The New York Times The Effort to Raise Awareness of Web Accessibility for the Disabled April 30, 1997 By Sandeep Junnarkar Each month, an increasing number of companies unveil new Web sites and begin to rely more on the Internet to conduct business. Web developers, hired at premium prices, create visually brilliant sites with snazzy graphics, and businesses wait for customers to take the bait. But even the well-intentioned developers rarely consider the impact that these hip graphics will have on the accessibility of the site for the visually impaired, especially because, more often than not, vital text-based descriptions of the images, which can be sounded out by screen-reader technologies, are not included. Giving the disabled full access to the Internet, in particular the World Wide Web, is a challenge several industry groups are confronting. Earlier this month, the World Wide Web Consortium, based in Cambridge, Mass., announced the Web Accessibility Initiative to drive the creation of technologies that make it easier for people with disabilities to use the Web, and to increase awareness about access issues among Web developers. The Consortium, directed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is developing descriptive video and captioning enhancements to HTML and XML, and trying to find ways to support speech output. The United States Department of Education and the National Science Foundation have pledged $800,000 to work toward this goal. Several private corporations, including International Business Machines and Microsoft are also sponsoring the initiative. "Given the explosive growth in the use of the World Wide Web for publishing, electronic commerce, lifelong learning and the delivery of government services, it is vital that the Web be accessible to everyone," President Clinton wrote in a letter to the World Wide Web Consortium. The letter continues: "The Web Accessibility Initiative will develop the tools, technology, and guidelines to make it possible to display information in ways that are available to all users." According to the National Economic Council at the White House, there are approximately 49 million people in the United States with varying disabilities. This figure does not include the 34 million people who will be over 65-years-old by the year 2000 and who will begin to find that their eyes take a little longer to focus or that their hands aren't as nimble across the keyboards as they once were. These people, like everyone else, increasingly need access not only to the Internet but also to the private networks known as intranets that are widely used by companies to disseminate work-related information to their employees. "Inaccessibility goes beyond just not being able to surf the Web for fun," said Linda Hazzan, the vice president of marketing at SoftQuad, a Toronto company that produces accessibility aids as well as publishing tools for corporate intranets and the Internet. "It jeopardizes people's jobs when they are not able to operate on the intranet on an equal basis as their colleagues." The legal ramification for either losing one's job or not being promoted because of access problems are serious. The Americans with Disability Act and the 1996 Telecommunications Act legislate that employers could be held liable for not accommodating or providing accessibility to employees with disabilities. "The liability factor for businesses to ensure accessibility is rising at lightning-like speed," said Mike Paciello, executive director of the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation, a non-profit organization in Nashua, N.H., founded to pursue equal Web access for the disabled. "If ever there was an impetus to encourage and ensure accessibility by the industry, now is the time." Luckily, the disabled will not need any major innovations to surf the Web, especially since many adaptive technologies already exist. It's mostly a matter of getting programmers to integrate these aids into their applications. SoftQuad is releasing an update of its HoTMetaL PRO, an HTML authoring tool, that includes an auto-prompting mechanism that helps Web developers to make sure a Web document they are creating is accessible. "The prompting technology actually prompts authors while they are creating content and also shows them how to make their content more accessible," Hazzan said. "Imagine a spell checker: well this is an adaptability checker." HoTMetaL PRO will also include an on-screen keyboard to assist Web authors who have physical disabilities. Microsoft is also deeply involved in creating tools to make applications adaptable for disabled. "Microsoft has made the technology available," said Charles Opperman, program manager of accessibility and disabilities at Microsoft, referring to Internet Explorer 3.0's accessibility aids and the MS Active Accessibility, a developer's programming tool. "Now it's an cultural issue to get people aware of the issues of providing textual descriptions and to implement sites that are accessible to the visually impaired." Internet Explorer 3.0 aids include a feature called High Contrast Mode, which makes a screen more visible by automatically rendering an HTML page in a high contrast color selected by the user. It also allows people to navigate the Web using keyboards instead of a mouse because the adaptive technologies help the user determine where the hypertext links are on the page. MS Active Accessibility is a tool that software developers can use to make their programs accessible. Although there are development tools that help make HTML-based Web sites more accessible, Java, the programming language developed by Sun Microsytems, is rapidly becoming ubiquitous and is posing a host of new accessibility problems for the disabled. "We are investigating Java's accessibility right now," said Phill Jenkins, a program manager for Special Needs Architecture and Technical Planning at IBM. "Our goal is to have a screen-reader that supports Java applications and Java operating systems." But currently, no adaptive tools exist to make Java accessible even as it spreads and appears on increasingly more Web sites. "As a technologist, it is very depressing to think that advances in technology are taking away jobs from people who have a disability," said Jim Miller, the World Wide Web Consortium's technology and society domain leader, not specifically referring to Java. "If technology were used well, it should have the opposite consequences." Paciello added: "Sun Microsystems has recently announced their Java Accessibility team, which shows that the very fiber of Web programming and applications will include the needs of people with disabilities." History has also shown that any gains for the disabled community often result in benefits for the mainstream. "Screen readers can help people who are able bodied but are temporarily not able to use their eyes because their eyes are busy doing some other task," said David Singer, program manager for Advanced Internet Technology at IBM. "It can help make people more efficient."