+++E-ACCESS BULLETIN.
- ISSUE 49, JANUARY 2004.

Technology news for people with vision impairment
(http://www.headstar.com/eab).
Sponsored by RNIB (http://www.rnib.org.uk).

NOTE: Please forward this free bulletin to others (subscription
details
at the end). We conform to the accessible Text Email Newsletter
(TEN) Standard:
http://www.headstar.com/ten .


++ISSUE 49 CONTENTS.

01: Italian web law pulls down barriers
- but rules strongest for public sector sites.

02: 'Global garden' showcases accessible animation
- rare example of 'Flash' children's game allowing text access.

03: Long-awaited breakthrough for talking TV
- Freeview launches affordable audio description.

04: RNIB leads on progressive procurement policy
- draft strategy examined by major government departments.

News in brief: 05: Registration numbers - blindness statistics for
England; 06: Views welcome - education consultation; 07:
Maintaining momentum - European rallying cry. 08: Commission
investigation - ombudsman lays down the law.

Section two: 'The Inbox' - Readers' forum.
09: Font wisdom - typeface query; 10: Musical resources - scores and
dots; 11: Welsh voice - language products; 12: Talking phones -
handset compatibility; 13: Screen correction - magnifier usability.

Section three: Interview - Janina Sajka.
14: One-woman army targets 'add-on' access culture: Mel Poluck talks
to the American Foundation of the Blind's prolific research director
about how technology firms have it all backwards; and the liberating
potential of open source software.

Section four: Conference report - Techshare 2003.
15: Technology - help or hindrance? Adaptive products can be costly
to buy and maintain, and that's before the costs and headaches of
training are taken into account. Derek Parkinson reports on a lively
debate at the recent international RNIB event.

[Contents ends].


++SECTION ONE: NEWS.

+01: ITALIAN WEB LAW 'PULLS DOWN BARRIERS'.

The Italian government has passed new legislation designed to give
people with disabilities greater access to online services. The
so-called
'Stanca law', which forces all Italian government agencies to make
their web sites fully accessible and will develop non-compulsory
access standards for private sector sites, was unanimously approved
by the country's Parliament in December.

According to a statement by Lucio Stanca, the Italian Minister for
Innovation and Technologies, the new requirements will "help to pull
down digital barriers and create opportunities for more than three
million Italian disabled people to study, work and actively
participate in society." He said that lack of ICT access for Italy's
disabled people caused social marginalisation and democratic and
economic disadvantage.

In 1999, an Italian government circular was sent out encouraging
local
and central government agencies to ensure their web services were
accessible. But the new law has gone much further by introducing
disciplinary sanctions for public sector managers who don't comply.
The law also provides for the cancellation of web site contracts if
they fail to meet the Stanca requirements, in an echo of the US
government web accessibility law known as 'section 508.'

Citizens groups have welcomed the law, while expressing regret that
its provisions are non-mandatory for private firms. "The law
represents
a real turning point," said a spokeswoman for the Citizens Defence
Movement (Movimento Difesa del Citadino  - http://www.mdc.it).
"However, it should be followed up with economic incentives for
private web sites to be made fully accessible."

The Italian government now plans to draft regulations defining the
new accessibility criteria by March 2004 in co-operation with disability
organisations and technology suppliers.


+02: 'GLOBAL GARDEN' SHOWCASES ACCESSIBLE ANIMATION.

A ground-breaking children's web site which has been created using
accessible 'Flash' web animation could set a new trend for accessible
games and cartoons, according to the RNIB (http://www.rnib.org.uk).

'Our Global Garden' is a collaboration between Eureka!
(http://www.eureka.org.uk), a children's museum in Halifax, and
'showme' (http://www.show.me.uk), the children's section of the
government's online cultural resource the 24-Hour Museum
(http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk). The site mirrors a current
exhibition at Eureka! By allowing children aged between four and
seven to explore and compare six different global environments.

The game was built using a combination of HTML and accessible web
animation software Flash MX 2004, developed by Macromedia
(http://www.macromedia.com). The software allows access to
descriptive text within an animation file which can be interpreted by
assistive devices such as screen readers.

"This is an exciting development," says Julie Howell, digital policy
development officer at the RNIB. "Over the past few years,
Macromedia has modified its software tools to make them more
accessible [see for example E-Access Bulletin, issue 10, October
2000]. However, best practice examples of using accessible flash to
create web sites are few and far between."

Howell hopes that projects such as this will help galvanise the web
design community to experiment with the technology. "It is easy for
web designers to think that accessibility means creating uninspiring,
text-only sites. However, this project proves that this isn't the
case. We need web designers to start experimenting with accessible
Flash, sharing their learning experiences and creating best practice
examples of accessible, interactive web development."


