Making Travel Websites Accessible For Blind Travelers
Before the late 1990s, air travel was often booked through airlines and travel agents, either in person or over the phone. After the Internet was widely adopted in the mid-1990s, online travel booking websites like Expedia and Orbitz took on the lion's share of the work done by travel agents, leveling the playing field for deaf and hard-of-hearing travelers who otherwise needed help booking over the phone, or drove to the nearest travel agent office to make their arrangements. Yet, what has been an immeasurable benefit for deaf travelers has come at the expense of blind travelers, who find these online travel websites difficult to access, and continue to arrange their itineraries by phone or in person, or rely on sighted people to make the online arrangements for them.The explosion of online travel booking websites has made it significantly easier for most travelers to make their own travel arrangements -- it takes just a few minutes to purchase airfare and book a hotel, compared to the one hour it usually takes over the phone (mostly waiting time). Yet, in today's transformed travel landscape, where travel agents have less clout, and mom-and-pop travel agencies are closing up shop, it is increasingly more difficult for blind travelers to navigate the travel booking business. Which is unfortunate because the best airline deals are usually found online.This may be about to change. On Monday, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) announced an agreement with Travelocity, one of the leading online travel agencies, to make Travelocity's web site more accessible to people with blindness. As part of the agreement, by July 2011, Travelocity will make its home page and search pages accessible, and its entire web site will be fully accessible to the blind by the end of March 2012.With this announcement, Travelocity becomes the first major online travel agency to commit to ensuring its website is accessible to travelers with blindness. Other major online travel websites such as Expedia and Orbitz still contain significant accessibility barriers for travelers. And in today's Web 2.0 environment, when travelers increasingly go to meta-search engines like Kayak and Hipmunk to find the best travel deals, these meta-search engines are not easily accessible for the blind, either.As more business-to-consumer and business-to-business transactions are increasingly being conducted online on both desktop and mobile devices, web accessibility for people with disabilities has become mission-critical. It is not simply enough to be able to buy books and kitchen gadgets on Amazon.com, or to bid for antiques on eBay. Starbucks recently announced that its Starbucks Card mobile app now enables you to pay for your coffee with your smartphone. In an increasingly cashless economy, blind consumers should not only be able to book their airline tickets on the Web, but also carry out transactions on other Websites and mobile devices. Travelocity's announcement only scratches the surface of what is possible, not only for blind travelers, but for all consumers with disabilities.
Readability for Your Browser
The Yahoo! Accessibility Lab brought to my attention a very helpful add-on for the browser: the Readability app developed by Arc90, available here as a Firefox-add on, or directly from the Readability page for all browsers. I had become acquainted with the Readability concept last month when I downloaded the Reeder RSS application for my Mac and iPhone, and immediately saw its potential value for people with vision, cognitive, and/or mobility issues.I am a hard-core RSS user, as I like to read through many different articles posted on various news and business sites and blogs on the Internet, and appreciate the efficiency of the RSS readers in pushing through the articles I need to keep up to date on a daily basis -- in other words, my personal daily newspaper. One of my favorite RSS readers is Reeder (available for the Mac and iPhone), which has a Readability feature that enables me to read only the article content without the fonts, styles, and backgrounds associated with the website where the article natively resides -- saving me the work of jumping to a separate browser to read the article.Apparently, the other useful benefit of Readability is that it enables those with vision, cognitive, or mobility issues to control how the content of individual articles is presented. With the separate Firefox add-on from Arc90 (no RSS reader necessary), you can control the font size, the appearance of the page, and choose whether to present links in-line or as separate footnotes. You can also set Readability to auto-scroll at different speeds.Readability can also be set up by dragging the Readability bookmarklet from this site to the browser's toolbar, regardless of browser. It is not clear, however, if auto-scroll can be controlled via this bookmarklet.This application works best on webpages for individual articles, which is what Readability is intended for. It will not work correctly for home pages where there are many different links to individual articles, such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal home page.I tested Readability on my own blog, and it worked very well. A smartly thought-out concept.
