Out of the Dark
The Dallas Morning News
by Jeanette Prasifka
September 15, 1998
Internet opens doors for disabled, but new features may shut some
Donna Miller begins her day just like most of us, over a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper. Unlike most of us, she starts at 4 a.m. so that she has at least an hour for reading the paper. Also unlike most of us, Donna Miller is blind. Ms. Miller checks the newspaper using her computer, a speech synthesizer, screen-reading software and the Internet.
For some of us, life before the Internet is a vague memory.
For Ms. Miller and other disabled individuals, life before the Internet is a bad memory. The Internet has thrown open doors previously closed for deaf, blind and mobility impaired people. Doors which, Ms. Miller hopes, are never shut again.
"I call the computer the equalizer," said Ms. Miller, blind since birth. "It puts us with disabilities on the same footing as the rest of the people who are not [disabled]."
But for Ms. Miller and other advocates of the disabled, the Internet offers a dilemma of technology: The very tool that has helped them access the world around them may leave them behind.
E-mail and browsers have made the Internet a staple for work and play. It has changed the way many of us spend our days.
In the morning, with the click of a mouse, we can read newspaper headlines from around the world. During the day, via e-mail, we can communicate with our colleagues. And in the evening, in a chat room, we can unwind and relax.
The worry is that as the Internet becomes more visual, more audible and more complex, it becomes more difficult for the disabled to access. A small but growing cadre of engineers and access advocates say they hope to make the World Wide Web available to everyone.
"The message is getting out: 'Design your Web site accessibly,' " said Geoff Freed, who heads the Boston-based Web Access Project at the WGBH Educational Foundation. "It's a good thing to do, and it makes the most sense.
"If your primary goal in having a Web site is to sell stuff, then you want to sell as much stuff to as many people as you can," said Mr. Freed. "And many people who are disabled take advantage of electronic commerce because it means they don't have to leave the house, negotiate traffic and take a bus to go buy something. They can go shopping on the Web instead."
Although the Americans with Disabilities Act has proved a powerful tool for opening public life to the disabled, its applicability to the Internet has not been fully tested.
For the moment, Web access advocates say they are content to educate Web designers and engineers with a wide array of approaches and tools. Their job, as they see it, is to keep Web design and computer technology in synch.
Henter-Joyce Inc., widely recognized as the industry leader in software products for the blind, developed software called JAWS that reads text and converts it to digital speech. JAWS, which stands for Job Access With Speech, allows Ms. Miller to read her morning paper.
But standard screen readers scan only left to right and cannot differentiate frames - boxes on Web pages with scroll bars - columns or tables, making gibberish of even a slightly complex page. When a screen reader comes to a graphic, it says only the word "logo" or "icon," so a blind person knows that a graphic exists but has no idea what it depicts.
For those depending on a screen-reading device, the graphic intensive Web has, until recently, been almost indecipherable.
Technology is slowly providing the solution. For instance, the next generation of screen readers will not look at the screen at all but at HTML, the coding language that creates a Web site. Following that code, the software will be able to distinguish columns and frames. For now, Mr. Freed encourages designers to create a link to a text-only site that mirrors the more sophisticated one.
"That means, however, that you essentially maintain two sites," said Mr. Freed. "[Or] you can design a site without all the graphics and tables, so there's only one site . . . and it's more accessible to everyone. That, in some ways, is a bigger challenge."
In fact, the biggest obstacle to a World Wide Web open to everyone is the lag between new and old technologies, said David Bolnick, a member of the Accessibility and Disabilities group at Microsoft Corp. Even the smartest programs have to allow for slower processors and older computers.
"Presently, even though there are standards, it takes a long time for all the different browsers to meet those standards and a long time for a lot of people to come up to speed," Mr. Bolnick said. A comparable example, he said, is a record player.
"You may have a wonderful turntable, but if you go to the music store, you're only going to find CDs. As much as you want it to, your record player isn't going to do you any good. Computer and Web technology is much the same way: Unless you keep the player technology up to speed, you won't get to enjoy all the latest and greatest."
To obtain that balance, Mr. Freed's Web Access Project was launched in 1996 as the Internet initiative of the National Center for Accessible Media. Created in the early 1990s with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the center tries to make electronic media more accessible to people with disabilities, particularly those who are hearing or visually impaired.