+03: LONG-AWAITED BREAKTHROUGH FOR TALKING TV.

Accessible digital TV in the UK took a leap forward this month with
the release of an affordable set-top box that provides audio
description for Freeview, the popular free-to-air digital service
used by terrestrial broadcasters ITV and the BBC.

Audio description is the verbal description of scenes that occur
between periods of dialogue, which can be carried as a separate
sound-track on digital television or in specially adapted cinemas.
Until now, it has only been commercially available through the Sky
digital satellite service. It is not supported at all by cable TV
and was only previously available on Freeview to just 45 households
as part of a pilot project.

The Netgem i-Player product costs 125 pounds and provides access to
all audio described programmes available on six BBC channels; ITV1
and ITV2; Channel 4; and Channel 5. "At last! This is very good news
and something for which we've been campaigning for a long time,"
said Jill Whitehead, broadcasting and talking images officer at the
RNIB.

The Freeview service offers users more choice because it enables
users to adjust the volume of the audio description track
independently of the programme's main soundtrack, unlike the Sky
system. The Netgem box also speaks the name of each channel
automatically, and will soon be available with a headphone adaptor
so users have the option of listening to audio description in privacy.
In addition, the box provides a link to the RNIB website so that
users can check programme times.

At present, the Netgem i-Player is not available in shops and must be
ordered from the manufacturer by calling the freephone number
0800 015 3092.


+04: RNIB LEADS ON PROGRESSIVE PROCUREMENT POLICY.

The RNIB has drafted a policy setting out standards for organisations
and companies to procure IT systems fully accessible to employees
with vision impairments, and has adapted the policy for its own
procurement practice, the institute announced this month.

The policy says accessibility must be taken into account when
procuring corporate IT systems and emphasises the business benefit to
the supplier. "The RNIB want to people to use best practise when
procuring IT so employees with a disability can use it," RNIB's
senior ICT development officer Ruth Loebl told E-Access Bulletin.

Under the policy, the RNIB is using International Standard
Organisation ISO standard 16071 (http://fastlink.headstar.com/iso1)
to test a corporate IT system about to be rolled out to users within
theRNIB to check its accessibility, such as the ability to perform
tasksfrom the keyboard. A report will then be made of problems
encountered before negotiating with the supplier to ensure they act
on the problems, Loebl says.

In an effort to encourage other large organisations to develop
similar policies, the RNIB and several other disability organisations
including AbilityNet, RNID and Scope met before Christmas with
representatives of a number of government departments, including the
Department of Work and Pensions and the Department of Trade and
Industry.

Following this meeting, an online discussion group "IT-include"
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IT-include/) was established to
discuss setting up a framework for accessible IT procurement in all
sectors and
recommending testing and evaluation methods. Further talks have
taken place this week with the government procurement agency the
Office of Government Commerce.

Up until now, no standards have been in place for ensuring the
accessibility of corporate IT systems, although according to Loebl,
if a
system needs adapting to suit a disabled employee, the Employment
Service's 'Access to work' scheme pays for the work. However, an
accessible IT procurement policy is important because, unlike with a
web site, improving inaccessible hardware after it is purchased is
often difficult and expensive.


++NEWS IN BRIEF:

+05: REGISTRATION NUMBERS: There are 157,000 blind and
partially sighted people registered with English local councils,
according to the latest figures from the Department of Health. The
figures represent an increase of four per cent since last year, and
100 per cent over the past 20 years:
http://www.doh.gov.uk/public/blindpartiallysighted03.pdf .

+06: VIEWS WELCOME: A draft equality and diversity strategy for
2004-07 that aims to challenge discrimination in education and
learning has been published for consultation by the Learning and
Skills Council. Interested parties have until 30 March to comment:
http://fastlink.headstar.com/lsc1 .

+07: MAINTAINING MOMENTUM: The European Parliament
member and disability campaigner Liz Lynn has said too many EU
countries have not yet complied with legislation protecting people
with disabilities against discrimination in the workplace. She has
urged the
Irish government, which currently holds the European presidency, to
exert pressure on laggard nations in an effort to maintain the ideals
of the 2003 European Year of People with Disabilities:
http://www.lizlynne.org.uk/story.php?id=175 .

+08: COMMISSION INVESTIGATION: The European ombudsman
P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, who has independent powers to
investigate alleged maladministration by European institutions, has
launched an investigation into the European Commission's compliance
with European disability law. The Commission must now respond by
29 February with details of actions it has taken or proposes to take:
http://www.euro-ombudsman.eu.int/disabilities/en .