Travelers With Disabilities Flying the Not-So-Friendly Skies
This holiday season, many people will travel by air to spend time with family, hit the ski slopes, or relax on a tropical beach. As they too often expect, traveling on commercial airplanes is not always the most pleasant experience. Cramped legroom, baggage fees, subpar food, long check-in lines, even sitting next to someone with a cold -- they are aggravating and uncomfortable. For travelers with disabilities, it is a unique challenge because of the logistics involved in traveling efficiently through the air in very tight quarters. As they should, air carriers are obligated -- and in the United States required by law -- to accommodate travelers with disabilities.However, as a recent spate of incidents showed, there continues to be a lack of awareness among some airlines about the capabilities of travelers with disabilities when "flying the friendly skies." In these cases, travelers with disabilities were not accommodated for reasons of airline safety -- a claim that indicates ignorance of a disabled traveler's capabilities which have little to do with safety.In the United Kingdom, British carrier EasyJet informed Craig Murray, a teenager with muscular dystrophy, that his wheelchair was too heavy to be stowed aboard one of its airplanes, and told him to break it apart so it could go under the per-passenger weight limit for safety reasons. Craig's wheelchair was not designed to be taken apart, and he had already flown with this wheelchair on two other airlines in the past without incident. He and his family wanted to book with EasyJet for their Cyprus vacation because the tickets were cheaper than on other airlines. Without tickets from EasyJet, Craig's father said, "I don't think we will be able to afford to go [to Cyprus] now."In September, Johnnie Tuitel boarded a US Airways flight from Florida to Kansas City when, as he sat down in his seat, he was told by an airline manager that he was "too disabled to fly without someone else with him" and he was escorted off the plane. Tuitel, who has cerebral palsy, travels for work -- he is a motivational speaker -- and already flew 500,000 miles over the years without incident. He ended up boarding a Delta flight but missed his speaking engagement in Kansas City.
Sometimes it is as simple as looking over the person and determining he or she can't fly. Zuhair Mahmoud, a blind man from Arlington, Virginia, was checking in at the Dubai airport for a FlyDubai flight to Amman, Jordan. At the check-in counter, he was told, "Well, we can't take you. You're traveling alone." FlyDubai's policy, apparently, was not to allow a blind traveler to fly without a companion.In this day and age when more people with disabilities are living independently, more travelers -- whether disabled or non-disabled -- are traveling by air and presenting air carriers with logistical challenges. In the United States, the Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provide solid and enforceable guidelines to ensure the travel experience for a person with a disability is functionally equivalent to that of a non-disabled traveler. An essential clause of the ACAA states that "no air carrier may discriminate against any otherwise qualified individual with a disability." The ACAA covers all U.S.-registered air carriers and all carriers traveling to and from the United States. Code share partners also fall under the ACAA's jurisdiction. Outside the United States, member airlines of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) observe codes of practice which are very similar to the laws enforced within the U.S. Yet among some airlines -- even larger and well-established airlines like US Airways -- there can be a lack of awareness of the minimum standards required to accommodate travelers with disabilities. These airlines often fall back on safety claims that have little to do with disability, particularly when these travelers have already demonstrated they can travel independently and safely. EasyJet, known among European travelers for its low fares within Europe, was insistent on enforcing weight limits on stowable baggage for safety reasons -- perhaps to avoid lawsuits or fines. By not making an exception for a single person with a disability who wanted to save money on his Cyprus vacation, the airline demonstrated a lack of business foresight in following IATA protocols, especially when other airlines were able to accommodate him. As a result, EasyJet received publicity it did not want, and it ruined a family's plans for some fun in the sun in Cyprus.By the same token, US Airways and FlyDubai used their own interpretation of safety protocols to explain their denials of service to Johnnie Tuitel and Zuhair Mahmoud, who are themselves frequent and independent fliers. This also resulted in negative publicity, as news of their treatment hit media wires around the world.Safety is paramount when flying on airplanes. Travelers with disabilities, on the other hand, have often traveled on airplanes on their own with little or no impact on safety. So, when an airline makes a determination that it cannot accommodate a traveler with a disability, it must have a very good reason for doing so on the basis of safety, or risk negative word-of-mouth, or worse yet, an unflattering story in the media.Most importantly, when airlines can move mountains to make travel as hassle-free as possible for these travelers, they often get paid back in the form of gratitude, loyalty, or better yet, repeat business from both disabled and non-disabled customers. That is indeed flying the friendly skies.
