JESSE.THARIN@f7.n300.z1.fidonet.org (JESSE THARIN) (09/20/90)
Index Number: 10547
ADAPTED ACCESS: MAKING COMPUTERS ACCESSIBLE TO PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES
Frank Bowe
Good evening. It is a pleasure for me to join the Disabled/
Special Needs Users' Group of the Boston Computer Society here
tonight. I will be looking at some recent developments in access
to computers, and commenting on some next steps.
Five years ago, while writing "Personal Computers and Special
Needs", the first full-length book on this topic, which Sybex
Computer Books published the following August, I became concerned
about how little PC, mid-range and mainframe manufacturers, as
well as software publishers and operating-system developers, knew
about the special needs of persons with disabilities.
Some special-needs users, including friends of mine who had
cerebral palsy, were going to such extremes as linking two
personal computers just to write a memo. The first Macintosh was
coming out, as was the Apple IIc, both with closed architectures.
The Mac required use of a mouse; the critter was not optional,
that is, a user could not choose between keyboard and mouse but
was forced to use the mouse. The Mac and IIc had other problems
that disturbed me. I had visions of whole new generations of
computers coming onto the market that were inaccessible to people
with disabilities.
Being very much a "Washington man" at the time -- I had served as
the first head of the American Coalition of Citizens with
Disabilities, at the time the nation's most powerful lobbyist for
people with disabilities, and as a consultant to the House
Committee on Science and Technology and to the Office of
Technology Assessment -- I approached some people in the
Washington about sponsoring a meeting to draw attention to the
issues. The result was the February, 1984 White House Conference
on Computers and Disabled People. Held in the Indian Treaty Room
of the White House's Old Executive Office Building, it attracted
IBM, AT&T, Hewlett Packard, Tandy, DEC and others. What I said
there was that in the 1970's, we had moved to make buildings and
the activities that took place in buildings accessible to
individuals with handicaps. Computers, especially personal
computers, were becoming so important that it was time to look at
how to build "ramps" and "elevators" to them.
That was four and one-half years ago. I am pleased to see that
the level of awareness is higher by orders of magnitude today
than it was in 1984. The question now is not so much whether to
provide in some way for people who have special needs, as it is
how to do that.
Let's talk about that tonight. One of the concepts I introduced in
my 1984 book is that of "redundancy". The idea is fairly simple.
If a computer or its application displays information visually, it
should also make that information available auditorially; the sound
should be redundant to the display. If a mouse is useable, the
keyboard should be, too. Redundancy lets people who can't see, who
can't hear, who can't use a mouse to do everything other users do,
but in a slightly different way.
I talked in "Personal Computers and Special Needs" about the
importance of multi-tasking. I am deaf. I might have a
communications program running in background and a voice
recognition system in foreground; the combination lets me "hear"
voice messages and other telephonic communications. A user with
cerebral palsy could have a special menu-driven word or phrase
selection program running together with a word processing
application, making it possible to type a memo, report, or even a
book with a minimal number of keystrokes.
Gregg Vanderheiden, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
was developing, at much the same time, the ideas of
"transparency" and "keyboard emulation". He stressed the
importannce of operating systems accepting non-keyboard input as
genuine so that special-needs input aids could be used across the
board with any PC. That's not true now: the emulators must be
custom-designed for each model.
Those are the basic ideas. To them we added some rather obvious
human-factors design criteria. The on/off switch should be at
the front of the machine, not in the back. There should be a
one-motion reset function that emulates the awkward CTRL-ALT-DEL
reboot. Things like that.
We are now moving to think through some other challenges.
Foremost among them is the graphics displays becoming omnipresent
in PCs today. We need to make those displays readable by speech
synthesizers. Graphical interfaces are so troubling for blind
and dyslexic users, who depend on the synthesizers, that there is
talk about abandoning the mainstream altogether and going back to
separate, special boxes and custom applications -- which would be
a tragedy of the first dimension for these people. There are in
the United States some 1.7 million blind and low-vision people,
and some six million dyslexics. If they can't use the PCs they
find in school classrooms and in offices, they can't get a good
education and they can't find paid employment.