[Section one ends].


++SPECIAL NOTICE: USABILITY TESTERS WANTED

Headstar, the publishers of E-Access Bulletin, is seeking
computer users who use special access or adaptive technologies
such as screen readers, for paid web site testing work.

The occasional work would involve visiting web sites and filling
in a simple questionnaire about your experiences (we can provide
questionnaires in any preferred digital or other format).

If you might be interested in this kind of work, please email
usability@headstar.com with details of the access technology or
technologies that you use to browse the web, and we will contact
you with further information.

[Special notice ends].


++SECTION TWO: 'THE INBOX'
- READERS' FORUM.

- Please email all contributions or responses to inbox@headstar.com .

+09: FONT WISDOM: John Conway, Disability Officer at the Royal
Agricultural College, has a query about the best fonts to use for
readable text. "I understood that for visually impaired people one
should use a sans serif font - I'm about to try and introduce that
standard here, and I've got my computer set to Arial as default font,
but your accessible text email newsletter (TEN) standard document
(http://www.headstar.com/ten) opened in Times New Roman." Do any
of our readers have any comments on this topic? [Responses please to
inbox@headstar.com].


+10: MUSICAL RESOURCES: Last issue Scott Rae of the Highland
Society for Blind wrote in to ask about technology that would help
young people with impaired vision read sheet music.

Our tireless correspondent Chris McMillan has three further
suggestions for useful resources. The first is the Netherlands-based
Talking Music project, which runs the excellent Accessible Music
Newsletter:
http://projects.fnb.nl/Talking%20Music/ .

The second is the Visually Impaired Musicians Association (VIMA),
an organisation of blind and partially sighted musicians and music
lovers - in the UK telephone 0208 3666019 or see:
http://fastlink.headstar.com/vima1 .

And the third is Share Music, an organisation which arranges
residential and non-residential courses in music, theatre and dance
for  people with physical disabilities or sensory impairments aged 16
or over:
http://www.sharemusic.org.uk .

Bill McCann, Founder and President of Dancing Dots Braille Music
Technology, further responded: "Of course, Louis Braille himself
invented his code for music as well as literary and mathematics
Braille (try getting all of that done by the time you're 20 years
old!).

"In 1997 Dancing Dots published the world's first Braille music
translator software, GOODFEEL, which has numerous transcription
options including a set of UK formatting options that apply UK
variations to the Braille output. We publish a few courses on Braille
music reading and our UK distributor, Techno-Vision Systems, is to
release a new Braille music course for UK readers.

"Our Sibelius Speaking product gives the JAWS user premium access
to the Sibelius music notation software, allowing a blind person to
navigate through the score and hear musical and verbal descriptions of
score elements or create a new score. Students might also be interested
to create their own sound recordings with our access solution for
Cakewalk SONAR which we call CakeTalking.

"For further information on all these products see
http://www.dancingdots.com and to contact Techno-Vision email
info@techno-vision.co.uk ."

Another reader, Chris Towers, adds: "Have you tried using the
software Cubase from Steinberg (http://www.steinberg.net/en/start)? I
used it when doing my degree and it was excellent. I am partially-
sighted and it enabled me to enlarge music, and read off screen or
print it out."


+11: WELSH VOICE: Rebecca Redmile, a daily living skills instructor
and community access facilitator at the non-profit organisation
BALANCE in Toronto (http://www.balancetoronto.org), has a question
following from our article last month on new synthetic speech
technology allowing access to magazines and newspapers (see
'Revolutionary speech technology to launch', story 01, E-Access
Bulletin issue 48, December 2003).

She writes: "I certainly applaud the British reading services. North
America is a little behind in this area. [However] I have a very
specific question which you may be able to answer.
"I have been looking for software, or an external screen reader which
will read Welsh properly. Would you know who might be able to
recommend some?" [Responses to inbox@headstar.com].


+12: TALKING PHONES: Clare Page writes in to ask for more
information on talking mobile phones: "Within the past few months I
have noticed that the new Talx software, which brings speech output
to mobile phones, has been mentioned in the bulletin more than once. I
live in France, and have bought a mobile phone here, but of course
with modern mobile phones there are some features visually impaired
people like me cannot use without some adaptation. So I was
wondering - is Talx compatible with all mobile phones, or only with
certain models? And if it can be used with any phone, might it be
possible to obtain it outside the UK?

