I have lots of things to be thankful for, not the least of which are eyeglasses. Like many people, I have a permanent disability. My eyesight isn't the greatest. Fortunately, my disability Is mild and easily overcome with prescription lenses. I don't begin to equate my minor disability with the kinds of serious disabilities that many people encounter. I'm grateful that my eyesight isn't worse. And I'm grateful I have glasses. Eyeglasses are one kind of "accessibility aid." A wheelchair is another. An elevator chime is yet another. Any tool that lets a person who has a disability gain better access to the world is an accessibility aid. Maybe you have a permanent disability, too.

Many people are colorblind, dyslexic, or have debilitating back problems or other chronic illnesses or injuries, including repetitive-stress injuries such as carpal-tunnel syndrome. As the average age of the population increases, the number of people with significant disabilities will grow. Helping accommodate people with disabilities makes sense. Just imagine how much worse off society and millions of individuals like me would be if eyeglasses had never been invented. When ways are found to keep people productive, everybody benefits--not just the individuals, but their friends, relatives, employers and the whole economy, too. It's an intelligent use of resources.

Sometimes investments or regulations intended to help people with disabilities prove to offer unexpectedly widespread benefits. The chimes and lights that announce the pending arrival of an elevator car were installed to give people with sight, hearing or mobility impairments a little extra time. Everybody takes these accessibility aids for granted now, and if an elevator didn't have them you might be annoyed. The sloped "curb cuts" that provide gentle ramps from the sidewalk to the street at many U.S. street corners were installed to benefit people in wheelchairs. But people pushing carts or strollers, or riding bikes or skateboards, rely on them too. Closed-captioning for television programs was devised to help people with hearing impairments, by displaying in written form the dialog of a show. Now many people who hear just fine use closed-captioning merely to watch TV in bed without disturbing a spouse, or to watch the news while working out on a noisy exercise machine.

The flip side of this is that some innovations meant for society at large have had disproportionate value to the disabled. The PC and the Internet are great examples. They are, in effect, accessibility aids for many people. People with speech impediments can "chat" via text on the Internet or other computer networks. Many older individuals and others who may not be able to get out much participate in social groups that communicate over the Internet. They keep up with friends and the doings of their grandkids and other relatives. A lawyer can sit in front of a computer and call up every brief her law firm has ever filed and every deposition. She doesn't have run to somebody's office, or shuffle a lot of paper, or go to and from a file cabinet. She may even be able to work from home. Anybody with limited mobility--or even just limited time--can appreciate how the Internet and electronic databases have opened vast amounts of information to easy access.

The PC is one of the greatest accessibility aids ever created but people who are blind have actually lost ground in recent years. A decade ago most computer screens displayed only text, and it was relatively easy for software to "speak" this text aloud to the blind. The immediate result was a new level of independence for people who could not see the printed word. But today's more powerful PCs and software, which use graphics heavily to communicate large amounts of information to the sighted person, have proven problematic for people who don't have eyesight. Similarly, as the Internet's World Wide Web becomes more graphical and interesting for people with sight, its content threatens to become less accessible to the blind than it is today. Fortunately, a growing number of computer hardware and software innovations are being developed specifically for people with disabilities, including blindness.

Pioneering work has been done at universities and non-profit research centers, such as the Trace R&D Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Federal funding played an important role in these early initiatives, and now commercial companies are getting involved. Enhancements are being built right into operating systems and software applications. The broad goal is to make the interface between the computer and the person so flexible that there are a variety of ways to accomplish any task. Because some people can"t use a mouse efficiently, there are now alternatives to the mouse. Because not everybody can hear sounds, there are visual as well as audio cues available. Because not everybody can see a screen well, or even see it all, there are enhanced ways to convey information--from high-contrast settings to software that allows a speech synthesizer to describe and read aloudi even screens that are richly graphical.

Microsoft will soon release technology to make it easy for authors and third parties to add closed-captioning and audio description to Web pages and software applications. Encarta 98 will be the first multimedia encyclopedia to be fully closed-captioned. Windows 98 will feature numerous new features for people with disabilities, including a screen magnifier and an easy way for individuals to customize their machines. Good accessibility work is under way at several other big companies, including IBM and Sun. And numerous small companies are making important contributions by providing everything from speech synthesizers to foot pedals for people who have trouble holding down keyboard keys. Still, the industry has a long way to go in establishing and promoting these techniques so that they will be used everywhere, in every software product, with the benefits available to everybody. We'll get there. I can see the day coming, even with my glasses off. ( For information about current and future accessibility aids, visit http://www.microsoft.com/enable/ ).


Sent by Ed Bedford on August 14, 1997 at 22:41

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August 14th, 1997