Below is the text of a letter 15 chief executive officers of leading
technology companies wrote to President Clinton committing to technology
access for people with disabilities.
kelly
AN OPEN LETTER ON ACCESSIBILITY FROM TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVES
The Honorable William Jefferson Clinton
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500
September 21, 2000
Dear Mr. President:
As the CEOs of a number of America's leading high-tech companies, we
strongly support your efforts to promote the accessibility of information
and communications products and services for people with disabilities.
We believe that there are two compelling reasons to do so. First,
accessible information technology can be a powerful tool for expanding
opportunity in the emerging information society. If our products and
services are designed to be accessible, people with disabilities will find
it easier to work, access a growing universe of electronic information and
services, and lead more independent lives. If we fail to do this, people
with disabilities could be further isolated from the mainstream of our
economy and our society. Second, there are sound economic and commercial
incentives to make our products more accessible. Globally, there are over
750 million people with disabilities, and there are 54 million in the
United States alone. Making our products accessible will also make it
easier for us to serve the rapidly growing population of seniors.
Moreover, increasing the accessibility of our products can often improve
their functionality for everyone, not just for people with disabilities.
Designing products and services that can give customers a choice of input
and output mechanisms will help people with disabilities, but it will also
help the mobile professional trying to access the Web on a handheld
wireless device.
This issue requires private sector leadership. The federal government can
help create the right policy environment, but it is ultimately companies
that must design, develop and market accessible products and services. To
make concrete progress on this issue, and to elevate its importance within
our companies, all of us are committed to developing a corporate-wide
policy on accessibility within the next six months. The specifics of our
policies will vary because of the different markets that we serve, but all
of us will seek to include the following private sector "best practices" as
appropriate:
* Raise the level of awareness of accessibility issues within our company,
and provide our employees with the training they need to design accessible
products and services;
* Develop accessibility guidelines for products and services, and hold
product development groups accountable for implementing these guidelines
where technically and economically feasible;
* Involve people with disabilities in the development of our accessibility
guidelines, or in the design and testing of our products and services;
* Devote sufficient product development and engineering resources to
identify and rapidly address known accessibility problems, in future
products and upgrades;
* Make it easier for our developer community to create accessible products
and services by making available training, guidelines, and technology
solutions;
* Document the accessibility features of our products and
publicly-available services;
* Support internal and external (e.g. university-based) research and
development that will improve the state-of-the-art of accessible technology
that is relevant to our products and services; and
* Support implementation of standards that advance accessibility, such as
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines on accessible browsers, Web
content and authoring tools.
As an industry, we will also commit to establishing a Web site that will
collect private sector
policies on accessibility as a way of encouraging the rapid dissemination
and adoption of best practices. Thank you for your leadership on this
important issue.
Sincerely,
John Warnock
CEO
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Stephen M. Case
Chairman & CEO
America Online, Inc.
C. Michael Armstrong
Chairman & CEO
AT&T
Duane Ackerman
Chairman & CEO
BellSouth
Michael D. Capellas
President & CEO
Compaq Computer Corp.
Meg Whitman
President & CEO
eBay, Inc.
Leo J. Hindery, Jr.
CEO
Global Crossing
Carly S. Fiorina
President & CEO
Hewlett-Packard Company
Rob Burgess
Chairman & CEO
Macromedia, Inc.
Steve Ballmer
CEO
Microsoft Corporation
Dr. Irwin M. Jacobs
Chairman of the Board
Qualcomm
Scott A. McNealy
Chairman & CEO
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Eric A. Benhamou
Chairman & CEO
3Com Corporation
James C. Morgan
Chairman & CEO
Applied Materials, Inc.
Donna Dubinsky
CEO
Handspring
John Keane
Chairman & CEO
Keane, Inc.
Peter Hering
President
PST, Inc.
Amardeep Lamba
President
Absolute Solutions, Inc.
Larry L. Petersen
President
Advanced Network Technologies, Inc.
David Lane
General Partner
Alpine Technology Ventures
Mark Hill
President
Baker Hill Corp.
David Westin
President & CEO
Channel Automation, Inc.
Hani MN Alaouie
President
Dearborn Technical Institute
Scott A. Martin
President
diCarta, Corp.
Paul Lippe
CEO
e-SKOLAR
Brad Beckman
CEO
JTBS, Inc
Nick Grouf
CEO & Founder
PeoplePC, Inc.
Elaine M. Verna
President/Acting CEO
IsSound Corporation
Curt M. Vinson
President
Lyme Computer Systems
Lalit J. Chabria
President
Micropower Business Solutions
Marc Ostrofsky
President
Multimedia Venture Partners
Lars Nyberg
Chairman & CEO
NCR Corporation
George F. Adam, Jr.
Chairman & CEO
NEON New Era Networks
Rick Dutta
CEO
Nexgenix
Tim O'Reilley
Founder
O'Reilley & Associates
Jimmy Edwards
President & CEO
Premier Computing Training
Bob Young
Chairman
Red Hat, Inc.
Lucia Klebar
President
ProMentor
LaWanda Armstrong
President & CEO
QuesTech Communications
Ariel Kleckner
President & Founder
Red Gorilla
Sterling Ledet
President
Sterling Ledet & Associates, Inc.
Gregory M. Avis
Managing Partner
Summit Partners
Frank J. Ponzio, Jr.
President & Founder
Symbolic Systems, Inc.
Paul Okoye Chukwudi
President & CEO
Synergistic Software Solutions
William M. Nelson
CEO
Will Nelson Computer Services, Inc.
Arthur R. Rippey
President
World Technology Computer Learning Center, Inc.
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