"I have only recently bought a new mobile phone, a Sagem
(http://www.sagem.com/en) with a lot of modern features but without
some means of adding speech to the phone I cannot use them all. In
France I have only heard of one program that seems to be similar to
Talx, called Mobile Accessibility, but it is only compatible with
certain Siemens and Nokia phones." Please send advice or information
to
inbox@headstar.com .


+13: SCREEN CORRECTION: In our last issue we reported that Chris
McMillan had used ZoomText with the TFT iiyama AS 4611 UT 18-
inch flat computer screen without encountering problems; in fact we
should have said it was Lunar, not ZoomText, that she has used
without difficulty with this screen. She has not tried using ZoomText
with it.

[Section two ends].


++ SECTION THREE: INTERVIEW
- JANINA SAJKA.

+14: ONE-WOMAN ARMY TARGETS 'ADD-ON' ACCESS CULTURE.
by Mel Poluck mel@headstar.com .

Janina Sajka, director of research and development at the American
Foundation of the Blind, is dismayed by the culture of "add-on"
accessibility which prevails among technology companies that develop
products that later have to be adapted for vision-impaired users.

"I firmly believe they have it backwards. By working with people with
disabilities at the outset, they would end up making better products
for themselves", she says. "I am increasingly concerned about how much
further there is to go, how much accessibility is still ghettoised,
how much it is not integrated into the mainstream flow of how services
are supplied."

Sajka's work involves providing consultative support to and
developing accessible technology standards for industry and
governments worldwide, in the fields of emerging information systems
and access technologies.

One of the projects she is currently undertaking, is the development
of a strategy for vision-impaired people in the US to be able to access
medical information from mobile phones using technology from the
DAISY talking books consortium (http://www.daisy.org), for whom
Sajka also works.

The new medical information service would provide content similar to
free pamphlets available in doctors' surgeries, such as how to obtain
medicines or how to get more information, and uses existing
technology - something Sajka feels passionately about. The concept
has been proven she says, and all that remains is for her team to
meet with the relevant government department to discuss implementation.

According to Sajka, there are some serious usability issues inherent
in audio cassette recordings, the current method for vision-impaired
patients to access this kind of information. With DAISY style
recordings however, users can go directly to the relevant place
without having to use the rewind and fast-forward buttons or listen to
the lists and "shrieking beeps" that denote sections of an audio cassette,
often requiring the user to remember multiple options. "Why have lists at
all?" Sajka says. "Why not do it on a cellphone? It's snappy. It's a
way to get the information you need now, comfortably and effectively".

Sajka has fingers in many other pies. As well as advising the US
government on accessibility law and helping it to develop a digital
talking book standard (http://www.loc.gov/nls/z3986/), she also works
for the world wide web consortium's web accessibility initiative (WAI
- http://www.w3.org/WAI/).

And as if these projects were not enough, Sajka says for the next few
years, she will be focusing her energy on chairing the Free Standards
Group (FSG - http://www.freestandards.org) access work group, which
aims to help develop accessibility standards for open source
software.
The group is set to be launched at the LinuxWorld conference on 27
January in New York (http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/linuxworldny).

The potential of the open source movement to make the internet a more
accessible place is one of Sajka's real passions. In a past interview
with E-Access Bulletin (see issue 24, December 2001), Sajka said that
thanks to the open source movement people with disabilities now
"don't need advocates, we need engineers."

She still feels the same way: "With traditional proprietary systems,
if the computer isn't working, you ask who manufactured it, call them
and then sort out the problem," she says. "But open source invites
the community in. Everything you need to change it is already there - you
can scratch your own itch. And if someone wants to submit a standard
or a patch and it works, it is likely that will be included in a
future version of a piece of software."

Overall however, it is not access to computers which concerns her in
trying to improve the daily lives of people with impaired vision but
more basic, established technologies such as thermostats or security
systems. "I'm not too worried about computers, but common devices
are just not accessible."

Typically, Sajka has a solution brewing. In the pipeline as part of
her work with the International Committee for Information Technology
Standards is the 'V2 Spec' (http://www.v2access.org). This is the
specification for a universal device to be carried by disabled people
to discover what other devices are in an area.

The 'Universal remote console', will detect and "negotiate" with a
wide range of objects in the user's vicinity to return information
about what is nearby, from TV and radio to lifts, roads or coffee
pots. In future, the device may even be able to determine distance
of other devices away from its user. To succeed, Sajka says, it will
need to be attractive to mainstream industry. A specification is due
to be released for public consultation in around a month.

Overall, Sajka says that what is needed to build a better
technological environment for people with disabilities is simple:
"A smarter way to use things we share with everybody else. We've made
wheelchair ramps - we can do the same in e-space".

