E-ACCESS BULLETIN. The email newsletter on technology issues for people with visual impairment and blindness. E-Access Bulletin web site: Sponsored by the Royal National Institute for the Blind the National Library for the Blind and the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association Please forward this bulletin to friends or colleagues so they can subscribe by emailing full details at the end of the bulletin. The more subscribers we have, the better our free service can become! [Issue starts.] ISSUE 17, MAY 2001. IN THIS ISSUE: Section One: News. - Tesco site bags new RNIB award; Free and fair elections?; Internet access experiences wanted; Physics via screen readers and rubber bands; Test-drive an online course; Radio listeners group – update; Sight village 2001; Ricability report online. Section Two: Profile - Cearbhall O'Meadhra. Section Three: Legal Focus - Olympics Website. Section Four: Reader Response - Colour Testers. [Contents ends.] SECTION ONE - NEWS. TESCO SITE BAGS NEW RNIB AWARD. The supermarket chain Tesco has picked-up a newly-created RNIB 'See It Right' award for 'Tesco Access', an accessible site for ordering groceries launched this week (http://www.tesco.com/access). The supermarket plans to back up the site by training staff and giving them more time to unpack and describe goods for visually impaired customers. Tesco has not always been strong on accessibility: last year the RNIB lent its voice to a campaign urging the company to offer an accessible version of its web site. Once Tesco had decided to heed protesters' calls, the site took around six months to develop. Among Tesco's competitors, Asda told E-Access Bulletin it has no plans to create an accessible version of its web site. Sainsbury's online shopping site is frames-based, making it difficult to use with screen reading software. According to the RNIB the See It Right award will be given to both commercial and none commercial web sites as and when they are found to meet RNIB access standards. FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS? Polls Apart 3, a campaign to highlight disabled peoples' right to vote, is inviting people to send in their assessment of the accessibility of their local polling office through its new web site (http://www.pa3.org.uk). The campaign has been launched by the disability charity Scope with support from the Disability Rights Commission. The web site will be used to publish real- time findings from each constituency as they come in on Election Day, June 7. The campaigners hope the convenience of the online survey will mean more people participate than in two previous paper-only surveys. On and offline responses are expected from two thirds of UK election constituencies. Scope plans to go on to use the results to name and shame councils that fail to make adequate provision for accessible voting. The charity is an advocate of pilot schemes to improve the lot of disabled voters, including trial of electronic voting techniques. In the 1997 General Election, some 94% of disabled people surveyed encountered one or more barriers that could have prevented them from being able to cast their vote. On average there are 13,000 disabled people in each UK constituency. INTERNET ACCESS EXPERIENCES WANTED! E-Access Bulletin is planning a series of articles investigating the practical problems faced by visually impaired people seeking Internet access for the first time. We will concentrate on four issues: cost; sources of financial assistance; specialist training; and providers of technical support. To anchor this research in people's real experiences we would be extremely grateful for readers' input. So, please, email your experiences, observations, advice and opinions to Phil Cain on phil@headstar.com PHYSICS VIA SCREEN READERS AND RUBBER BANDS. The latest in John M Williams' regular assistive technology columns in the Internet magazine BusinessWeek Online offers a fascinating insight into the work of one of the world's leading blind physicists, Kent Cullers. Cullers, senior researcher at the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in California, uses both new and old technologies to help him in his work, ranging from raised-line drawing kits using rubber bands and wax to the latest in Braille pads and screen readers. For more on the technology Cullers uses to design alien-hunting radio telescopes see: http://businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflas h/may2001/nf20010516_176.htm TEST-DRIVE AN ONLINE COURSE. Duncans, an online learning company based in Saskatchewan, Canada, is looking for visually impaired people to test its online courses. Around 600 courses are being offered for free to access testers for 60 days, including ones in computing, business and personal skills. Duncans' courses generally cost between 69 and 149 Canadian dollars a year. Anyone interested is asked to email one or two paragraphs on their background to admin@duncans.ca The company (http://www.duncans.ca) is also interested to hear from technical consultants and staff from organisations working in the access field. RADIO LISTENERS GROUP - UPDATE. In our last issue (April 2001) we featured a piece about a radio listeners' email group started by Visually Impaired Radio and Electronics Society (VIRES). The piece suggested that the online community was dedicated to reminiscing about bygone radio programmes, but our source Clive Lever – a VIRES subscriber - points out it is far more dynamic than that, and covers all radio- related topics including the latest programmes. Lever says examples of typical discussions cover "which satellite stations are about to change frequency, who's about to be awarded franchises for new stations and what special features stations like Radio 4 are running." To join the group send a blank message to: uk-radio-listeners- subscribe@yahoogroups.com SIGHT VILLAGE 2001. More than 60 specialist companies in accessible technology development are coming together at the Sight Village 2001 exhibition in