Adaptive Technology Makes Business Sense By Rick Cook From: MicroTimes - October 28, 1998 - page 189 From the worker who has been blind from birth to the programmer whose career at the keyboard has been cut short by repetitive stress injury, computers with adaptive technology are helping to put people back to work and keep them there. "Adaptive technology" is the name for computer hardware and software that can help people deal with their disabilities. Computers can read for the visually impaired, listen for those who cannot hear and help workers with impaired mobility do their jobs more easily and effectively. The potential of adaptive technology for helping people with disabilities has never been higher. "Things have definitely gotten better," says Joe Lazzaro, a specialist in adaptive technology. "But I don't want to give the impression we're all set. We still need to convince a lot of other software vendors to do the right thing." Lazzaro knows about the problems and quite a lot about their solutions. He is the director of the Adaptive Technology for the Blind program at the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind in Boston. He is the author of "Adapting PCs for Disabilities," and a number of articles on adaptive technology. He is also legally blind. When Lazzaro refers to "the right thing," he means going the last ten percent or so needed to make most desktop computer programs work effectively with adaptive technology. The growing power of desktop and notebook computers, combined with the ingenuity of people developing hardware and software for the disabled, has meant that modern software is fairly easy to modify to handle adaptive technology. It can be done without even being visible to non-disabled users, without harming the functionality and, if adaptive features are designed in from the beginning, for very little cost, he says. "[Including adaptive features in software] is still seen as almost a charitable thing to do, which is really not the right way to look at this," says Lazzaro. Looking on adaptive features as charity ignores the huge number of people with disabilities in the work force today. According to the US Bureau of the Census, 6.9 percent of all executive and administrative employees in the country today have some kind of disability - nearly a million people. Nearly 25 percent of all sales personnel (803,000) have some kind of disability as do more than 800,000 machine operators. Pragmatism dictates that the skills of such workers not go to waste, particularly in a time when companies compete in a tight labor market with intellectual resources in high demand. It simply doesn't make sense for a company to cut itself off from a productive, trained group of potential employees. Nor is it prudent to pass up customers with disabilities, when both groups can be accommodated at little expense with modern adaptive technology. Another reason, of course, is that the law mandates reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities. This applies especially to companies with contract with state and federal governments. Meanwhile, there is a wide range of adaptive products available for employers and employees to use. Speech has been one of the biggest wins for adaptive technology. Speech synthesis, or talking computers, was one of the first major areas where computers were adapted to the needs of people with disabilities. Today we have become more accustomed to seeing people using speech synthesizers on television. Cosmologist and PBS science show perennial Stephen Hawking, and actor Michael Zaslow, who plays David Renaldi on "One Life To Live," both use them. Both lost the ability to speak due to ALS - Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as "Lou Gherig's Disease." More recently, improvements in computer power and speech recognition software have allowed computers to take dictation from people with, and without disabilities. "In the last year, [speech recognition] has changed from a system where you had to pause between every word to systems where you can speak at a natural rate," says Lazzaro. "That's a major breakthrough." The progress in speech recognition and synthesis illustrates something another important point about adaptive technologies - the real promise of computers as adaptive technology is not just that they can enable people with disabilities but that so much of the functionality needed to do so is becoming readily and inexpensively available. The first speech synthesizers, for example, used special sound chips and other hardware and they were not cheap. Today, the hardware for effective speech synthesis is standard on most desktop systems. Even the Sound Blaster-compatible sound card is part of many business systems and commonly and inexpensively available at any computer store. Software also makes it easier for people with limited mobility to use computers. For example, a program called Sticky Keys eliminates the need to press several keys at a time to give a command. It makes the keys act like the Caps Lock key so the user can press them individually. Such programs and alternative input devices are especially important to people with repetitive stress injuries, such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, because these users have trouble using a keyboard and mouse. Other programs magnify the screen, print documents in Braille, and let users control their computers with head movements or by using a blow tube. The number of companies offering adaptive hardware and software has increased rapidly as computer power has jumped. The Internet has played a role as well because it makes it easier for adaptive technology companies to find their potential customers and for people with disabilities to find adaptive products that work for them. Ironically, in spite of the improvements in technology, computers and software still aren't especially friendly to the disabled. One of the major problems, Lazzaro says, is Windows and programs that use Windows. On the one hand, Windows makes it easier to write adaptive software by providing a