[Section three ends].


++SECTION FOUR: CONFERENCE REPORT
- TECHSHARE 2003.

+15: TECHNOLOGY - HELP OR HINDRANCE?
by Derek Parkinson

Most of us have pinned great hopes on technology at some time or
another. It's easy to dream of gadgets that will dispatch boring
tasks with the ruthless efficiency of The Terminator and be as
user-friendly
as a well-worn pair of shoes. Happily, sometimes things do turn out
this way, but all too often the reality disappoints.

The topic of whether technology has helped or hindered people with
impaired vision was therefore an excellent subject for the RNIB's
November Techshare conference (http://www.rnib.org.uk/techshare) to
have chosen for an open debate. According to keynote speaker Brian
Charlson of the American Council of the Blind (ACB -
http://www.acb.org), adaptive technology is often designed and built
in a way that ignores the practical demands of everyday life.

The effect of this is that adaptive technology often makes
unreasonable demands of the user. "We're just regular schmoes like
everyone else, but we have no choice but to master all this
technology," he said.
"It's well-known that many telephone operators were blind people,
because this was one of the few jobs open to them. But what these
people had to do was actually very difficult, operating a Braille
output with one hand, a Braille input with the other, while listening
to audio over the headphones at the same time," he said.

It is difficult enough for many people to meet the cost of adaptive
products, upgrades and maintenance, Charlson said, yet they also have
to meet the cost and demands of training, not to mention finding
decent training in the first place. "The cognitive load of adaptive
technology is unreasonable," he said.

The thought that technology only benefits a minority of people
resurfaced during a lively debate chaired by Newsnight presenter
Jeremy Paxman. "Many of us agree that we have benefited from
technology, but who is this 'we'? This room is full of well-educated
caucasian people," said Janina Sajka, Director of Technology Research
and Development at the American Foundation for the Blind (see also
section three, this issue for an interview with Sajka).

According to Peter White, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 blindness
issue programme 'In Touch', we often forget that technology is a
means to an end. "People don't want technology, they want answers to
problems," he said. White also argued that the momentum behind the
implementation of new technology often has more to do with saving
money than the needs of users. "It has been used to get rid of costs,
in other words face-to-face contact between people," he said.

Charlson said that training for adaptive technology must be more
affordable, useable and available, not only at the time of its
original purchase but over the entire time it is in use. In his view,
we have been
slow to encourage development of alternatives to the face-to-face
training model. "We have to ask whether online learning is part of
the answer," he said. This is not to say that face-to-face training
should be scrapped, rather that teaching resources could be targeted
more wisely.

Training materials would also reach more end users if they were
distributed to a broader cross-section of teachers, he said. "We need
more training materials for teachers who aren't assistive technology
specialists."

The theme of partnership featured strongly in a keynote presentation
from Rob Lees, technology executive for Vodafone Global Products
and Services. Lees was keen to highlight the mutual benefits to
Vodafone and the RNIB of partnering to share expertise, and to
illustrate how the organisations could pursue common aims in
practice.
He was quick to acknowledge that market share and profits are the
main drivers for the mobile phone giant, but suggested that the
community of people with impaired vision has much to gain too.

According to Lees this comes about because of the way markets tend
to get split up by  retailers. For Vodafone, all people aged over 45
are lumped together as "mature users", a segment that remains under-
exploited yet tends to have a high disposable income. In addition, a
high proportion of this age group have some kind of vision
impairment. "So there is a strong demand for voice-enabled services,
the sort of phone that can be customised to individual needs," said
Lees. Consequently, Vodafone has consulted the RNIB for evaluation
and feedback on such services, and is keen to use its power in the
marketplace to ensure that handsets support them. "With 125 million
customers we can put pressure on handset manufacturers," he said.

Such practical suggestions were typical of the Techshare meeting,
which seems to gain strength each year and has already become far
more than a showcase for new products and a rallying point for
campaigners.

[Section four ends].


++END NOTES.

+HOW TO RECEIVE THIS BULLETIN.

To subscribe to this free monthly bulletin, email
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 2004 Headstar Ltd http://www.headstar.com .
The Bulletin may be reproduced as long as all parts including this
copyright notice are included, and as long as people are always
encouraged to subscribe with us individually by email. Please also
inform the editor when you are reproducing our content. 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.headstar.com/eab is also cited.

+PERSONNEL:
Editor - Dan Jellinek
Deputy editor - Derek Parkinson
Senior reporter - Mel Poluck
News reporter - Julie Hill
Editorial advisor - Kevin Carey.

ISSN 1476-6337 .

[Issue ends.]