Short Sighted
From: Yahoo Internet Life
      July 1998, page 90

Jeri Clauring writes for The New York Times's Cybertimes

For the 25 million people who can't use a standard mouse, keyboard, or
monitor, much of this gee-whiz progress on the web isn't progress at all -
though the tech industry is slowly doling out solutions. 

For most of us, the World Wide Web is opening new doors to exciting places
every day. But for at least 10 percent of the population, the latest
technological advances are just as quickly slamming doors shut. Geoff Freed
at the Corp. for Public Broadcasting / WGBH National Center for Accessible
Media (NCAM) estimates only about 1 percent of Web sites are completely
accessible to people with visual, hearing, and mobility problems.  

Imagine surfing the Web but not being able to use pages that contain tables,
pictures, or image maps (large graphics that require you to click around in
order to navigate through a site). What if the columns were scrambled so they
didn't make sense? Welcome to the frustrations of the blind and visually
impaired who use screen-reading equipment, which reads screen contents aloud.  

Bob Harris, a blind employee of the Environmental Protection Agency in
Chicago, says he hits so many snags when he tries to surf the Net using
Netscape Navigator and a setup that translates a screenful of type into a
small, refreshable braille display that "after a few tries, the Net and I end
our connection." According to Curtis Chong, director of technology for the
National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in Baltimore, Maryland, almost half of
all Web sites cannot be used by the blind. "The task of using the Internet
for a blind person is not something that is done with ease," says Chong, who
is blind and uses the Net regularly with screen-reading software. "You have
to be a very sophisticated computer user to get a benefit from the Internet"
Web access for the blind doesn't come cheap, either: A typical screen-reader
setup costs $1,200, and a braille display setup starts at $3,000.  

Those with limited or no use of their hands, who can't use keyboards or mice
even when that equipment has been altered in size or shape, have fewer
complaints. Many use voice-recognition software starting at $150 that lets
them control both Mac and Windows applications with spoken commands.
Navigation isn't as much of a problem for these users: To use image maps or
frames, for example, they can move the cursor slowly to where they want to
click or ask the software to pop up a numbered grid over the screen that lets
them zoom in gradually to the area they want to click. Jim Anderson, a
quadriplegic and county attorney in the Rockport, Texas, state prosecutor's
office, is happy with using voice-recognition soft- ware but sees room for
improvement in his access: "One of the biggest problems I have with the
Internet is frames. There's no easy way to toggle between the frames yet?"  

The key word here is yet. Just as the rise in popularity of graphical
interfaces was a disaster for users of assistive technology - leaving them
plugged until their products caught up with the market and offered access to
Windows and Mac software - so has the advent of new Web technologies left
many users back at Square 1. The lurching pace of progress is nothing new to
users of assistive tech.  

Who's to blame? 

So who's at fault? Web developers? Makers of assistive-technology products?
The competitive realities of the software business? All of the above. But
hope is in the air, thanks to academic and government groups that are
advancing awareness and promoting change.  

On the whole, says Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden, director of the renowned Trace
Research & Development Center at the University of Wisconsin, the computer
industry is "all over the map" on accessibility. But he says more is being
done for two reasons: "First of all, it's becoming increasingly clear that as
computers move into employment, education, and daily life, we can't just
leave 20 percent of the population out." Second, he says, there is an
increase in laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, which require companies and public facilities
such as schools and libraries to make workstations and telecommunications
equipment accessible to everyone. The ADA is the most significant legislation
in U.S. history for people with disabilities and is being reinforced by the
promotional work of influential people, including Christopher Reeve. In late
April, the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee held hearings prior to
revising and extending the Technology-Related Assistance for Individuals Act,
which allocated $34 million annually for states to promote assistive tech.
Testifiers called for increased funding and warned that the disabled may
otherwise fall behind in tech skills, further increasing the high
unemployment rate in that population.  

The Web Accessibility Initiative for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the
international body that sets the common standards for the World Wide Web,
released the first working draft of its HTML guidelines last month, calling
for Web developers to make pages accessible to assistive technology by, among
other things, providing alternative text for all images and image maps, and
making sure image map information is accessible and keyboard-navigable. Its
site even provides sample HTML code for accomplishing these things. The W3C
also built features into HTML 4.0 that make it easier to follow many of the
design guidelines. In fact, HTML 4.0 requires you to include the options that
screen readers can translate if you want the page to be a true HTML 4.0 
document.  

And the W3C isn't alone in its efforts: The NFB, the NCAM, the Trace Center,
and similar groups have all posted links to guidelines for making Web pages
accessible. The NCAM and the Trace Center are working closely with the W3C
program, as are a number of big companies, including Microsoft. Microsoft is
"both one of the companies doing the most and one of the companies under the
most pressure to do work," says Vanderheiden.  

