Congress seeks IT availability for disabled workers
by Peyman Pejman
Government Computer News - November 24, 1997 - page 10


Lawmakers are quite busy at work, attempting to a put a bigger bite into a
law that requires the Office of Management and Budget to ensure that agencies
make information technology available to disabled employees. The House has
passed HR 1255, sponsored by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), and the Senate is
considering S 716, sponsored by Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT). Both bills ask
OMB to set up standard procedures for agencies to follow. 

If the Senate passes Dodd's bill and the language is approved in the House
and Senate conference version, agencies will have to report to OMB on what
new technologies they bought in the past year and how they made the
technologies available to disabled workers. 

Eshoo's and Dodd's bills, both known as the Federal Electronic Information
Technology Accessibility Compliance Act of 1997, require agencies to provide
written verification to OMB as part of their budget requests. 

But OMB will not be charged with independent verification of agency reports,
staff members at Eshoo's and Dodd's offices said. 

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, updated in 1992, calls on
agencies to buy IT that would be accessible to disabled workers, but the act
does not include any enforcement measures. 

Eshoo said some agencies have made progress in providing such technology, but
most have not. "There is simply no reason why federal bureaucracies should be
allowed to ignore the law and deny full benefits of high technology to their
employees," she said. 

Rep. Anna Eshoo says some agencies have mode progress in providing IT that's
accessible to the disabled; most hove not. 

More than 140,000 federal employees, about 7,5 percent of the government's
work force, suffer from some kind of disability. The departments of Veterans
Affairs and Agriculture and the Navy, Army, and Air Force employ 62 percent
of government's disabled employees, according to Eshoo's office. 

Meanwhile, a nonprofit organization said it has developed screen magnifier
software, BigW, that agencies can buy for their disabled employees for
one-tenth the cost of similar software on the market. 

Don Selwyn, vice president of the National Institute for Rehabilitation
Engineering in Hewitt, NJ, said Veterans Affairs is using BigW. 

The Social Security Administration is reviewing the product. 

Selwyn said NIRE has developed BigW in a portable format available on
diskettes. It can be installed on desktop PCs for multiple-user access. 

Splitting the scene 

The program lets the user split the monitor into two parts, see a document at
a normal size in one window and see the area around the cursor magnified
between 1.5 times to 10 times in the other window. 

Another version of BigW splits the screen five ways in case a user works with
graphics or a spreadsheet, Selwyn said. 

BigW runs under Microsoft Windows 3.1. Windows 95 and Windows NT.