Birmingham this summer. Scheduled seminars include sessions by the British Computer Association of the Blind and suppliers demonstrating new products. The event runs from 17-19 July. For further information, see: http://www.qac.ac.uk/sight.htm RICABILITY REPORT ONLINE. The new report from Ricability on the new rights disabled people have in dealings with telephone companies, 'Its your call' (See E-Access Bulletin, March 2001) is available online at: http://www.ricability.org.uk The report is also available in tape, Braille and large print on 020 7427 2460. [Section One ends.] SECTION TWO: PROFILE - Cearbhall O'Meadhra IRISH EQUALITY COMMISSIONER COMES THROUGH THE HARD WAY. Cearbhall O'Meadhra, the first ever blind person to be appointed to the Equality Authority of Ireland (http://www.equality.ie), has come through the hard way to emerge a strong champion of the rights of the visually impaired to access technology. O'Meadhra is completely blind. He was diagnosed at the age of four with retinitis pigmentosa - a progressive genetic eye condition that affects the retina. He started to experience the effects in 1970 when blindness affected his lower field of vision and he became completely night blind. He qualified as an architect in 1969 and was a specialist in archaeological surveying techniques. Occasionally his job would require him to work at night which became increasingly difficult - he was often only able to hear the voices of his fellow colleagues. Eventually the difficulties led him to give up architecture and follow his love of flamenco and qualify as a music teacher in Spain. In 1978, his failing vision caused him to fall down a flight of stairs and badly injure himself. He returned to Ireland and couldn't get work so embarked on a course teaching English as a foreign language and taught in Dublin for three years. His first experience of discrimination ended his employment - the school received a complaint from an Italian agency that the students were caused distress being taught by a blind teacher so he returned again to music and set up a music school. "I hadn't completely lost my sight but I couldn't see books so I learned to make music programs and spent a year devising a complex 'note speller' program to help familiarise students with a keyboard." This was the beginning of his ongoing relationship with computers and led him to apply for a post at the Bank of Ireland in 1983. The bank accepted his application on condition that he completed a rigorous RNIB programming training course, funded by the national Rehabilitation Board in Ireland. "My Braille and typing were too slow - there were no computer screens or terminals so we had to code on typing paper which we couldn't see and if we made one small error in the code the program wouldn't work," says O'Meadhra. "There were no sighted people to help proof-read our work. There was no system for recording computer code in Braille so we had to set it up ourselves - we were dictated code and we tapped it out in Braille. It was a 12 week course with strict deadlines - and boy did my typing skills improve!" He is scathing about the standard of sophisticated computing help available from charitable sources. "There is a horrible charitable attitude of lie down, submit, accept your fate. I've been active in the disability field for 16 years and witnessed thousands of people going through courses but they are not coming out with computer skills. I know six disabled people who are working. "There were no courses in the commercial sector to explain to blind people how things work, so I was stuck at the bottom. They don't expect blind people to be in the workplace." Initially employed at the bank as a component programmer, O'Meadhra soon found his phone became an informal 'help line' for people requiring information about accessible technology. The bank was accommodating and created a new post for O'Meadhra as assistive technology consultant, with a remit to advise on how different types of technology can improve the lives of visually impaired and blind people. A year after he started with the bank, he and two other visually impaired people established the Visually Impaired Computer Society (http://www.iol.ie/~vics) to meet the needs of partially sighted and blind programmers. VICS works with software developers and employers to ensure that people with sight problems have access to technology. The arrival of Windows 95 infuriated members of the society as it was completely inaccessible to people with visual impairments. VICS joined US campaigners in their campaign to make the software accessible. As a result Microsoft has taken steps to improve its accessibility record - Microsoft even boasts an accessibility site with resources and information for those with disabilities (http://www.microsoft.com/enable/). Among the factors that persuaded Microsoft to act were rumours that the US defence forces would not buy the product if it were not made accessible to the blind. O'Meadhra has recently been granted a two-year secondment from the bank to concentrate on his further role as chairman at the Irish Institute of Design and Disability - a body that represents the needs and rights of disabled people to lead a normal life (http://www.idd.ie). The UK has a sister organisation to the IDD - the Institute for Inclusive Design (http://www.ukiid.org). He is currently hard at work at the Institute of Design and Disability seeking to promote the adoption of the Barcelona declaration (http://www.idd.ie/Barcelona_Declaratio n.htm) by all local authorities in Eire and Northern Ireland. The government has provided funding of 300,000 Irish Punts over three years to aid wider implementation of the declaration, which aims to promote inclusion and accessibility throughout all regions in which it has been signed. Among his many other tasks for the institute, he built the organisation's web site in 10 days. In building the site O'Meadhra deliberately set out to see if he could build it without HTML, so he used Microsoft's FrontPage