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April 1998
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April 1998
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Some colleges, fearing lawsuits or trying be helpful, seek to design accessible pages
By Jeffrey R. Young
Champaign, ILL.
Reprinted from The Chronicle of Higher Education
March 13, 1998Unlike many other computer-science majors, Keith Wessel doesn't like the razzle-dazzle of the World-Wide Web. When he does go on line, he usually doesn't even bother turning on his monitor.
Mr. Wessel, a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been blind for most of his life. To him, knowing what he knows from the tools that his computer offers, the graphics-rich Web is like a cluttered room that's hard to move around in. He relies instead on either a speech synthesizer that reads his screen aloud, or a "refreshable Braille display," a device that uses hundreds of motorized pegs to instantly turn lines of text on the screen into Braille. While he's on the information highway, his seeing-eye dog, Apollo, lies curled at his feet.
To Mr. Wessel and other students with disabilities, it's not necessarily good news that more universities are putting course materials on line these days. For them, the Web threatens to become the equivalent of a classroom building without an access ramp.
"How can a university talk about equality if their course materials on the Web aren't accessible?" he asks.
Some university administrators are asking the same thing, wondering whether laws like the Americans With Disabilities Act can be interpreted to include Web pages. If so, universities could be breaking the law by not working to make their on-line offerings accessible.
A few research groups have crafted guidelines for making Web pages more user-friendly for people who have trouble seeing or hearing, or who have other disabilities. And some universities are pushing to install "electronic curb-cuts," on-line equivalents of the graded slopes between roads and sidewalks.
Last year, administrators here created a full-time position devoted to improving the accessibility of campus technology. The person they hired, Jon Gunderson, has an office in the Rehabilitation Education Center, a central resource for students with disabilities. He has focused much of his energy on improving "virtual classrooms."
"More and more courses are using this type of technology," he says. "As it becomes more popular, we need to learn about how to make it more accessible."
Many improvements are relatively simple, he notes. Professors making Web pages for their courses, for instance, can accompany any pictures with descriptive "tags" that can be read aloud by a speech synthesizer. If the professors use sound clips of people talking, they can include transcripts that deaf students can read. But most people designing Web pages don't take such steps or even realize that accessibility is an issue, he adds.
One way to attack the problem, Mr. Gunderson says, is to create Web-development tools that prompt professors and others to add such elements to their pages. When a professor puts in an image, for instance, such a program could automatically ask for a written description and would add a tag. "Tools are going to be critical," says Mr. Gunderson. "Even if I spent all my time rewriting Web pages, there would be no way to get to all of them." And that's just for Web pages produced on campus.
One of Mr. Gunderson's first projects has been to build accessibility features into a "Web-authoring" tool called CyberProf, created by Alfred Hubler, a physics professor at the university. CyberProf has been used to make more than a dozen home pages for courses here (http://cyberprof.uiuc.edu/).
On a recent afternoon, a graduate assistant working for Mr. Gunderson sat in front of a computer, trying to make a Web page for a popular physics course more accessible. Roger Steffen is not disabled, but he's trying not to use the mouse while he works. He wants a better sense of the way a blind user would experience the page.
One of the first improvements he made to the physics-course page was to move the most important links to the top and to present the information in a more straightforward fashion. Though that may not sound significant, it can be a great help to blind people, who lack visual cues and so have trouble determining what parts of a page are most important. And for students who are paralyzed and have to press computer keys with a mouth stick, the simpler the page is, the better.
Before Mr. Steffen changed the page, it had opened with a banner graphic and a list of all of the teaching assistants for the course -- information that speech-synthesizing software had to labor through before reaching anything of substance. Now the page opens with the links that students are likely to use most often -- the ones to course notes and quizzes.
If professors want to offer a glitzy page, says Mr. Steffen, they should provide a text-only alternative as well.
Other students have worked on similar tools, including Mr. Wessel, the computer-science major, who took time off from his studies last year to work on an accessibility project for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which is located at the university. The program he developed scans Web pages to look for sections that could be made more accessible, and then makes suggestions on how to improve the pages. He calls it "Text Only Maker," or TOM. It is available free on the center's home page (http://lunch.ncsa.uiuc.edu/tom/).
