>Disabled find many barriers online
>
>By Andrew Park
>American-Statesman Staff
>Sunday, September 3, 2000
>
>Tired of having to squint to read the display of his small green computer
>screen, Guido Corona one day replaced it with a 19-inch television.
>
>When text on the edges blurred beyond recognition, he pulled a cardboard
>box over his head and the monitor to block out extraneous light.
>
>When light seeped in anyway, he lined the makeshift hood with black paper
>to cover the cracks.
>
>When he found himself squinting again, he rigged his computer to talk to
>him and soundproofed his office so colleagues wouldn't be bothered by the
>noise.
>
>It was 1984 and Corona, a programmer in the research labs of IBM Corp.,
>was losing his eyesight to retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disorder
>that can lay dormant for half a lifetime and then turn a sighted person
>blind within a matter of months.
>
>Elsewhere within IBM, blind programmers were rigging printers with rubber
>bands and coat hangers to get them to print Braille and going back to
>primitive punch card sorters that could be read by their hands.
>
>They knew -- even in the early days of the personal computer -- that a
>technological revolution was coming and they didn't want to be left behind.
>
>Today, PCs can be custom-made for the visually impaired, and a whole
>industry has grown up to develop technologies to help people with
>disabilities. But that doesn't always make them useful to folks like Guido
>Corona, because much of the Internet -- which has become so important in
>American life that it increasingly separates the haves from the have-nots
>-- remains inaccessible to people with disabilities. They struggle every
>day to find their way through complex Web pages that are clogged with
>animation, video and data that would fill reams of paper -- but are void
>of any accommodation for their needs.
>
>Ten years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which
>forced corporations and governments to address the needs of people with
>disabilities in the physical world, advocates are focusing attention on
>the barriers in the virtual world.
>
>It is another digital divide, and if you think the issue is simply the
>ability to shop online, think again. At some point, the Internet will be
>the platform for learning, working and participating in society. Texas is
>pushing hard to adopt electronic textbooks in public schools, for example,
>but they will be of little value if students with disabilities cannot use them.
>
>``To the extent that the world is moving to the Internet, it ups the ante
>that we have to be there or we cease being competitive,'' says Curtis
>Chong, director of technology for the National Federation of the Blind in
>Washington.
>
>``We've always said that blind people can be competitive. But being
>competitive can be tough to do if the technology is moving too fast for
>you to keep up with."
>
>Fighting for access
>
>According to a study released in March by researchers at the University of
>California-San Francisco, less than 10 percent of people with disabilities
>regularly use the Internet, versus nearly 40 percent of people with no
>disabilities.
>
>In the past two years, major computer and software makers have decreed
>that their products will be built with accessibility to everyone in mind,
>from people who can't use a mouse to those who can't hear a computer's
>beeps and whistles. But the needs of people with disabilities still get
>trampled under the rush to expand the Internet and use it to transform all
>aspects of American life, from business to government to education.
>
>"Ninety percent of the Internet pages have some problem with
>accessibility,'' says Kelly Ford, a Portland, Ore., consultant who teaches
>Web design to corporations and is one of the more outspoken advocates of
>building in accessibility. ``Inaccessible information is just as much of a
>barrier as a set of steps is to a person in a wheelchair."
>
>After years of pushing technology companies behind the scenes to improve
>the accessibility of their products, the fight is becoming public.
>
>In the past year, advocates for people with visual impairments have sued
>major corporations including Bank of America, H&R Block and Intuit,
>claiming that the companies' popular software and Web sites aren't
>compatible with the screen-reading technology they use to surf the Web.
>They charged that Internet services such as online shopping, banking and
>tax preparation constitute public accommodations that, under the ADA, have
>to be as accessible to people with disabilities as the public library or
>the mall.
>
>America Online recently settled a suit by agreeing to make future versions
>of its Internet service software accessible to screen readers and other
>technology that people with disabilities use. The Department of Justice
>ruled in 1996 that the ADA applied to the Internet, and the government is
>adopting rules requiring accessibility in all technology it buys. The
>rules are expected to encourage state and local governments as well as the
>private sector to pay more attention to the issue.
