Making IT accessible to all is latest challenge

From...

By Gary H. Anthes

(IDG) -- "I was not happy," sighs Don Barrett, lead engineer in the U.S. Department of Education's Assistive Technology Program. Barrett, who is blind, recently tried to purchase software from a vendor over the Internet. Using his PC keyboard, he typed and tabbed easily through an online form. But at the end, the Web site required use of the mouse to click on a Submit button. His screen reader could identify the fields to fill out. But because he couldn't see the mouse pointer, Barrett was stymied.

That frustration is repeated many times every day as people with vision, hearing, motor and cognitive disabilities struggle to make IT work for them. There are an estimated 60 million disabled people in the U.S., 70 percent of whom are unemployed or underemployed as a result, according the U.S. Census Bureau.

But the importance of IT accessibility goes far beyond providing for people who are blind or in wheelchairs. As the population ages, IT managers need to be aware of how to make technology more usable by people with imperfect abilities. And accommodating people with disabilities -- whether mild or severe -- brings productivity gains to all, experts say.

"An accessible IT site or service is almost always easier to use by a greater majority of people," says Neil Jacobson, a senior vice president for IT at Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco. For example, voice-activated computer input was designed for the disabled, but now many people without disabilities use it.

Jacobson says IT managers should do for disabled employees just what they do for all employees: "Make sure they have what they need." But Jacobson, who has cerebral palsy, says it's the responsibility of disabled employees to tell management what accommodations they need.

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Wells Fargo will soon join the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative, and the bank has formed an internal group to ensure that its own Web sites conform to accessibility standards. Wells Fargo provides accessibility tools for its employees, including screen readers, text-to-speech tools and screen magnifiers, Jacobson says.

There are as many as 400 people at the Education Department who are either permanently or temporarily disabled, says Craig B. Luigart, the agency's CIO. He gives them screen readers and screen magnification software, speech recognition and synthesis software, alternate I/O devices, Braille embossers and translators, ergonomic keyboards, talking Caller ID and more. Not all of these accommodations are IT-related. Luigart, who must use a wheelchair, has a special desk built higher than standard.

The cost of these accommodations is surprisingly low, Luigart says, especially when designed into a system or product from the beginning. "If you think about this stuff up front, it typically costs about 1 percent more," he says. And many of the things that make software more accessible are also good systems practices, according to Luigart.

Procurement regulations require federal agencies to buy accessible IT products if they are available. If they aren't, Luigart asks vendors to sign a "letter of commitment" to guarantee their compliance with such regulations. "We haven't had one vendor refuse," he says.

The age factor

The aging of the general population and the increasing complexity of IT are on a collision course that could leave more people unable to use IT effectively, says assistive technology expert Gregg C. Vanderheiden, director of the Trace Research and Development Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. For example, handheld devices are proliferating but are hard to use by older people with poor eyesight and manual dexterity.

Vanderheiden says that while better technology is needed, an even greater need is the awareness of what's possible today and of existing guidelines for accessibility. He advises IT managers to think about the productivity gains that might be had from easy steps like using a larger font on a screen or printout.

And the cost of accessibility is rarely an issue, he says. "The way speech technologies are going, it will very soon cost less to put speech into products than the cost of the cardboard box they ship in."

Built-in accessibility

Indeed, software and hardware vendors continue to make their products more accessible. For example, Microsoft Corp.'s Office XP has a feature called "reveal formatting" that allows blind users to get spoken information about the format of their documents. "Before, if you inadvertently hit the Italic or Bold or changed fonts, there was no way to 'see' that, and your document might end up looking like a ransom note," says Ellen Mosner, a product manager at Microsoft's Accessible Technology Group. "Now, that information is available to screen readers."

Also, Microsoft Office for the first time offers speech recognition -- one type for dictation and one for command and control. In the latter mode, a user can command the software by voice to open a file, for example. That's useful for blind users, those with limited use of their hands, and even for able-bodied users who don't like to type, Mosner says. "If you use the keyboard and speech together, you can see productivity improvements," she adds.

"We are seeing the tools come forward," says Luigart. "We have really good, innovative thinking out there from Sun, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, you name it. The big issue now is one of awareness on the part of the CIO and the systems engineers."

An accessible future

Many organizations are developing technologies to enhance the accessibility of IT. For example, the federally funded Trace Center at the University of Wisconsin has some 30 research projects under way. Many of them deal with "modality translation," in which a given mode of communication is changed into one that is more easily accessible by some class of users, such as text to speech for the blind or speech to text for the deaf.

Signing avatar

The Trace Center worked with Vcom3D Inc. in Orlando to develop the SigningAvatar. It translates text to sign language and has a 3,000-word vocabulary. Trace is working on extending the concept to convert speech to sign language, a capability that could be useful for deaf users wishing to participate in teleconferences.

Accessibility interface

Microsoft, which has 40 people in its accessibility group, is collaborating with other vendors in the Washington-based National Committee for IT Standards to develop a standard interface between a "target" device -- such as a photocopier, automated teller machine or cell phone -- and an "accessor" handheld device tailored to the disability of its user. "We're driven by the proliferation of devices, and they present another magnitude of complexity as far as accessibility is concerned," says Nasser Ghazi, a senior program manager at Microsoft. "So you want a common protocol that all the accessor and target devices understand." Microsoft is working on an implementation of the protocol in something it calls the "universal remote console," he says.

IT mobility

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding several research projects that will not only directly help people with disabilities gain access to IT but will also help those without disabilities in areas such as mobile computing.

For example, the NSF is sponsoring research in "telework," which is traditional telecommuting with enhancements. A goal of this research is to find better compression algorithms to enable teleconferencing with low-bandwidth connections, says Gary W. Strong, a computer scientist and anthropologist at the NSF. Such at-home teleconferencing, integrated with office tools such as workflow products, will blur the distinction between home and office, he says.

Text to speech

The NSF is funding work in speech-recognition technology, with a focus on "dialogue interaction," in which an application prompts the user for an understandable response. SpeechWorks International Inc. in Boston and Nuance Communications Inc. in Menlo Park, Calif. -- spin-offs from university research funded by the government -- already offer that kind of capability, Strong says.

Strong says these new capabilities could open doors to many unemployed people with disabilities. "Information work is the single most available avenue for them," he says. "There is a huge untapped potential here."