One step forward, two steps back 

In February, after admitting that Microsoft has been slow to make its
products accessible, its CEO, Bill Gates, announced that he had named an
executive to monitor development to ensure the products are more accessible.  

But the company has some catching up to do: Internet Explorer 4.0, for
example, shipped with fewer accessibility features than its previous version.
Not only didn't it work with screen-reading software, but it also rendered
the desktop useless for the visually impaired. Says Gates, "Even though we
were able to very rapidly turn around and in 30 days ship version 4.01 that
solved those problems, it definitely sent the wrong message." According to
Dan Rosen, general manager for new technology in Microsoft's research
department, the company will eventually incorporate speech-recognition
technology capabilities into Windows, but not in either Windows 98 or Windows
NT 5.0.  

Microsoft isn't the only software developer feeling the pressures of a
competitive market. Development of voice-recognition software, which was once
used primarily by mobility- impaired users, is now driven by its mass appeal.
Ted Kempster, technical support manager with Dragon Systems Inc., one of the
companies that pioneered voice-recognition software, says there is a struggle
in the field over whether to release products quickly for the mass market -
or perfect them first.  

Dragon, according to Kempster, now focuses on the mass market over what was
once its main market: people unable to type for reasons varying from birth
defects to repetitive stress injuries. Although its first product,
DragonDictate, is still largely hands-free, its latest, NaturallySpeaking, is
not - though further accessibility development is planned. "Those of us with
personal connections to our disabled customers are real cheerleaders for
maintaining that access," he says. "But there a lot of people who would like
to see us focus on selling a million, what's going to sell to the most people
and serve the most people well."  

The company recommends DragonDictate to disabled users, but some users are
still left out of the loop: those with cerebral palsy, for example, many of
whom have both limited motor control and voice patterns that the software has
difficulty understanding. The older product is also slower and clumsier to
use, requiring that you pause between each word rather than speak naturally.
Says user Jim Anderson, "NaturallySpeaking doesn't give you as much control
[as DragonDictate does] over screen content. It gives access to menu
commands, but doesn't understand commands like 'Mouse Down' and doesn't have
MouseNudge, a command that lets you nudge the cursor within the pop-up grid."  

The NFB's Chong says the assistive-tech market's heroes are the small
companies such as Henter-Joyce, the developer of JAWS for Windows
screen-reading software, that remain committed to adapting their products
constantly to help their users gain access to the latest technological
advances.  

Web designers can make a difference 

Says Chong, "If you don't understand accessibility or don't think that a
blind person is ever going to read your page, you're going to make it as
glitzy as possible." But using any of the raft of currently released
guidelines, designers can take simple steps to ensure compatibility with
assistive-tech products.  

Though the use of the ALT text attribute, which lets a page designer identify
a graphic in a way a screen reader can understand, is on the rise, lack of
access to pictures is not the basic problem. Image maps are perhaps the
biggest roadblock. Sites that use them as the sole entry point and navigation
device cannot be accessed by users of screen-reading software. Some sites are
using an effective workaround: The New York Times, for example, uses a large
image map but also offers a text menu below it.  

Will Webmasters heed the new guidelines and initiatives? "We are very
optimistic about it because [the W3C is] very large and it has the
participation of some very important people," says the NCAM's Freed. But
trying to keep up remains a daily struggle for users. Says Chong: "Every time
we hear about progress, my first reaction is, My god, what accessibility
problems are we going to run into now?"  

"I try saying, 'It's doable and I can handie it,' but, if the truth be known,
it's getting harder and harder," says the Environmental Protection Agency's
Harris.  

Sites in this story:

CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM)
    http://www.wgbh.org/wgbh/pages/ncam

National Federation of the Blind (NFB)
    http://www.nfb.org

TRACE Research & Development Center
    http://trace.wisc.edu

Americans with Disabilities Act
    http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/adahom1.htm

Telecommunications Act of 1996
    http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html

WEB Accessibility Initiative
    http://www.w3.org/WAI

HTML 4.0 Specification
    http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40



With its image map and lack of text links, Vibe's home page leaves blind
users screen readers out in the cold. Users surfing sans mouse, however, can
use voice-recognition software such as DragonDictate to control cursor
movement and mouse-clicks with verbal commands such as "Mouse Up," "Page
Down," and "Mouse Grid", - shown here - to zoom in to the area they want to
click.  

Some sites, such as that of The New York Times, make up for their use of
image maps by also offering a text menu that screen readers can decipher.  

MIT's Media Lab and many other tech labs are experimenting with wearable
computers, making the Web accessible by slight movements of toes, eyeballs,
and other body parts. Someday, these prototypes could lead to useful
assistive tech applications.  

