The article below is a kind of celebration of the ADA anniversary.
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Norman Coombs [log in to unmask]

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 Technology Pioneered By and For People With Disabilities Benefits Everyone

REDMOND, Wash., July 26, 1999 - Motivated by a powerful desire to overcome
barriers to employment and full participation in other aspects of
mainstream life, people with disabilities have always been among those who
are willing to experiment with new technologies.

For more than a decade people with limited dexterity have been running
software that lets them use their voices to communicate with their
computers, and blind users have listened as their computers talked tothem.
Today, these technologies have been refined to the point that they're ready
to be marketed to mainstream audiences. And then there's the onscreen
keyboard, a technology developed initially for those who could not type but
were able to point. Today, it seems as though every other corporate
executive you see is carrying around a little palm-sized computer with an
onscreen keyboard. Older examples of such technology evolutions from
outside the world of computers include the typewriter, telephone, ramps cut
into curbs, easy-to-open containers, and the bell that signals the arrival
of the elevator.

"When new technology is first introduced, it is often pretty cumbersome,"
says Greg Lowney, director of accessibility and the Accessibility and
Disabilities Group at Microsoft. "Mainstream audiences aren't willing to
try it and quickly give up in frustration because the inconveniences
outweigh the benefits it provides them. Microsoft relies on early adopters
- such as people who love computer games, people in the computer industry,
and people with disabilities - to teach us how to make our products more
usable."

On July 26, the nation marks the ninth anniversary of Americans with
Disabilities Act, federal legislation that requires businesses with more
than 15 employees to accommodate individuals with disabilities. "Microsoft
has been working on making our technology accessible to individuals with
disabilities for more than a decade, because it's the right thing to do and
it makes good business sense," Lowney says. "It's also consistent with Bill
Gates' vision of empowering people through great software - any time,
anywhere and on any device. The passage of the ADA motivated our large
corporate clients to also take this issue more seriously, which has given
us further justification for being proactive in this area."

This is not a small niche. It's estimated that there are more than 30
million people in the United States with disabilities who can be affected
by the accessibility of computer technology; worldwide, the number is much
higher. In the future, millions more will become permanently or temporarily
disabled due to an accident, illness or age.

"Every morning, millions of Americans wake up and fantasize about not going
to work. At the same time, millions of Americans with disabilities wake up
and wish they could go to work," says Warren D. Johnson, Assistant Vice
President of Individual and Major Gifts, Easter Seals. Technology is the
key to tomorrow's jobs, and Microsoft has been instrumental in breaking
down the obstacles that people with disabilities face in finding work."

Thanks in part to their relationship with the community of people with
disabilities, members of Microsoft's Accessibility and Disabilities Group
have been able to help employees throughout the company make products not
only more usable and attractive for people with disabilities but for
everyone. Today, due to more than 10 years of dedicated effort and
committed leadership, accessibility features are standard in Microsoft
products.

"If you can't access today's technology, you are looking at a difficult
future," says Betsy Beyha, director of technology policy for the World
Institute on Disability. It's hard to get educated, hard to find a job. We
knew that Microsoft was serious about accessibility issues when Windows 95
came out with accessibility options included in the basic operating system."

Windows 2000, which will be released sometime in the next several months,
contains dozens of built-in features specifically for people with
disabilities. People with impaired vision can modify their screen to make
type larger and clearer. For those who have manual dexterity issues, it's
possible to customize keyboard functions so that keys repeat more slowly or
not at all. Users can also go into the control panel and turn on a function
that allows them to switch over to serial key commands instead of the
default key commands that require pressing two keys at once. A feature
called MouseKeys allows users to bypass the mouse altogether by using the
numeric keypad. It even lets blind users perform basic system functions on
any machine.

"It's not just people with disabilities who are benefiting from this
technology. The rest of us are, too," Beyha points out. She recalls a
recent training seminar she conducted for a group of teachers, none of whom
had a disability. As she was projecting a Web page on the overhead, she
quickly keyed in a command in Microsoft Explorer that made the Web address
bigger and easier to read. "All at once, everyone was asking, 'How did you
do that? I want to do that on my computer,'" Beyha says.

