Technology Pioneered by and for People with Disabilities Benefits Everyone
By: John Kirby, Co-Editor
From: CATS News Service - Volume 15 (December, 1999)

Motivated by a powerful desire to overcome barriers to employment and full
participation in other aspects of mainstream life, people with disabilities
have always been among those who are willing to experiment with new
technologies. 

For more than a decade people with limited dexterity have been running
software that lets them use their voices to communicate with their computers,
and blind users have listened as their computers talked to them. Today, these
technologies have been refined to the point that they're ready to be marketed
to mainstream audiences. And then there's the onscreen keyboard, a technology
developed initially for those who could not type but were able to point.
Today, it seems as though every other corporate executive you see is carrying
around a little palm-sized computer with an onscreen keyboard. Older examples
of such technology evolutions from outside the world of computers include the
typewriter, telephone, ramps cut into curbs, easy-to-open containers, and the
bell that signals the arrival of the elevator. 

"When new technology is first introduced, it is often pretty cumbersome,"
says Greg Lowney, director of accessibility and the Accessibility and
Disabilities Group at Microsoft. "Mainstream audiences aren't willing to try
it and quickly give up in frustration because the inconveniences outweigh the
benefits it provides them. Microsoft relies on early adopters-such as people
who love computer games, people in the computer industry, and people with
disabilities-to teach us how to make our products more usable."  

On July 26, 1999, the nation marked the ninth anniversary of the Americans
with Disabilities Act, federal legislation that requires businesses with more
than 15 employees to accommodate individuals with disabilities. "Microsoft
has been working on making our technology accessible to individuals with
disabilities for more than a decade, because it's the right thing to do and
it makes good business sense," Lowney says. "It's also consistent with Bill
Gates' vision of empowering people through great software-any time, anywhere
and on any device. The passage of the ADA motivated our large corporate
clients to also take this issue more seriously, which has given us further
justification for being proactive in this area."  

This is not a small niche. It's estimated that there are more than 30 million
people in the United States with disabilities who can be affected by the
accessibility of computer technology; worldwide, the number is much higher.
In the future, millions more will become permanently or temporarily disabled
due to an accident, illness or age. 

"Every morning, millions of Americans wake up and fantasize about not going
to work. At the same time, millions of Americans with disabilities wake up
and wish they could go to work,' says Warren D. Johnson, Assistant Vice
President of Individual and Major Gifts, Easter Seals. 'Technology is the key
to tomorrow's jobs, and Microsoft has been instrumental in breaking down the
obstacles that people with disabilities face in finding work."  

Thanks in part to their relationship with the community of people with
disabilities, members of Microsoft's Accessibility and Disabilities Group
have been able to help employees throughout the company make products not
only more usable and attractive for people with disabilities but for
everyone. Today, due to more than 10 years of dedicated effort and committed
leadership, accessibility features are standard in Microsoft products. "If
you can't access today's technology, you are looking at a difficult future,'
says Betsy Bayha, director of technology policy for the World Institute on
Disability. 'It's hard to get educated, hard to find a job. We knew that
Microsoft was serious about accessibility issues when Windows 95 came out
with accessibility options included in the basic operating system."  

Windows 2000, which will be released sometime in the next several months,
contains dozens of built-in features specifically for people with
disabilities. People with impaired vision can modify their screen to make
type larger and clearer. For those who have manual dexterity issues, it's
possible to customize keyboard functions so that keys repeat more slowly or
not at all. Users can also go into the control panel and turn on a function
that allows them to switch over to serial key commands instead of the default
key commands that require pressing two keys at once. A feature called
MouseKeys allows users to bypass the mouse altogether by using the numeric
keypad. It even lets blind users perform basic system functions on any
machine. 

"It's not just people with disabilities who are benefiting from this
technology. The rest of us are, too," Bayha points out. She recalls a recent
training seminar she conducted for a group of teachers, none of whom had a
disability. As she was projecting a Web page on the overhead, she quickly
keyed in a command in Microsoft Explorer that made the Web address bigger and
easier to read. "All at once, everyone was asking, How did you do that? I
want to do that on my computer," Bayha says. 

The Accessibility and Disabilities Group was created in 1992 with the
understanding that, as an industry leader, it was Microsoft's responsibility
to develop products and information technologies that were accessible and
usable by all people, including those with disabilities. 

"It all began when we started working with the Trace Research and Development
Center at the University of Wisconsin to make Windows 3.0 more accessible to
people with disabilities," Lowney remembers. "We helped them develop an
add-on tool, then we made the tool available free of charge. We improved it
for Windows 3.1, then created my full-time job, which included building it
into Windows 95 and Windows NT."  

In 1998, Bill Gates announced a large-scale plan to dramatically increase the
size and scope of Microsoft's accessibility initiatives. The accessibility
team has grown from one person in 1988 to a full-time staff of over 40 today.
"One of the most important things we do is to encourage people within all
areas of Microsoft think about and take responsibility for accessibility,"
Lowney says. "We want to make sure that our products are easy to use for the
widest possible range of people. That diverse customer base is valuable to us
as a company."  

"By the same token, Microsoft is committed to employing people with
disabilities, in part, because their perspective really helps us build better
products for everyone," Lowney says. "In addition, by demonstrating their
success in the workplace, they raise awareness about how people with
disabilities really are equally capable. That in turn can help break down
social barriers, and it's something we see becoming more widespread because
of the capabilities of the computer."  

Microsoft has also reached out to the community of people with disabilities
by forming an international advisory council composed of leading direct
service and advocacy groups. "Microsoft has shown that they understand that
their developers can't just go off by themselves and intuit what everyone
needs. By setting up the advisory council, they've asked the community of
people with disabilities to help them prioritize where they put their
resources," says Russ Holland, program director for the Alliance for
Technology Access. 

In January 1999, WE Magazine, a lifestyle publication for people with
disabilities, identified Microsoft as one of 10 companies that go beyond the
Americans with Disabilities Act to recruit and accommodate employees with
disabilities. Microsoft has also taken the lead in pushing the entire
high-tech industry to recognize the importance of people with disabilities as
consumers and to routinely consider accessibility issues when designing new
products. Microsoft has built a number of tools that allow software authors
across the industry to build more accessible products that provide users with
greater flexibility and that work better with accessibility aids. In fact,
Microsoft now requires software developers who want to use the "Designed for
Windows" logo on their packaging to follow certain accessibility guidelines
in the design of their products. 

Microsoft's ultimate goal is to drive the industry toward universal
accessible design-making all accessibility products usable by the widest
range of individuals, and raising awareness of what is possible with
assistive technology. Perhaps the most important thing the community of
people with disabilities has taught Microsoft is flexibility. Early
programmers and developers initially worked under the assumption that people
have to adapt to the limitations of the computer. Now they understand that
technology should be designed to accommodate human needs, not the other way
around. 

"An important role of the community of people with disabilities has been to
encourage the high-tech industry to give choice and control to users,"
Holland says. "This idea is rapidly becoming mainstream. Just look at
Microsoft Windows-no two users have their desktop set up the same way."  

"Adaptable computer interfaces, ergonomic keyboards, portable devices, voice
recognition and artificial speech-all of these were developed for or first
adopted by the community of people with disabilities," Lowney says. "The
technologies we are developing today to accommodate people with disabilities
are the future of the high-tech industry." 


CATS News Service - http://www.interwork.sdsu.edu/catsca/CATSnews.html
WE Magazine - http://www.wemagazine.com/
Microsoft Accessibility - http://www.microsoft.com/enable/
World Institute on Disability - http://www.wid.org/index.html