>
>But it remains to be seen whether corporate policies and government
>regulations can keep up with the explosive growth of the Internet. New
>elements are added every day to Web sites, often without regard to how
>different viewers might experience them. The emergence of affordable
>high-bandwidth connections such as cable modems and DSL has encouraged Web
>designers to create sites with complex features like streaming audio and
>video, animation and built-in, executable programs -- elements that even
>many people without disabilities have trouble using.
>
>``I think as the Web continues to grow, it gets more inaccessible,'' says
>Jim Allan, information technology director at the Texas School for the
>Blind and Visually Impaired.
>
>With the advent of each new potentially world-changing Internet
>application -- telecommuting, distance learning, online voting, digital
>signatures, e-books -- people with disabilities question whether they will
>be able to take advantage, too.
>
>``Every new thing that comes along, the first thing I do is worry,'' Chong
>says. ``I will say that most of my worry has been justified."
>
>Screen-reader success
>
>Guido Corona is not alone at IBM, and was not when he joined in the early
>1980s. Long before the Web existed, computing's emphasis on the visual
>caused problems for people with blindness and other disabilities, forcing
>them to improvise.
>
>Each time such improvisations failed him, Corona cursed his
>state-of-the-art computer and blamed technology, even though he knew it
>was his vision that was reaching early obsolescence.
>
>"It was me, my eyes that were going the way of the Edsel or the dodos,''
>says Corona, 47, his eyes hidden by mirrored sunglasses more suited to a
>Texas state trooper than a computer programmer.
>
>As he continued to struggle, Corona learned that an IBM researcher named
>James Thatcher was developing a program that, when combined with a speech
>synthesizer, would read text aloud from a PC screen.
>
>``That was really a very important thing for the blind community, because
>it opened up jobs that wouldn't be available to them,'' says Thatcher, who
>retired from IBM in April.
>
>Corona jumped at the chance to be one of the early testers of that product
>-- called PC-SAID -- beginning a long association with Thatcher that
>culminated in 1996, when IBM moved its Special Needs Systems group, which
>was charged with bringing together all of the company's efforts in
>developing computing for people with disabilities, to Austin. Corona, then
>working in Toronto, soon followed.
>
>By the early 1990s, millions of people were logging onto e-mail and a
>text-based Internet through services such as AOL and Prodigy, including
>many blind people who used screen-reading programs. With the invention of
>the Web browser, though, developers were able to format text into boxes
>and columns and add logos, charts, photographs and drawings and the
>Internet began to evolve into a much more graphic environment.
>
>Once again, people with disabilities were left behind. Not only did the
>emphasis on spectacular graphics mean that visually impaired people using
>screen readers were stymied; the growing emphasis on the mouse as the tool
>for navigating the visual world of the Internet also meant that many
>people with mobility problems would be left out.
>
>``In 1997, I was essentially refusing to recognize it because it was
>becoming a truly schizophrenic experience,'' Corona says. ``There were
>less and less places that you could go to."
>
>About the same time in a laboratory in Tokyo, an IBM researcher was
>programming a screen reader that would recognize not just conventional
>text, but also the tags in HTML that control where text is displayed, its
>appearance and its function on Web pages. The program, called Home Page
>Reader, offered the visually impaired user signals to how a Web page was
>laid out and how to navigate it. Thatcher's group brought the software to
>the United States and released a second version last year.
>
>Home Page Reader -- and programs like it from assistive-technology
>companies such as Henter-Joyce Inc. -- rely on Web developers to include
>text alternatives to graphic elements as they are programming their pages.
>It is an easy step in designing a page, but one many programmers overlook.
>
>``When the issue of accessibility comes up, that's not the No. 1 priority.
>The No. 1 priority is to have a nice-looking product,'' says Adam
>Weinroth, a Web developer at Mediatruck Inc. in Austin, whose team won
>first place in a contest last fall in which local design firms created
>accessible Web sites for nonprofit organizations. ``Now it's to the point
>where people are potentially missing out on customers or missing out on
>revenue because of it."
>
>Indeed, people with disabilities are increasingly looked upon by
>corporations as a lucrative market, and their combined buying power of
>$300 billion is only expected to grow as baby boomers age.