The Accessibility and Disabilities Group was created in 1992 with the
understanding that, as an industry leader, it was Microsoft's
responsibility to develop products and information technologies that were
accessible and usable by all people, including those with disabilities.

"It all began when we started working with the Trace Research and
Development Center at the University of Wisconsin to make Windows 3.0 more
accessible to people with disabilities," Lowney remembers "We helped them
develop an add-on tool, then we made the tool available free of charge. We
improved it for Windows 3.1, then created my full-time job, which included
building it into Windows 95 and Windows NT.".

In 1998, Bill Gates announced a large-scale plan to dramatically increase
the size and scope of Microsoft's accessibility initiatives. The
accessibility team has grown from one person in 1988 to a full-time staff
of over 40 today.

"One of the most important things we do is to encourage people within all
areas of Microsoft think about and take responsibility for accessibility,"
Lowney says. "We want to make sure that our products are easy to use for
the widest possible range of people. That diverse customer base is valuable
to us as a company.

"By the same token, Microsoft is committed to employing people with
disabilities, in part because their perspective really helps us build
better products for everyone," Lowney says "In addition, by demonstrating
their success in the workplace, they raise awareness about how people with
disabilities really are equally capable. That in turn can help break down
social barriers, and it's something we see becoming more widespread because
of the capabilities of the computer."

Microsoft has also reached out to the community of people with disabilities
by forming an international advisory council composed of leading direct
service and advocacy groups. "Microsoft has shown that they understand that
their developers can't just go off by themselves and intuit what everyone
needs. By setting up the advisory council, they've asked the community of
people with disabilities to help them prioritize where they put their
resources," says Russ Holland, program director for the Alliance for
Technology Access.

In January 1999, WE Magazine, a lifestyle publication for people with
disabilities, identified Microsoft as one of 10 companies that go beyond
the Americans with Disabilities Act to recruit and accommodate employees
with disabilities.

Microsoft has also taken the lead in pushing the entire high-tech industry
to recognize the importance of people with disabilities as consumers and to
routinely consider accessibility issues when designing new products.
Microsoft has built a number of tools that allow software authors across
the industry to build more accessible products that provide users with
greater flexibility and that work better with accessibility aids. In fact,
Microsoft now requires software developers who want to use the "Designed
for Windows" logo on their packaging to follow certain accessibility
guidelines in the design of their products.

Microsoft's ultimate goal is to drive the industry toward universal
accessible design -- making all accessibility products usable by the widest
range of individuals, and raising awareness of what is possible with
assistive technology.

Perhaps the most important thing the community of people with disabilities
has taught Microsoft is flexibility. Early programmers and developers
initially worked under the assumption that people have to adapt to the
limitations of the computer. Now they understand that technology should be
designed to accommodate human needs, not the other way around.

"An important role of the community of people with disabilities has been to
encourage the high-tech industry to give choice and control to users,"
Holland says. "This idea is rapidly becoming mainstream. Just look at
Microsoft Windows -- no two users have their desktop set up the same way."

"Adaptable computer interfaces, ergonomic keyboards, portable devices,
voice recognition and artificial speech -- all of these were developed for
or first adopted by the community of people with disabilities," Lowney
says. "The technologies we are developing today to accommodate people with
disabilities are the future of the high-tech industry."

 More Information Sources

* <http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/features/1998/10-22lowney.htm>Greg
Lowney: Microsoft's Director of Accessibility is Motivated by the Millions
of People His Work Will Benefit
*
<http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/features/1999/01-28hammer.htm>Microsoft
Employees Receive Hammer Award for Assistive Technology
* <http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/features/1999/03-17csun.htm>Microsoft
Announces Recipients of First-Annual PC Accessibility Research and
Development Grants
*
<http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/features/1999/03-01bradesco.htm>Brazil's
 Largest Bank Demonstrates Banking Software for the Visually Impaired


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