and hit another problem with the corporations software. He found that the hierarchical navigational structure of the program was difficult for a blind person to organise. He has since published a report highlighting his experience using FrontPage to design a website, which will be available at the VICS website shortly. The institute's motto is 'Good design enables, bad design disables'. "My ultimate aim is to see industry and design schools teaching accessible design. You have to expect the disabled person to be a user and cater for everybody," O'Meadhra says. "Everything I've wanted to do I've had to climb a high wall. There is significant discrimination in Ireland. It takes twice as much work to achieve a managerial level - the exams aren't even in an accessible format. There's a general shift in the right direction but it's still obstructed. We've got a long way to go." [Section two ends.] SECTION THREE: LEGAL FOCUS - Olympics website. AUSTRALIAN CASE IS WARNING FOR WEB DESIGNERS. * In August 2000 the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) was found to have engaged in unlawful conduct by providing a web site which was to a significant extent inaccessible to the blind (see E-Access Bulletin issues 9, 10 and 11). In this article Tom Worthington, one of the expert witnesses called in this landmark case, describes how complainant Bruce Maguire won the day. On 7 June 1999, the blind sports fan Bruce Maguire made a complaint to the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (http://www.hreoc.gov.au) that he was unlawfully discriminated against by SOCOG in their failure to provide a web site which was accessible to him. As part of the case, at the request of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, two expert witnesses prepared reports for Maguire on the accessibility of the Olympics website. The witnesses were Jutta Treviranus, manager of the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto, and myself. During the case, SOCOG did not supply technical details about the web site requested by the complainant's experts, claiming the information was "highly commercially sensitive information". At another stage SOCOG argued that responsibility for any problems with the site lay with its contractor, US technology giant IBM. However, this was not accepted and no complaint was made against IBM. Technical details requested were a sample page in electronic format from the proposed Results Table on the SOCOG website relating to the Olympic Games; the content plan for the Olympic website; the number of templates to be used; the details of the tools used to generate the pages of the Olympic website; and detailed calculations of certain 'ball park' figures. As this information was not supplied, it was necessary for the experts to examine the information which was available on the site to evaluate the design and estimate the cost and time needed to make the site accessible. The 'Bobby' web-based tool (http://www.cast.org/bobby) was used to test three selected web pages for acessibility. The pages were displayed using Internet Explorer (Version 5.0 for Windows 95), with image display switched off to simulate use by a blind person. The display of the web pages was inspected for usability and then an examination of the HTML source code made. Use of the Bobby tool proved difficult, due to the extensive use of frames on the site, requiring each frame to be submitted separately. Based on the inspection the conclusion was that the SOCOG Web Site was inaccessible to the blind for three main reasons: First, descriptive 'ALT' text tags were not included on all images. As an example the graphic at the top of the page which linked to 'home' had no caption. Second, tables were not laid out so as to be read in a linear way. Tables contained multiple lines of wrapped text, which access devices like Braille readers would read unintelligibly across the rows. And third, the 'Sports home page' carried a list of sports in one large image map, which was unreadable by non-text readers. In the absence of the technical information requested from SOCOG, a number of assumptions were made to estimate the cost of changing the web site for accessibility. Based on the games' format of 300 events across 28 sports with some extra templates needed for general pages it was estimated a total of 357 web templates would be needed. It was further assumed that the tools used to design the web site have provision for usability options such as the inclusion of 'ALT' tags, and therefore no additional cost was included for new tools. Finally, an estimate of just over three weeks for one web developer to assess the templates, make the changes and carry out tests was calculated. The cost of the changes on the basis of a consultant's rate per day of 1,900 US Dollars was therefore estimated at 29,450 Dollars. The decision was delivered 24 August 2000, with SOCOG found to have breached section 24 of the Australian Disability Discrimination Act 1992. HREOC dismissed claims by the committee that the cost and difficulty in providing an accessible site would impose on the respondent "a level of hardship which could not be justified". It dismissed claims that the number of templates was as high as 1,295 and that the reformatting of templates would take hours each - "a more realistic estimate for the minor changes required is 10 minutes each . . . the cost of making the site accessible is a modest amount." A declaration that SOCOG do all that was necessary to render its web site accessible by the commencement of the Olympic Games was therefore issued. Subsequently, on 6 November 2000 (after the Olympics) the web site was found to only be partly compliant and 20,000 Australian Dollars was awarded in damages, which SOCOG paid. It should be noted that no web designers from IBM or SOCOG gave evidence to the commission as to who, how or why the web site was designed the way it was. The Australian Internet Industry Association (http://www.iia.net.au) subsequently warned that the SOGOC