We have not solved the multi-tasking problem. Special-needs
hardware, firmware and software generally function under MS-DOS,
which is of course a single-tasking operating system. There is
now only one or two peripheral products of which I'm aware that
work under OS/2. UNIX is potentially of major importance to
people with disabilities. But as yet we do not have keyboard
emulators or other special hardware, firmware or software
products that work under that OS. Making matters worse are the
highly graphical user interfaces such as the AT&T/Sun "Open Look"
and the others being considered now by the Open Software
Foundation. These interfaces, if they are not made more
accessible, will lock out of UNIX some of the very people who
most need that OS.
And of course we have the usual problem of keeping up with the
field. Until mid-1987, IBM had the most accessible product line.
The more advanced PS/2's, however, with their different card
requirements, VGA, smaller disks, and other changes instantly
transformed Big Blue into one of the least accessible vendors.
Only a handful of speech synthesizers can handle VGA and its
bit-mapped display. We have some excellent grammar checkers on
the market -- notably Grammatik III and RightWriter -- but these
do not flag the kinds of writing errors made by deaf or other
communication-disabled end users. There are questions raised
about the buses -- IBM's Micro Channel is an obvious example.
And no one knows yet where EISA will take us with respect to
accessibility.
We have some vehicles through which to approach these problems.
Foremost among them now is section 508 of PL 99-506. The section
508 regulation has just appeared. I have nothing to do with GSA
or the rule, of course, so I can't provide any authoritative
comments on it. What I know is what I've read and what the
companies have been telling me.
Section 508 requires federal agencies to include in RFPs or other
contracts provisions which call for accessibility and which allow
for "adaptability", or connection of third-party peripherals.
Companies I have talked with say they do not know how to solve
all disability-related problems. The rule anticipates that by
providing that vendors may include systems integration consulting
in the bid, calling for cost-per-hour technical assistance to the
agency to find acceptable solutions. Second, vendors want to
know if there is any kind of grace period. The answer to that
seems to be, "Yes." A vendor that cannot meet all requirements
at the time of bid may explain how it would attempt to do so
after contract award.
The rule does not apply to any computer, operating system,
peripheral or application company. Only the federal agencies
must comply. The rule does not address other electronic office
equipment. GSA officials have said that they do expect to add to
the regulation over the next, say, three years. I imagine that
eventually GSA will have something to say about telecommun-
ications, about printers and copiers and fax machines. That's
because the original legislation does not talk only about micros
but about "electronic office equipment" of all kinds.
The August 1988 enactment of the Technology-related Assistance
for Individuals with Disabilities Act takes section 508 one step
further. It calls upon states to comply within three years.
Again, it requires nothing of vendors themselves.
Section 508 will be important to people with disabilities because
the federal government is the world's largest buyer of PCs and
other computer products -- and because each of the 50 states has
a budget big enough to put it into the Fortune 500. Very few
computer, systems or applications companies will want to maintain
two separate product lines -- one accessible, for sales to
government, and one not -- so in time the rule will have a real
effect.
Another tool we have to meet special needs is that of research
and development. Already, IBM and other computer companies are
experimenting with all kinds of innovative input and output
mechanisms. Some of these are truly exciting. The most
revolutionary, to my mind, is a direct PC-to-brain interface that
eliminates the need for any physical movement or other overt
action by the end user. For people with cerebral palsy, stroke
survivors, and others who have difficulty expressing their
thoughts, this direct connection will be of breathtaking
importance. Speech recognition, of course, is going to be very,
very important. Fred Jelinek of IBM, who's been at the forefront
of this work for years, used to say that speaker-independent,
continuous speech recognition -- the kind of system I need to
understand what people say on the telephone or in a meeting --
was five to ten years away. Now he is saying three to five
years. We'll get it.
The most important thing you in the Boston Computer Society can
do at this point is to communicate directly to the computer,
operating system, and applications manufacturers. Make them
aware of your needs -- and of your buying power. Educate them
about how they can design their products, or interface them with
third-party peripherals, to meet your needs. The companies are
very attuned to what special interest groups say, recognizing how
influential you are. The BCS is one of the elite user groups.
You have a lot of potential power. Use it.
Thank you.
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