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.