IT accessibility is worth its cost
Letters to the Editor
From: Government Computer News - February 21, 2000 - page 24

In his column "Systems access for disabled is worthy but costly" [GCN, Jan.
24, Page 24], Stephen M. Ryan perpetuates the myth that it is expensive to
consider and include the needs of people with disabilities when designing
electronic and information technology systems. 

Ryan is wrong. The cost of inclusive design and implementation is negligible,
and the benefits far outweigh any additional expense. 

Ryan writes, "Everyone agrees that it's basically fair to remove barriers
that keep people with disabilities from participating fully in society." Is
it not even fairer to not build those barriers in the first place? We would
not need curb cuts if we did not first build the curbs. 

Electronic curb cuts are more easily constructed than the physical ones, and
if government and businesses are mindful, those electronic curbs can easily
be avoided. 

Retrofitting an electronic IT system to be accessible is expensive. Poor
planning early on can mean that a project's cost almost doubles. But
universal design at the beginning of a project adds very little expense. 

It is not fair to let a business or agency off the hook because it did not
have the foresight to consider the needs of the public before releasing a
finished product. 

While it is common for lay people to be amazed that a blind person can use a
Windows computer, government and industry leaders in technology must be held
to a higher awareness standard. 

Two examples best illustrate the issues and their solutions. The first is
touch-screen-based information transaction kiosks. The second is Web content. 

Touch-screen kiosks seem like a tough problem. How can blind people work a
touch screen when they don't know where to touch? How can someone with severe
motor impairment such as quadriplegia hit the small buttons? 

Touch-screen kiosks can be equipped with sound output that lets a blind
person know what is happening on the screen. Adding speech synthesis costs
only a few dollars. 

As for navigating the menus, there are interface protocols that let a person
to do so by finding the left edge of the touch-screen bezel. 

To address access for a person with a limited hand function, the same design
allows full control provided by a single large-format switch. 

Again, the additional manufacturing cost, if measurable, is at most a few
dollars. 

Details about one design that provides for multimodal control of an
interactive touch-screen based multimedia machine can be found at
http://www.tracecenter.org/world/kiosks/ez. 

Access to the Web is the first instance in which a disabled computer user
with full control of his application, the browser, can still encounter
content on Web pages that are not at all accessible. But check out the
document "Does it cost more to make a site accessible?" at
http://www.w3.org/1999/05/WCAG-REC-fact#cost. 

There are standards for universal and accessible design not only for Web
content but for most other consumer products. These standards, by and large,
assert no limitations on the designs that software and hardware developers
can pursue. 

I encourage readers interested in examining what I have discussed to visit
the Web site of the University of Wisconsin's Trace Research Center, at
http://www.tracecenter.org/world. The center's mission is to help make IT more
usable for everyone. 

Bruce Bailey
Webmaster, Maryland Rehabilitation Center
Maryland Education Department
Baltimore, MD