standardized set of high-level services and APIs (application programming interfaces) that can be used to operate the computer. But on the other, both Windows and the Macintosh operating system provide a graphical user interface (GUI), which by its very nature is difficult to access by the visually impaired. "When you're using a speech program, you need to know not just where you are but what you're sitting on and what its state is," he says. "The name of the game is finding out what's on the screen," he explains. "What's my mouse sitting on? Am I on a slider or a dialogue box? What's the status of this push-button? All that information that a sighted user can see needs to be communicated to the adaptive technology." Theoretically there is no real difficulty in any of this. All the software needs to do is provide hooks that adaptive programs can connect to give the information through adaptive devices. In fact, this is very much in keeping with how Windows programs work anyway. The problem is that the hooks aren't there, or aren't consistent, so companies writing adaptive software have to use workarounds. "A lot of vendors who make adaptive equipment will tell you their applications works well with all of Windows applications," Lazzaro says. "But to make their programs accessible, they have written a lot of scripts or done a lot of special (coding). So you can buy a screen reader, say, that is compatible with the current version of the particular program, but to use the next version of the program you need to wait for the vendor to update the software." The situation is getting better, but it's a long way from perfect or even particularly good. Too many software companies see adaptive features as something to be added at the last minute, or even removed from the product in order to meet deadlines, Lazzaro says. Microsoft took many of the adaptive features it had added to Internet Explorer 3.0 out of version 4.0, he noted, but after an outcry from the people concerned with adaptive technology, some of them were reinstated in version 4.01. Microsoft has an initiative called Active Accessibility which uses COM (Microsoft's Common Object Model) and OLE (Object linking and Embedding) to let applications vendors add hooks for adaptive devices in a standardized way. It has also included a range of adaptive features in the recent versions of Windows. "Windows NT also has a speech output program called Microsoft Narrator built into it," says Lazzaro. "Windows 98 has a built-in magnifier. Take a look at the accessibility options available through the control panel in Windows." Other Microsoft initiatives include providing closed captioning and audio description for animation and sound to make them accessible to people with visual or hearing impairments, as well as providing documentation in accessible, on-disk files that can be read by a speech synthesizer, as well. Microsoft also publishes a guidebook on its Web site for creating more accessible applications. All of which is good, but the net result is still a long way from where it should be. The most important thing for software companies, Lazzaro says, is to consider accessibility up front when designing a product. "The time to think about accessibility is not when you're putting the shrink-wrap on the box," he says. "The time to think about it is at the very beginning of the project. Then you get accessibility almost for free." You also have the ability to easily extend the product's accessibility features to future upgrades, he points out. There's also the matter of psychological attitudes, which can be much harder to change. "Many people have no idea how they would do something if they became disabled," Lazzaro says. "These are things that you can work around, but you have to know what's available." Adapting Adaptive Technology Although there has been something of an adaptive technology explosion with the broad use of computers in the last decade, adaptive software and hardware is still seen as specialty equipment and it can be hard to find out what's available. "It's a hard job because the average MIS person in a company doesn't know anything about adaptive technology" Lazzaro says. "It's not a field generally known to main stream computer types." For example, he notes that the classes that teach Microsoft products and Novell NetWare generally do not mention accessibility or the accessibility features in the products. "Companies really don't know what to buy," he says." The states and federal government are trying to get the word out on adaptive technology and what it can do. So are a number of private and governmental organizations and companies that manufacture adaptive products. Another source Lazzaro says, is simply to ask disabled employees. "Many [disabled] employees will have studied the adaptive market just for their own benefit," he says. "While they may not be experts on the field as a whole, many people with disabilities are adept with their particular disability." Resources GSA http://www.itpolicy.gsa.gov/cita The General Services Administration's site on adaptive information technology. Explanations of government programs and lots of links to other sites. Chart Book on Work and Disability in the US http://www.infouse.com/disabilitydata/work/disability html Designing Accessible Web Pages TRACE on Adaptive Technology http://www.trace.wisc.edu Probably the premier adaptive technology site on the Web. Links to many government, non-government and commercial sites dealing with adaptive technology. Microsoft's Program http://www.microsoft.com/enable Microsoft's accessibility initiatives guidebook for programmers on writing accessible Windows programs. Accessible Web Pages http://www.cais.com/naric/access.html A page of resources on designing Web pages that are accessible to everyone. Many of the modifications are as simple as adding a period at the end of headings. Speech for Windows http://www.hj.com Site for a company that makes a speech program for Windows 95/98/NT. Windows Reader http://www.gwmicro.com Site for the WindowEyes reader for Windows.