Copyright 2001 The Financial Times Limited

Financial Times (London)

June 28, 2001, Thursday London Edition 1

SECTION: INSIDE TRACK; Pg. 14

LENGTH: 1005 words

HEADLINE: Leading technology by example: New federal rules aim to spur voluntary design changes that will provide full access for the disabled

Summary: Jonathan Bick, an e-commerce law practitioner and academic, says this uncertainty should lead private companies to err on the side of caution in designing websites. He says companies could find themselves held liable for failing to cater not just to blind, deaf and otherwise physically disabled people but also to those with learning or emotional disabilities.

E-commerce websites that limit the time users have to input critical data may need to think again, he says, so as to accommodate those who cannot operate at speed, perhaps because they have a learning difficulty. He even recommends that e-commerce sites try to cater for the emotionally disabled too, if necessary by limiting the choices available to those who become paralyzed when faced with too many options.

BODY:

There are few more potent symbols of the intrusive benevolence of government than the wheelchair ramps that provide access to public buildings in America.

Primitive societies hide away their handicapped. Civilized nations build ramps and doors and lifts to help the disabled to escape their isolation.

Now, for the first time, the philosophy that gave America wheelchair ramps is being extended to the internet - yet another sign that it is maturing and increasingly being forced to play by the rules that apply in life off-line.

From now on, websites maintained by the federal government will be treated just like government buildings.

Under regulations that came into force earlier this week, new federal government web pages will have to guarantee access to the blind, the deaf and other disabled people.

That means reconfiguring web pages so they do not trip up the text-to-speech screen-reading technology used by the blind; ensuring that video images have captions for the hard of hearing; and altering sites for those who cannot type so they are fully navigable using voice recognition software.

In addition, government agencies will have to ensure that they buy only those fax machines, photocopiers, cellular phones, computers and software that are friendly to their disabled employees.

Where possible, they must buy the photocopier that declares loudly it is out of ink, rather than the one that generates a silent error message. They must buy the laptop that opens with one hand rather than two; and the software that allows users to navigate by voice rather than by mouse. Agencies that fail to comply with either the procurement or the website regulations can be sued.

Disability activists hope government can lead the way with the internet as it did with public buildings - and not just through force of example. They are hoping to leverage the purchasing power of the federal government (which last year spent Dollars 38.5bn on information technology products and services) to force technology companies to redesign their products.

They are gambling that manufacturers will find it easier to change their standard products than develop a customized version for the government. And once they have done so, disability activists hope, most companies will no longer bother offering anything else.

On the face of it, this may sound like yet another extension of American disability law into areas where it does not belong. It may seem like a dismal sequel to the recent US Supreme Court decision allowing a disabled golfer to use a cart to help him compete at the highest levels of professional golf.

You may think it absurd to insist that blind users should be able to surf the internet. In fact, technology already exists to read web pages to blind users - it is just that the commercially available screen- readers cope much better with text information than with graphics, icons and, especially, animation.

Web programmers can easily include embedded "tags" to help screen-readers identify graphics, navigate using icons and communicate what is in a picture. Disability activists hope the new federal regulations will encourage a new approach in the private sector as well as the public, even though they do not apply to non-government websites.

The new rules do not require the government retrospectively to fit either hardware or websites because it would be prohibitively expensive to do so. They simply require government agencies and their suppliers to think about the disabled when designing new products. And once new habits of thought have taken hold, ensuring disabled access in future should not be hugely costly.

Once again, there are parallels in the offline world: adding ramps, lifts and doors to existing buildings can cost serious money; designing buildings that incorporate them from scratch is far less expensive.

Similarly, retrofitting the internet would be hugely costly, given that internet experts believe some 95 to 99 per cent of websites now violate the new regulations. But keeping disability in mind from now on cannot be that costly; it is probably still early enough to ensure change without pain.

Compliance is certainly less costly than lawsuits. And disability activists have made clear they will sue if websites do not voluntarily comply. Back in 1999, the National Federation of the Blind sued America Online, claiming its service violated the Americans With Disabilities Act because it was difficult for blind users to navigate. AOL settled the case, promising to make future versions of its software more accessible, so the issue of how disability law applies to the internet was not fully tested. And though the Department of Justice has said websites will be subject to disability law if they are deemed to be "public accommodations", the scope of this liability has never been tested either.

Jonathan Bick, an e-commerce law practitioner and academic, says this uncertainty should lead private companies to err on the side of caution in designing websites. He says companies could find themselves held liable for failing to cater not just to blind, deaf and otherwise physically disabled people but also to those with learning or emotional disabilities.

E-commerce websites that limit the time users have to input critical data may need to think again, he says, so as to accommodate those who cannot operate at speed, perhaps because they have a learning difficulty. He even recommends that e-commerce sites try to cater for the emotionally disabled too, if necessary by limiting the choices available to those who become paralyzed when faced with too many options.

With any luck, activists will delay launching lawsuits until the new regulations have had a chance to bear fruit.

It will take time for them to spur voluntary design changes from manufacturers and voluntary revisions from websites. If the clock is stopped now by lawsuits, we shall never know what this experiment in government-by-example could have achieved.

LOAD-DATE: June 27, 2001