In the digital age, access for all has new challenges

By Kim Hart 

WASHINGTON

Olivia Norman’s fingers fly across her laptop keyboard, dexterously tapping out instant messages to friends and entering Google searches without committing a single typo. A minute later, she’s listening intently to the voice cues that help her read e-mail and send text messages on her Motorola Q smart phone.

Norman is blind, so the cues help her navigate the tiny keypad and understand the words on the screen.

She can’t order an on-demand movie from Comcast because she can’t read the on-screen menus. She had trouble setting up an iTunes account because the speech-synthesizing software she relies on couldn’t find the right link on the Web site.

“It’s a curse and a blessing at the same time,” said Norman, 27, of Washington. “The Internet has revolutionized my life, but there are basic things that are still completely inaccessible to people like me.”

Web technologies and mobile devices have created many new ways for blind and deaf consumers to find information and connect with friends. But as entertainment and communications tools increasingly take digital form, some people with disabilities feel left behind. Online videos are not required to have captions for those who can’t hear, for example, and ticker-style emergency messages are not narrated for those who can’t see.

Various groups have tried to address some of these hurdles over the past few years.

For example, the Federal Communications Commission last year ruled that Internet phone services, such as Vonage, that connect to the public telephone network must be compatible with hearing aids and relay services, as traditional phone companies’ service is. The agency also decided that wireless carriers must ensure that at least half of their cell phones are compatible with hearing aids.

Five years ago, the FCC set rules requiring video operators to provide “video description” services that narrate scenes for people with visual impairments. But those rules were overturned in court when movie studios argued that the FCC did not have the authority to make such rules.

A Democratic congressman recently introduced legislation to restore those requirements and bring other big changes to the way Internet phone and video are designed.

“Now we’re full-blown into this digital era, and we, in general, need to upgrade the laws that ensure that there is accessibility for all the people who use these new technologies,” said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.

The bill, also sponsored by Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., calls for new rules for devices that display video programming. Federal law requires all TV sets with screens larger than 13 inches to display closed captions. Under the new legislation, all gadgets from MP3 music players to cell phones would be required to show captions.

Devices also would be obligated to provide video description services and read aloud emergency messages that scroll across the bottom of the screen. And they would have to be designed so that on-screen menus are usable by people with disabilities.

In addition, Markey’s bill would extend existing Internet phone service requirements to Skype and similar services that let users exchange voice, text or video communications over the Internet.

Various advocates of people with disabilities have lined up in support of the bill, arguing that it’s high time that the law spelled out technology standards that consider the needs of consumers with visual or hearing impairments.

But tech industry groups say that such a list of requirements will dampen the innovation that’s already making these products and services available and more accessible. They also argue that new regulations will drive up the price of products for all consumers.

“No one thought about these things five years ago, and yet these technologies are coming down the pike on their own and we need to make sure we don’t stifle that growth,” said Dane Snowden, vice president of state and external affairs for CTIA, the wireless industry’s main lobby group in Washington.

Robert McConnell, 23, a student at Gallaudet University in Washington, said Web cameras, instant-messaging programs and his BlackBerry allow him to communicate in ways that were unavailable to previous generations of the deaf and hard of hearing.

“We live through our thumbs,” he said of his dependence on his cell phone to send text messages and photos of sign-language sequences.

But video clips and many TV shows that are streamed online are often unintelligible to him because they lack captions. At the moment, it is left up to the producers of online content to decide whether to provide captions. CBS’ Web site, for example, does not have captions for all of the network’s content, but Hulu.com, a joint venture between NBC and Fox, often does.

Similarly, Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, has put captions on many of the videos on his campaign Web site, McConnell has observed. Officials with Republican candidate Sen. John McCain did not say whether his site provides captions for videos.

Captions are difficult to post with online videos because there is no common standard for how they are decoded and displayed, said Larry Goldberg, director of media access at WGBH, a public broadcasting station in Boston. The station is coordinating a coalition called the Internet Captioning Forum, formed last year by AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which is working to draw up captioning standards for content providers and Web sites.

The proposed bill would not extend to the homemade clips posted on YouTube and other video sharing sites but would require major TV networks and movie studios to include captions with Web-bound content.

“The problem is every video player – RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, QuickTime – works differently,” Goldberg said.

Although made-for-TV content is required to have captions, they are not always easily repurposed for the Web. For example, if a half-hour show is broken up into smaller clips for the Web site, the prerecorded captions “can be garbled or destroyed.”

Some companies have created programs that cater to deaf and blind people. FeedRoom, a New York company, has created a video player that can display captions. Audiopoint, in Rockville, Md., has a text-to-speech program that reads e-mail and news alerts over the phone in a robotic voice.

But the software can cost hundreds of dollars, and compatible devices can cost in the thousands, said Karen Peltz Strauss, who helped form the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology.

She said she thinks federal action would help make the technologies more affordable.

But Vincent Morris, communications director for the Information Technology Industry Council, argued that government action would also lead to higher prices for all consumers.

“Our goal would be to craft something that works for the broadest number of people, and we’re not convinced this bill is a good example of that,” he said.