Mr. Gunderson, besides coordinating the university's technology-access efforts, is working on a larger project to educate Web designers outside academe.
He is part of a committee of the World Wide Web Consortium that is developing guidelines for accessibility. The consortium, an international group that sets technical standards for the Web, released a draft of its guidelines last month (http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH-0203).
The Trace Research and Development Center, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has developed similar guidelines.
But Mr. Gunderson faces another challenge: getting disabled students to use the Web in the first place. Many of them -- even those familiar with computers -- have become so frustrated by poorly designed Web sites that they've given up on the medium. Kareem Dale, a third-year law student at the university who is blind, says he uses the Web only if he absolutely has to. "To me, it's not been worth it yet," he says. "It's too difficult, and there's not enough benefit right now."
Such attitudes are unfortunate, says Mr. Gunderson, because familiarity with the Web is becoming important in the workplace. "People who can use these technologies are going to have more opportunities than people who can't."
And, he points out, the Web offers disabled students an opportunity to become more independent. Before the advent of the Internet, a blind student who wanted to complete a class assignment often had to pay someone to read it aloud. But if the assignment is on the Web -- and if the Web pages are accessible -- technologies like screen-reading software allow the student to get the information without outside help. "We're moving toward something I call independent literacy," says Mr. Gunderson. Bringing that kind of independence to disabled students is what makes the university's efforts worthwhile, he says.
Universities also have to rethink the way they provide hardware for disabled students, he argues. The most popular model has been to offer disabled students one computer lab where all of the screen readers, Braille displays, and other devices can be found. But that further segregates disabled students from their peers. Mr. Gunderson encourages administrators here to spread such technology all around the campus, putting it in libraries and public computer labs.
Other institutions are also working to address such issues. At New Mexico State University, a campus policy calls for authorized Web pages to follow the Trace guidelines for accessibility. But a rule like that is difficult to enforce in a university setting, where hundreds of people craft Web pages, says Michael K. Thompson, a systems programmer for computing and networking services at New Mexico State.
Mr. Thompson, whose wife and 6-year-old son are blind, serves on a university committee to improve the accessibility of campus technology. He has also been trying to spread the word about Web accessibility. "We want to avoid the pitfall of having a whole new arena of inaccessibility," he says. "Hopefully, by the time my son's in college, we'll have sorted through these problems."
Persuading universities to develop such policies can be difficult, however. Jeffrey C. Senge, the information and computer-access-program coordinator at California State University at Fullerton, invites himself to meetings about technology planning and pushes for greater emphasis on accessibility. "Sometimes you feel like you're beating your head against the wall," he says, explaining that people ask why they have to go to so much trouble to accommodate the small number of students on campus with disabilities.
One argument he uses to get administrators' attention is a legal one. "When institutions fail to recognize the barriers they're building in by not following standards" with Web pages, he says, "they are at risk of being found out of compliance" with laws such as the A.D.A.
But other experts say it is far from clear whether universities are required to make their Web offerings accessible. "All the way down the line, the law is pretty vague" in terms of technology, says Norman A. Coombs, director of Equal Access to Software and Information, a support group affiliated with the American Association for Higher Education. He is also a professor emeritus of history at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Dr. Coombs, who is blind, says universities should improve the accessibility of Web pages because it is the right thing to do, not because the law requires it. Unless they think in terms of doing the right thing, he says, he fears that universities will do as little as they can legally get away with. Such concerns are particularly important, he notes, in new "virtual universities," like the Western Governors University, for which he is a consultant on accessibility.
That some universities have Web-accessibility consultants is a good sign, many say. Even so, disabled users face an uphill battle: The rapid pace of change on the Web is creating accessibility challenges far faster than they are being solved. Text-based alternatives to interactive features that are based on graphics and animation are difficult to create. "As this stuff gets more visual, people aren't going to think about keyboard equivalents," says Mr. Gunderson, of Illinois.
But he and others hope to find ways to build in accessibility features while the Web is still a work in progress. Building in ramps now, they say, will be easier and more effective than bolting them on later.
"That's the beauty of the Web," says Mr. Wessel, while Apollo lies comfortably at his feet. "Equal access for everybody, if it's done right. Otherwise we're right back where we started from."
Copyright (c) 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com
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