its suburbs.

"In Manhattan, you are held hostage by the D'Agostinos and the Gristedes of
the world," Mr. Enoch said in a recent interview. He noted that those
grocery stores are often busy and cannot provide much attention to a
disabled customer. Even when the handicapped are able to navigate these
stores, he added, they often have difficulty getting the items home.

"A lot of the things we carry are heavy," Mr. Enoch said.


Executives of similar online delivery services said they were not
necessarily trying to attract disabled customers when they started. Most of
the businesses, based in Manhattan's Silicon Alley, focused on reaching
young urban professionals, appealing to a simple desire for convenience.

"We go where the customers lead us," said Skip Trevathan, the chief
operating officer at Kozmo.com, which is based in Manhattan and delivers
many items, including toilet paper and movies, in cities across the
country. "It obviously was in the thinking behind the business model, but
only in a narrow sense of people who were homebound for a few days because
of something like pregnancy or an injury."

That vision has expanded, Mr. Trevathan added. Now, the first page of
Kozmo's employee training manual includes a letter from a disabled
customer, Cameo C. Massey. Ms. Massey, a single mother in Seattle who
suffers from Epstein-Barr syndrome and has severe nerve damage from
troublesome surgeries, wrote about her difficulties doing everyday chores.

"I find myself at the mercy of my own limitations," Ms. Massey wrote.

"Your service has helped make my life filled with more quality time. By
being able to order books, magazines, movies, games and food from Kozmo, I
find that I am able to feel more in touch and up to date with normal people."

Many disabled New Yorkers echo those sentiments.

Ms. West, who teaches at the Computer Center for the Visually Impaired
People at Baruch College, said that for the first time in her life, she
"can handle everything like a sighted person."

Kozmo.com officials said they believed that as more disabled Americans gain
access to computers, they would increasingly rely on online delivery
services. A recent Harris poll conducted for the National Organization on
Disability found that adults with disabilities were twice as likely as the
nondisabled to report that the Internet had significantly improved their
lives.

But the poll also found that only 43 percent of the disabled respondents
had access to the Internet, compared with 57 percent of the nondisabled
respondents.


For its part, Kozmo.com has begun a campaign with the National Cristina
Foundation, a nonprofit organization that brings computer technology to the
disabled, to deliver donated computers to the disabled.

In a partnership with General Motors, Kmart and Microsoft, Heidi Van Arnem,
a Birmingham, Mich., entrepreneur who has been a quadriplegic since 16,
began a national campaign this year, the 10th anniversary of the passage of
the Americans With Disabilities Act, to draw attention to what she calls
the "disability divide."

In a speech she gave when the campaign started, Ms. Van Arnem, the chief
executive of I-Can Online, which provides consultant services to commercial
Web sites trying to reach the disabled, said, "Disabilities disappear with
advancements in technology." But the fact that the people who benefit most
are the ones most likely not to have a computer is frustrating, she said.

She added that the online companies beginning to cater to the disabled
"represent a growing awareness that there is great opportunity to reach the
85 percent of people with disabilities who are not online yet, and whose
lives stand to be enhanced by connecting to the Internet."

Robert Harvey, the president of I-Can Online, said in a recent interview
that the disabled population is "the most underserved and underattended
market in the country" because the disabled "are just not in public view.
But they spend a trillion dollars a year on our economy."

Fifty-four million Americans, about 20 percent of the population, have
disabilities, according to the latest census data. There are about 5.6
million disabled people in New York City and its suburbs.

Most online delivery companies, Mr. Harvey said, began with a "throw seeds
out and watch to see if anything will sprout" approach and quickly found
that the disabled could become one of their most solid customer bases.

Their success has caused other businesses to "think about this population
and how they want to reach them," he said.

Despite the advantages that the Internet offers to the disabled,
technological problems persist. For example, the National Federation of the
Blind has sued America Online, claiming that AOL violates the Americans
With Disabilities Act because its software is incompatible with many voice
recognition programs, known as assisted technology. The suit is pending.

Several delivery companies, including YourGrocer.com, UrbanFetch.com and
Amazon.com, have had to deal with similar technical issues. Even I-Can
Online had problems, since corrected, that made it difficult for voice
recognition software to read its Web pages. The software allows users to
control their computers with their voices instead of keyboards. The
computer also reads text from Web pages, if they are formatted properly.

"It did not take us long to realize that we could not be the advocates for
people with disabilities and not have ramps for our own people," said Mr.
Harvey, the president of I-Can. "One of the elements we now put in our
contracts is that the companies will work to make their sites more
accessible."

The challenges notwithstanding, Ms. West sees the improvements for disabled
people as a monumental and empowering turning point. "It evens the playing
field," she said.


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