August 8, 1994
Computerworld
Adaptive Technologies - Computing for All

by Julia King

Thousands of blind and visually impaired computing professionals and their 
companies are caught in a costly and seemingly futile exercise in high-tech 
catch-up.

On one side of the scenario are commercial software giants such as Microsoft 
Corp., whose steady flow of graphical applications and Windows operating 
system enhancements do not include standard hooks for tying into software 
for braille, speech output and other adaptive systems.

That leaves blind users such as Dave Simpson waiting months, even years for 
access to widely used Windows-based business packages. And each time a new 
version is released, Simpson must wait again for the updated adaptive 
software.

"Just when something comes out for us that should work with Windows, there's 
always something new. Now, for instance, it's the Chicago version of 
Windows," said Simpson, a database administrator at Bell Atlantic Corp. in 
Philadelphia.

On the other side are a handful of modestly capitalized third-party software 
and hardware companies such as Artic Technologies, Inc. in Troy Mich. Like 
other firm in the specialized world of computerized accessibility products, 
Artic has been bedeviled by application mapping problems. The primary source 
of these woes are the multiple program interfaces commercial developers 
randomly built into mainstream Windows-based packages.

"The primary problem is that so many applications programmers don't use the 
standard APIs already in Windows.  Microsoft itself is one of the primary 
offenders," said Artic President Dale MacDaniel. "It leaves us pulling our 
hair out because we don't have enough hours or staff to take everybody's 
applications and write special drivers for them."

Playing catch-up translates into additional costs for corporations. This, in 
turn, can prompt internal political battles over who pays.

At Federal Express Corp. in Nashville, officials have yet to decide how to 
distribute the costs of adaptive hardware and software used by nine customer 
service representatives who are blind or visually impaired.

"Economics is a major issue any business needs to look at because [adaptive] 
equipment is not cheap," said Scott Hooker, a senior information planning 
analyst at Fedex. Hooker, who is blind, functions as a technical 
troubleshooter for the nine workers. When blind workers are first hired, 
state or rehabilitation agencies generally pay for adaptive equipment, 
Hooker noted. "But once the employee is no longer a client of that agency, 
the question is, where does the money come from to update their equipment?"

Looking for a money tree

At Bell Atlantic, disabled employees are furnished with the equipment they 
need to do their job, said Ginger Rogers, a job accommodations specialist in 
the human resources department.

"But human resources doesn't have a bucket of dollars where any person with 
a disability can come to us and we'll pay for it." Rogers said. "It's a 
departmental responsibility. If accommodation is going to allow an employee 
to do a job, [the department] is going to have to eat it."

Accommodation costs could be reduced greatly if software vendors used a 
standard set of interfaces in their commercial packages from the outset, 
rather than targeted information systems users who are blind or otherwise 
disabled as a totally separate market, according to Lee Day, a former 
software engineer at Digital Equipment Corp.'storage products group in 
Colorado Springs.

For example, Day said IBM sells a separate screen-reader package that gives 
blind users access to its OS/2 operating system as well as Windows. "but the 
functionality in that package, which costs $800 on top of buying OS/2, could 
have been included in OS/2 itself," Day said.

Had Microsoft implemented universal hooks on its Windows operating 
environment, it would have cost users 25 cents to 50 cents more per copy, 
Day estimated.

Day said one of the reasons she left her job at Digital after 10 years was 
irreconcilable differences over accessibility issues. Another was pure 
frustration.

"I left largely due to frustration [I felt over] getting smaller and smaller 
pieces of things to do while hearing about all the neat stuff that was going 
to be developed," Day said.

Like other users who are blind, Day emphasized that she does not view 
today's lack of software accessibility as some diabolical plot hatched by 
vendors.  Rather, she and others such as Hooker believe it is an awareness 
issue.

"Most product designers that don't use universal hooks are not doing it on 
purpose.  They're not out to ruin some blind guy's day," Hooker said.  
Instead, "They're just not aware of what it does to access."

Sidebar: Rethinking Disability

"Just about every piece of software on the market today has been designed 
without an awful lot of thought to accessibility," acknowledges Greg Lowney, 
senior manager and sole staffer of Microsoft's accessibility and 
disabilities group.

To help change this, Lowney said Microsoft has published and distributed to 
thousands of independent software vendors guidelines that explain disability 
issues and how products and work with disability aids.

Moreover, the next version of Windows will include a tool kit feature that 
allows screen-reading programs to work better with certain graphical 
information. Farther out, Lowney said greater use of Object Linking and 
Embedding Technology should greatly increase application integration.

But for now, Microsoft has no plans to implement standard access methods 
across the company's far reaching product line. Individual business units 
will continue to develop products as they see it.