ROAD SIGNS FOR THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
Access to today’s gee-whiz technology shouldn’t be a problem for people with disabilities. So why do roadblocks remain? By Sarah McGill
For many disabled people, technology has smoothed out the bumps on the information superhighway.
It used to be that people with limited or no sight, for example, had to wait to learn the contents of a newspaper until someone read the articles to them or recorded them on tape. Now there are scanners and magnifiers, along with software that reads aloud the information displayed on a computer screen.
“People with disabilities have benefited enormously from computers,” said Ken Petri, director of Ohio State’s Web Accessibility Center.
Approximately 1,300 Ohio State students, a little more than 3 percent of the student body, identify themselves as disabled, said Scott Lissner, the university’s Americans with Disabilities coordinator.
Several places around campus, including the Office for Disability Services in Pomerene Hall, have computers equipped with screen readers or keyboards with enlarged yellow keys. The Digital Union in the Science and Engineering Library offers assistive technologies such as captioning stations for people with hearing impairments and touch-screen PCs for people who cannot use a mouse.
English professor Stephen Kuusisto, who is blind, uses screen-reading and book-scanning software in all his daily tasks. “I am able to read and do research as fast as my sighted friends and colleagues,” he said.
Even equipped with vehicles to travel the information superhighway, people with disabilities might need help navigating. That’s where the Web Accessibility Center comes in.
The center was established in 2000; Petri became its first full-time director in September 2005. He conducts workshops and advises faculty and Web developers on whether their sites are accessible to everyone. One of his goals is to review the university Web sites most visited by new students.
Petri said he wants to hire one or two developers to help departments bring their sites up to Ohio State’s Minimum Web Accessibility Standards, updated in 2004.
So far, the university is using carrots to encourage departments to meet the 19 standards, rather than enforcing them with sticks, said Sean Miller, a counselor in the Office for Disability Services.
“We are a little ahead of the curve,” Lissner said. As federal requirements catch up with Ohio State’s, the university will move toward enforcement, he said.
In the meantime, whenever a person complains about not having access to information on a particular Web page, that page’s host has to provide the information “in a reasonable and timely fashion,” Lissner said. So far, not many complaints have been filed.
Petri wants accessibility to be “a design parameter, not a feature added after the fact.” Miller added: “It’s much harder to rebuild a site with accessibility than to build one.”
Although Ohio State’s online course management system, Carmen, was deemed acceptable during its evaluation process, it’s far from perfect. For example, Carmen’s chat feature in the current version is virtually useless to people with certain disabilities.
To find solutions, university administrators are collaborating with the company Desire2Learn, which provides the application that powers Carmen. Petri said he’s confident the system can be improved; in fact, a version to be released to the campus this spring has better built-in support for more-accessible user interfaces.
Ohio State’s call last year for proposals for a new Web mail system contained “a forceful statement” about accessibility, Lissner said.
Although Kuusisto is frustrated with the slow pace of improvements to Carmen and other Web-based applications, he said Ohio State is “one of America’s leading universities in the field of disability studies.”
And while Lissner gave the university only a C+ for its Web accessibility for people with disabilities, he pointed out that it ranks among the top 20 percent of colleges and universities.
His job attests to that: Ohio State is one of the few universities to employ an Americans with Disabilities coordinator without being pushed to do so by legal action.
*This essay appeared in the January/February 2007 issue of Ohio State Alumni Magazine. The magazine is a benefit of membership in the Alumni Association. Learn more about the benefits of membership and how you can make Ohio State stronger at membership services, or call 1-800-762-JOIN.