decision meant: "Disability access is a serious consideration for any Australian business wanting to establish a presence on the Internet. Sites which target customers overseas might also be liable under equivalent legislation in the US, Canada, the UK and elsewhere." However, there is little indication that Australian corporations are taking the threat seriously. * Tom Worthington is an independent electronic business consultant and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University. This article is based on a paper he is due to present at INET 2001, the Internet Society Conference on 8 June in Stockholm - http://www.isoc.org/inet2001 [Section three ends.] SECTION FOUR: READER RESPONSE - Colour Testers. COLOURFUL LANGUAGE. There has been a huge response from readers to last issue's query from David Porter about a hand-held device to help blind people select clothes to wear without choosing clashing colours, by emitting sound signals (E-Access Bulletin, April 2001). Fred Gissoni of the American Printing House for the Blind (APH), was one of many writing in with details of a device manufactured by the Austrian company Caretec known as 'ColorTest'. In the US, it is sold by his organisation at a price of 595 US Dollars (see http://sun1.aph.org/products/colortes.ht m). He says the device is approximately 15 centimetres long, 4cm wide and 3cm thick. It is powered by a rechargeable battery. On the face of the device near the sensing end are two buttons, one convex and one concave. When the convex button is pressed, a digitised voice announces the name of a colour from a library of about 150 (versions are available in several languages). When the concave button is pressed, information is given on three other aspects of the colour: brightness, hue and saturation. 'Brightness', presented on a scale from zero to 9.9, represents the amount of reflected light in the colour. 'Hue' tells where within the visual spectrum the observed colour falls. red is 3, blue 6, green 9 and yellow 12 - so for example a reading of 7.5 might be turquoise. 'Saturation' is an indication of the strength or depth of colour. If one presses the 'eye' of the instrument against a bit of clothing and holds down the convex button, a tone is heard. By moving the end of the instrument over the surface, variation in tone can aid in determining information about whether a garment is solid, striped or of another pattern, although precise detail is not available. Gissoni has personal experience of the device. "My wife and I have used the device for upwards of three years and, despite some shortcomings, are pleased with it. It enables us to perform tasks that would otherwise be impossible." In the UK, this same device is marketed as the 'Colourtest-150' by Vis-ability (http://ww.vis-ability.co.uk). Richard West is a UK user: "It is a hand-held device, rather like a torch. It worked fairly well, but had a price tag of several hundred pounds [it currently retails at 450 UK Pounds], so I never felt it worth getting. However, for a blind person living alone, it might have sufficient benefit to justify the expenditure. Several other readers wrote in to recommend ColorTest. They included Lindy van der Merwe of Johannesburg, South Africa, who says: "It is a truly wonderful device that not enough visually impaired people know about. The ColorTest can also detect a source of light, thus enabling me, as a totally blind person, to find out if lights are on or off. I have even used it to identify the colour of the roses in my garden. "However, although the device can identify colours, it will still be up to the person to decide which colours go together. It might for instance be a good idea to try and find some information on the matching of colours in books." Other advocates included E Marie-Lewis who says ColorTest is "extremely reliable"; Pratik Patel, Project Manager at CUNY Assistive Technology Services, who calls it "an excellent device"; and Anna Dresner. Robert Mortimer wrote in with a useful link to the 'Talking Products' section of the American web site Independent Living Aids: http://www.marcom.nu/vhosts/Independ entLivingAids/Talking_Products.html Not only can you buy a 'Talking Color Identifier' here (which appears to be the ColorTest device under a different name) but also a range of other devices from talking money identifiers to talking compasses and talking thermometers. Peter Meijer, inventor of the auditory 'soundscape' device 'vOICe' (see E- Access Bulletin, Issue 13, January 2001) wrote in to point out that his invention could also be used to describe colours. "You can use The vOICe auditory display software (http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winv oice.htm) with a cheap colour web-cam to have the colour spoken of whatever is at the centre of the camera view." He also sends in a link to a comprehensive table comparing all sorts of other light probes and colour sensors, maintained by Tiresias, at: http://www.dinf.org/tiresias/Equipment/e b14table.htm [Section four ends.] HOW TO RECEIVE THIS BULLETIN. To subscribe to this free monthly bulletin, e-mail eab-subs@headstar.com with 'subscribe eab' in the subject header. You can list other email addresses to subscribe in the body of the message. Please encourage all your colleagues to sign up! To unsubscribe at any time, put 'unsubscribe eab' in the subject header. Please send comments on coverage or leads to Dan Jellinek at: dan@headstar.com Copyright 2001 Headstar Ltd. http://www.headstar.com The Bulletin may be reproduced in full as long as all parts including this copyright notice are included. Sections of the report may be quoted as long as they are clearly sourced as 'taken from e-access bulletin, a free monthly email newsletter', and our web site address http://www.e-accessibility.com is also cited. PERSONNEL: Editor - Dan Jellinek dan@headstar.com Deputy Editor - Phil Cain phil@headstar.com Reporter - Tamara Fletcher tamara@headstar.com Editorial Advisor - Kevin Carey humanity@atlas.co.uk [Issue ends.]