Equal Access

	June 1999

Equal Access

Some dedicated people are helping the disabled
participate in the computer revolution

by David Becker

D.

As the founder of the Sun Microsystems accessibility team, Earl Johnson helped make the Java platform more adaptable for disabled users.

Of all the groups to benefit from the computer revolution, few had more to gain than the disabled. Often limited by physical barriers to information access, networked PCs promised vast new opportunities for employment, independence and creative expression.
The reality has turned out to be a little more limited. While easier to access than libraries or Braille books, numerous aspects of hardware and software design make computer use awkward at best for blind, mobility-impaired and other disabled users.
And because the disabled comprise a relatively small potential market, they have been low on the priority list for many engineers and developers.Progress is being made, however, thanks to a combination of technological innovation, government pressure and do-it-yourself inventiveness.
"I think we're in the same place racial integration was 10 years after the Civil Rights Act," says James Fruchterman, president of Arkenstone, a Mountain View nonprofit that develops and sells computer products for the blind and other disabled users. "People understand there's an obligation to be inclusive of the disabled, but they're not always clear what that means."
Advocates for the disabled point to recent advances such as the World Wide Web Consortium's newly adopted accessibility guidelines, a set of simple standards to make Web pages more useful to blind users who rely on devices that pronounce text on a computer screen. And the federal government continues to push the Americans With Disabilities Act into cyberspace, requiring government agencies to improve disabled access and inspiring private employers to follow suit.
"The federal government is really leading the way," says Earl Johnson, founder of the accessibility team at Sun Microsystems. "The customers who are really important are the big customers who write big checks, and a lot of those are in the realm of government and education. They are more and more stipulating accessibility in their contracts."
The payoff is considerable, Johnson notes, given historically high unemployment among the disabled.
"Computers basically level the employment playing field," he says. "If they're designed with accessibility in mind, it removes the physical aspect of the job. You're sitting and pressing keys. It makes it possible to mainstream people with disabilities."
Here's a look at a few Silicon Valley individuals and companies who are helping make that happen:

Auditory user interface

The graphical user interface is one of the foundations of the modern PC revolution, allowing a wide range of users to access information without learning program commands or other special skills.
The GUI doesn't do a thing, however, for users who can't see all the colorful little icons.
The typical solution for blind users has been to outfit a machine running Windows or the Mac OS with a screen reader, a hardware-software package that reads and pronounces every item on the computer screen.
It's a basic but far-from-elegant approach, given that much of a computer's visual input relies on graphic conventions that don't translate well into speech. Consider the way a screen reader presents a calendar: "April, Nine, Nine, Su, Mo, Tu …"
Enter Emacspeak, an open-source program that not only speaks information but interprets it, presenting it in a clear and logical format for users who rely on sound.
"It is for the speech user what a Windows 95 desktop is for the sighted user," says Mountain View programmer T.V. Raman, developer of the auditory user interface. "It gives you a pleasant auditory interface for all your computing tasks."
Raman, who works in the Advanced technology Group at Adobe Systems, began working on the program five years ago, after wrapping up doctorate work at Cornell University on auditory computer interfaces. Blind since childhood, the more he worked with the computers the more he found conventional accessibility solutions awkward and limiting.
D.

