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Get Four
|  | OCTOBER 27, 2004
By Sarah Lacy For the Blind, a Welcoming Web Slowly but surely, disability advocates are gaining ground in their quest to make Internet sites more accessible to the visually-impaired Lainey Feingold is trying to use the carrot instead of the stick in her dealings with America's big financial institutions. Feingold, an attorney in Berkeley (Calif.), specializes in brokering agreements between corporations and advocates for the blind, who think companies aren't doing enough to make their bank machines, brochures, and Web sites accessible to the vision-impaired. Having spent much of her career writing letters in support of ATMs that talk, her latest cause is Web-site accessibility. In 1999, the World Wide Web Consortium, known as W3C, which sets computer-programming standards for Web-related technologies, issued voluntary guidelines to help the blind access Web sites. SETTING STANDARDS. To Feingold, who says vision-impaired customers should have the same access to online banking as they do ATMs, it's a key issued. "You wouldn't put up a Web site and say, 'to enter, you need blond hair,' but if you don't code the pages so that a [vision-] disabled person can access it, you may as well have that kind of sign," she says. Feingold is one of many advocates for the blind trying to woo -- not sue -- companies into compliance with the W3C's accessibility guidelines. The issue came to the forefront in the late 90s, when banking sites started appearing on the Net. By now, many industry watchers expected there would be a law requiring Web sites to adopt the W3C's standards. So far only a handful of countries, Britain foremost among them, have turned those guidelines into law. In 1999, Web accessibility was included in the Britain's Disabled Discrimination Act. The Web accessibility portions just went into affect on Oct. 1. "MIXED REVIEWS." The U.S. hasn't ignored the issue, but it lags behind Britain. In 1998, the federal government amended the 21-year-old Rehabilitation Act to include Section 508, which requires all federal agencies and companies doing business with the government to comply with some basic Web-site accessibility guidelines. Section 508 has received mixed reviews. Many companies seeking federal dollars are still confused how to abide by with the law. And some advocates say many sites are technically compliant under Section 508, but still difficult to use. Instead, most advocacy groups say the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination by employers and businesses, should be the legal benchmark for Web site accessibility. But that's yet to be tested in court. "There's a misunderstanding that the ADA automatically applies to the Web, and it's not clear at all that it does," says Bradley Hodges, technology accessibility manger for the National Federation of the Blind. "Reasonable people disagree on this." Count on Eliot Spitzer to use the stick if Web sites don't come through with more options for the nation's 10 million blind and visually impaired. In July, New York's crusading attorney general announced Web accessibility agreements with Ramada.com and Priceline.com (PCLN ). Spitzer sent a letter to the companies in January and launched an investigation, but they complied before he filed suit, and even reimbursed the New York attorney general's office for the cost of the probe. Spitzer had argued that making a Web site that's not accessible violates the ADA. SITE REVAMPS. Priceline didn't argue and started working on its site right away, says spokesman Brian Ek. By the time the August announcement was made in Spitzer's office, the airline-ticketing part of the Norwalk (Conn.) discount e-tailer's site had been recoded to be easily read by screen readers. These PC programs typically read sites like a page of a book -- left to right and top to bottom. They allow a blind person to hear, rather than read, a Web site. "Once we were made aware of it, we did it because it was the right thing to do," Ek says. Nonetheless, advocacy groups say they want to keep this fight out of the legal system. "We'd rather not have Congress tell anyone how to design their Web sites," Hodges says. "We'd rather work collaboratively to make it happen." Web accessibility can be tricky, and guidelines have to constantly be updated. For the visually impaired, it's really all about making sure that the programming code used to build the site is friendly to screen readers. That's why many banks now have login information on the top right-hand corner. Before, a blind user would have to listen to everything on the page before they could log in to check account balances. Advocates say they want Web site usability, not mere compliance. Hodges, who is blind, says he's able to use more sites than he could a few years ago, but says few are flawless. By playing nice with companies, organizations like the NFB and other groups hope they can consult with big companies, rather than bicker with them. And because blind people are weighing in, advocacy groups say the results are better.
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