The National Center for Accessible Media has developed ways to add captions to video clips as a separate text track. It also has designed separate audio tracks for descriptions of movie clips. The hope is that Web site designers will utilize these features to translate for the disabled what appears on their screens.
While the Web Access Project relies on gentle persuasion, the Center for Applied Special Technology has opted for the Trojan horse. The center has developed a program called Bobby, whose logo is the genial image of a British cop. Bobby analyzes Web accessibility based on guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, the group of 170 international organizations that guides Internet development.
A Web site that passes Bobby's inspection earns the right to display one of two center-approved icons. The program is free, but to induce Web designers to use it, other diagnostics have been built into Bobby, said Chuck Hitchcock, a director of product development at the Center for Applied Special Technology.
"If you want to find out whether your Web page is compatible with an old version of an AOL browser, for example, you can run a test through Bobby, and it will tell you that," he said. Bobby also offers a graphics timer tool that calculates graphics download time for a 28.8 baud modem.
The other programs are more popular than the Web accessibility function, but the center uses the opportunity to educate Web designers.
"When people run one of these two reports, we know they're going to also get Web accessibility/disability issues at the same time," Mr. Hitchcock said.
Each month Bobby tests more than 3 million pages all over the world, he said.
But what's in this for the average computer user? Well, maybe a lot, say Web access advocates.
Just as wheelchair ramps outside building entrances were designed initially for the disabled, they come in handy for able-bodied people as well. Closed-captioned television, developed for the hearing impaired, has enjoyed unexpected popularity in restaurants and sports bars.
Advocates say text-based Web sites also provide access to people, businesses and schools with older machines and software that are often incompatible with the graphics portions of the Internet.
Another significant benefit may be felt by the baby boom generation, whose physical capacities may diminish as they age. The technology being developed to assist the disabled will improve their lives as well, access advocates say.
Among those who recognize the benefit of Web access is Mary Ann Schroeder, executive director of the Center for Computer Assistance to the Disabled, or C-CAD, a Dallas-based program that develops employment opportunities for the disabled through the use of computer technology.
Ms. Schroeder was diagnosed at age 60 with macular degeneration, a condition that creates a large blind spot in the center of normal vision. Within 15 months of diagnosis, she was legally blind.
According to U.S. Census statistics, one in five Americans is disabled; one in 10 is severely disabled. But fewer than 15 percent of people with disabilities are born with them, Ms. Schroeder said.
"Anyone can have an accident or get sick or just get old," she said. "None of us knows, for sure, that we won't be affected."
In Dallas County, according to C-CAD, there are at least 92,000 people with disabilities. Many endure lives of seclusion and dependence. Ms. Miller's life was like that.
"I used to read taped books from the library. I would listen to the radio and do basically nothing. I'd wait for somebody to come by and read me the latest news," she said.
The computer and the Internet have given her the tools to change that. Five years ago, Ms. Miller didn't know that such a thing as a computer existed. When she touched a friend's monitor, she thought he was watching television on his desk. She touched the keyboard, the CPU, the mouse and the monitor. She began to type.
Her curiosity became a passion. She learned how computers worked and how they could be utilized by the blind.
And now, for the first time in 23 years, Ms. Miller has a job. She is an instructor of adaptive technology at C-CAD.
"I love electronics. They're challenging to me, and I hate for anybody to tell me I can't do something until I prove to myself that I can't," Ms. Miller said.
But Ms. Miller said the equalizing effect of the computer became clear to her in a very odd way. Last winter, she posted a letter on The Dallas Morning News Web site regarding her support for a new arena downtown. A short time later, she received an e-mail from a man with whom she began a vigorous, two-week e-mail debate.
"The names we called each other and the comments we exchanged were not fit to be published," she said, laughing. "I sat there when the first real insult came across, and I thought to myself: 'Wow! He doesn't know that I can't see!' "
While she wasn't happy to be insulted, she was delighted to be treated like anyone else.
"That's why I call the computer the equalizer," Ms. Miller said. "I was able to debate as an equal. It made me walk 8 feet tall."