"Everything that happens on the screen with a standard interface is designed to make you visually efficient," he says. "For the blind user, the screen reader is always there on the side trying to read the tea leaves."
Raman decided it was time to build a solution from the ground up. Besides reading words, his system offers a wealth of auditory cues, switching voices to distinguish between various applications and presenting quick, distinctive sound bites to mark commands such as "cut" and "paste."
"You have to think these things through," Raman says. "What does it mean to tell an e-mail application to talk to you? The screen reader doesn't realize it's an e-mail message, doesn't distinguish it from any other text."
Raman used Emacs, an open-source system that predates Linux, because of the ease of access it offers.
"The way Emacs is architectured, it's very easy to extend it," he says. "It's a large open-source system, it's flexible, it's powerful."
The initial version of Emacspeak focused on basic tasks such as text editing, but subsequent additions have turned the program into a full-featured computing environment-it's all Raman uses in his demanding work at Adobe. One of the biggest challenges in extending the audio desktop was coming up with an auditory browser that would make sense of the visual clutter of the Web.
"One of the things I think Emacspeak excels at is getting information from the Web and maneuvering around the various buttons and banners," he says. "A Web page like Yahoo is just packed with stuff, and a screen reader reads every piece of text, every link and button, every ad. It becomes so painful to get what you want that you either need enormous patience or you don't use the damn thing. It's like being dropped into a stranger's living room and it's completely cluttered.
"Things that are a nuisance to you visually are an absolute showstopper for someone who's blind."
In true open-source fashion, Raman doesn't know how many users rely on Emacspeak. The program, which Raman updates twice a year, can be downloaded from Raman's home page (http://cs.cornell.edu/home/raman). It's also included on most Linux installation CD-ROMs.
"For the first year or so, I knew every user by name, but now the best I can tell you is that there are 400 to 500 people on the Emacspeak mailing list," he says.
Raman notes that while Emacspeak is purely a tool for the blind now, it can also be considered a prototype for general-purpose computing in the future, as ubiquitous computing and speech activation take hold.
"The blind user using a screen reader is a bad model for developers working on speech for those who can see," he says, noting the push toward automotive computing. "With a good auditory interface, you could use the Web or check your e-mail while driving.
"Ultimately it'll be more than the blind user who benefits from having a well-designed auditory interface."

Java lends a hand

While tremendous progress has been made in the past few years in making computers more accessible to the disabled, most of the improvements are still add-ons. You add a screen-reader, a specialized pointing device or a piece of speech-synthesis software to a PC, load in the required drivers and hope it gets along with whatever applications you need to use.
Earl Johnson thought it would be better to build support for such devices into the software platform. Then developers could easily include accessibility features in their applications. That's the idea behind the new Java Accessibility Application Programming Interface (API).
"It's a contract between assistive technologies and the Java user interface components," says Johnson, founder of the accessibility team at Java originator Sun Microsystems. "The accessibility support is built directly into the user interface, so the developer doesn't need to do a lot of special work to make their application accessible."
The API supports a number of the most common assisitive technologies-screen magnifiers, voice-recognition software, speech synthesis software, screen readers. Johnson says building support for such systems into the Java platform offers a number of advantages, most notably making it easy for programmers to include the disabled when they design an application.
"If you have to add components to add a capability, it becomes a pain in the butt for developers and they're more likely to skip it," he says. "But if you can build in these accessibility features and make it easy, something developers get for free when they use a component, there's a much greater likelihood they'll pay attention to it."
The API also makes support for such features more stable. You don't have to worry about losing the use of a voice recognition program when an operating system is updated, as happened to Johnson, a quadriplegic, several years ago.
The API approach also improves voice recognition, allowing users to set up word "clusters" so the program doesn't have to consult its entire dictionary to decipher a word. And it expands screen-reader technology by better recognizing graphical presentations and looking beyond the screen.
"Because of the accessibility API, you can keep track of information throughout the desktop, even if it isn't in the area of focus," says Johnson. "You won't miss out on a message that the system is going down in 10 minutes because you were using your word processor."
Combined with earlier Java innovations such as Project Swing, which allows for easy switching to keyboard navigation for those who can't use a mouse, Java has emerged into a full-featured language for disabled users.
"The thing that's really exciting is that we're releasing assistive technology so closely on the heels of when Java was originally released," says Johnson. "For example, the first version of Windows came in 1988 and it wasn't until 1995 that a screen reader came out for the platform. It took us just three years since Java was introduced to release an assistive technology that works with the platform."