>
>But change is not easy. Advocates bring inaccessible sites to the
>attention of the companies that run them, and their recent targets have
>been some of the biggest names on the Web: Dell Computer, Citibank,
>Priceline. After becoming a faithful customer of HomeGrocer.com, Kelly
>Ford complained when the site was redesigned and its accessible features
>were dropped. The Seattle company made the appropriate changes, but it was
>later sold to another company whose online grocery site is not accessible.
>
>And sites that target a wide audience have been embarrassed when they have
>failed accessibility tests. The Bush for President campaign recently
>relaunched its site, only to read in the media that it didn't meet
>accessibility standards.
>
>Last spring, people found that the ballots for the online primary held in
>Arizona were inaccessible; voting buttons were not labeled with text
>alternatives. As with Ford's experience with online grocery shopping,
>people with disabilities were denied a chance to do something they
>struggle with in the physical world.
>
>``It was the one time that people who are blind could have had complete
>independence when voting at the polls, and they blew it,'' said Cynthia
>Waddell, who helped the City of San Jose become the first major
>municipality to address the accessibility of its Web sites.
>
>Change comes slowly
>
>Not everyone agrees that Web sites should be required to include the kind
>of clues that Home Page Reader and other screen-recognition software can
>use. At a hearing in February, a House subcommittee heard testimony on
>whether the Internet was a ``public accommodation'' as defined by the ADA,
>and much of the testimony was against the idea.
>
>``It would be hard to find a better way to curb the currently explosive
>upsurge of this new publishing and commercial medium than to menace
>private actors with liability if they publish pages that fail to live up
>to some expert body's idea of accessibility in site design,'' Walter
>Olson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, told the
>House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution.
>
>And many who call for better accessibility favor encouraging more
>enlightened design, rather than forcing it. Gregg Vanderheiden, director
>of the Trace Research and Development Center at the University of
>Wisconsin at Madison, and others speak of a future in which ``universal
>design'' allows all people to access Internet content, no matter what
>their capabilities are or what type of device they are using. Rather than
>build sites that use only text or that have separate sites for people with
>disabilities, they advocate designing sites that transform gracefully,
>recognizing the special needs of the user as soon as they load onto the
>screen. And despite the effort IBM has made promoting Home Page Reader,
>the special-needs group remains a bit player in the corporation's cast --
>only 17 employees out of a work force of more than 300,000. Only in the
>past three years has the company bothered to file for patents on
>technologies for people with disabilities, and despite a companywide
>directive last year that all IBM products and Web sites must be
>accessible, Chairman Louis Gerstner has not talked publicly about the need
>for the industry to follow suit.
>
>Like IBM, Microsoft has widely advertised its accessibility effort, but it
>employs just 50 people and has been active only since 1998. Before then,
>the company did not work with developers of accessibility software, so
>blind users had to wait nine months before being able to work with
>accessible versions of new systems such as Windows 95.
>
>``It's very easy for our products to get lost because we have very small
>volume and there are many other very important products in which we get
>lost,'' IBM's Thatcher says. ``It's hard for IBM to sell so few products."
>
>For Guido Corona, Home Page Reader has been a godsend and he is back to
>being an Internet evangelist. Many sites still confound him, but most
>weeks, he spends hours searching the Web for news, the latest price of IBM
>stock, downloadable books and music, and stories about science. On his
>desk at home are books by Tom Clancy and Thomas Mann he has scanned into
>his computer to be read back to him later.
>
>In the 19th century, when the masses were learning to read, the divide
>between the blind and the sighted populations widened. Those who could
>read suddenly had access to information about the world, while the blind
>had to rely on hearsay. Later, they could listen to radio and television,
>and Braille texts and recorded books helped. But none of it was available
>widely enough or quickly enough to provide timely access to information.
>
>``Now with the explosion of information on the Internet, that gap becomes
>even greater because the amount of information out there is growing
>exponentially, but the blind population will start with the same
>methods,'' Corona says.
>
>``So when the Internet becomes all of a sudden accessible, it's truly
>opening the floodgate of knowledge, of information, of self-worth, of
>education, of being a part of this global village.
>
>``And that is awesome."
>
>You may contact Andrew Park at [log in to unmask] or 912-5933.


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