Custom-made OCR

James Fruchterman knew he had something that could be a tremendous help to the blind when he helped develop one of the first optical character recognition (OCR) systems for scanners in the 1980s. The directors of his company, Calera Recognition Systems, agreed the blind might indeed benefit from OCR but decided they were too small a market to be a good business target.
"That's when I basically decided I needed to go off and start a nonprofit to work on this project and not to have to worry about profitability," says Fruchterman, founder of Arkenstone, an organization that develops computer products for the blind and other disabled users.
The company's first product combined Fruchterman's OCR system (licensed from Caere, the firm that bought Calera) with a scanner and a speech synthesizer to create an all-purpose reading system for the blind. Place any printed text on a scanner connected to a PC running Open Book, and the software interprets, stores and pronounces the words.
"My idea is that the easiest solution that works is the one you should pick," Fruchterman says. "I wanted something that would allow any Pentium-class system with a scanner to become a reader."
The Open Talk software subsequently gave birth to WYNN (What You Need Now), a reading system specially designed for the needs of dyslexic and other learning-disabled users. Open Talk is also the basis of VERA (Very Easy Reading Appliance), a stripped-down version of the system that puts everything in a wooden case with just a few controls to manipulate.
"It's really for the older user who runs away when they hear 'computer,' " Fruchterman says. "It's for people who don't want complex technology but want reading capability."
Fruchterman says response to the Open Talk series has been gratifying.
"A lot of blind people don't want to be dependent on someone else," he says. "You can get books in accessible formats, but there's a lot of other necessary reading-mail, newspapers-that isn't accessible." Most blind people who don't have assistive technology have to rely on a spouse or attendant to read to them.
"One person told me there were two things in life he really wanted to be able to do-read a book and drive a car. We'd covered the reading part, so he wanted to know when we were going to have something to let him drive."
While it won't put blind people behind the wheel, Arkenstone's latest product takes a big step toward making the blind more independently mobile. Atlas Speaks adds a speech interface to digital mapping firm Etak's huge database of U.S. street maps. Blind users can type in two addresses and get precise walking directions, which can then be saved on paper using a Braille printer.
"By hitting the keys and listening, you get the same information as a sighted person using a street map," says Fruchterman. "That means getting to know your own neighborhood, finding intersections, determining the best walking route to a destination."
For blind users already adept at using canes and guide dogs to get around, Atlas Speaks allows them to plan a precise and safe route to their destination.
"We've taken this to blind conventions and people are amazed," Fruchterman says. "They type in their address and they find things in the neighborhood they never knew were there.
"The next generation of the device will combine the Atlas Speaks software with sophisticated GPS receivers, which will tell the blind pedestrian exactly where he is and how to get to his destination. One of Arkenstone's sales executives already uses a prototype of the system, dubbed Strider, to get around strange cities.
But Fruchterman says a number of factors, ranging from the deliberately fuzzy GPS signals supplied by government satellites to the size and battery life of the average laptop computer required to run such a system, stand in the way of putting a final product on the market.
"We've stopped making projections for when we'll have Strider ready for release, but it'll happen," he says.
While Arkenstone is helping the disabled achieve new levels of independence, it's also bringing a new business sense to assistive technology by overcoming the profit limitations that prevent many corporations from pursuing disabled applications. Fruchterman notes that Open Book utilizes technology licensed from 15 different for-profit firms, all of whom were happy to provide their products at discounted rates.
"We're get incredibly favorable licensing deals and other kinds of help out of proportion to our size," he says. "Every engineer likes to think he's making the world a better place. When they see how we're going to use their work, it taps into that spirit."
And it also makes good business sense because assistive devices are often precursors to mass-market items. Just consider how speech recognition technology has entered the mainstream.
"Everything we're doing with assistive technology is going to be a mass-market item once it reaches the right price point," Fruchterman says. "We won't need to exist at some point."
Staff writer David Becker can be reached at davidb@techweek.com.
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