Abledbody.com: The 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act
After passing in the Senate last week, the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which will improve access to mobile content for the deaf and blind communities, will soon become law.This means deaf consumers can now watch closed-captioned shows and movies on the Web on their PC or mobile devices. Before, closed-captions were only available on TVs. Blind consumers will also benefit from limited hours of video-description services on the Web, and the law will require touch-screen smartphones that have Web features to be made accessible to them.To read the full article, click through to my original link on Abledbody.com.
Let Your Fingers Do The Hiring: Part 2
Following up on everyone’s feedback and my response, I would like to add further clarity and color to my original article on Braille and employment.Born profoundly deaf, I often swam against the tide of popular opinion about deaf and hard-of-hearing people, just as successful non-Braille users did in swimming against the tide of popular opinion about blind and visually-impaired people which assumes that all blind people use Braille. While myriad educational choices were, and are, always available to deaf children – whether to teach speaking and listening, whether to teach sign language, or teach both, or follow other educational methods – conventional wisdom among uninformed (and I emphasize uninformed) hearing people was that pretty much all deaf people signed. This impression has made its way into popular media and informs general cultural discussions with regard to the deaf community. For that reason, many hearing people who approach me assume that I grew up relying on sign language to succeed, when that was never the case. I grew up learning to speak and listen, and did not learn sign language until I was 21 years old. Even then, sign language is not my primary mode of communication. I am most comfortable conversing in spoken English.This does not mean that I am against sign language. I am happily fluent in it, and have many deaf friends who I communicate with in sign language. I know many deaf people who have grown up being taught sign language, and have become successful and happy in their lives. Although sign language is the best known, and very popular, mode of communication in the deaf community, it is one of many different and equally valid educational flavors, each with its own strengths and shortcomings.For several decades until the end of the 1970’s, oral education for the deaf was implemented for as many deaf children as possible with little consideration for individual differences. While I have greatly benefited from oral education and count many other deaf friends who benefited as well, I cannot say that this approach was as beneficial for all deaf children. It was an “unmitigated disaster” for the deaf community in that many deaf children who otherwise needed sign language were denied it, sometimes by force. That is why in the 1980’s and particularly 1988 with the Deaf Power Now movement at Gallaudet, there was a backlash against oral education and increased interest in education through sign language, or bilingual education using sign language and English. This trend, however, was not helpful for some deaf children for which the oral or auditory-verbal option could have been more appropriate.By a similar token, uninformed sighted people think every blind person uses or should use Braille, when that has never been, and should never be, the case. Braille is not always appropriate for everyone in the blind community. That 90% of employed people know Braille means that the other 10% who are employed do not use Braille and still were employed.The point of my article is that Braille has become less accessible to blind people who have a need for it. It does not overtly say that Braille should be the be-all and end-all for every blind person, only that it is an essential tool to enable blind people to more effectively use the written word. My article is critical of the school administrators who made assumptions that non-Braille technologies are good enough for blind children, without examining carefully the skills and abilities of each child and whether that child has a need for Braille support. A school administrator who is extremely knowledgeable about the value of the Braille system, and extremely knowledgeable about the value of other assistive technologies for the blind, is in a much better position to evaluate the educational needs of a blind child than one who is not as knowledgeable. If that administrator says that this child does not need Braille to have a good education, then that administrator’s word carries far more credibility than the word of another administrator who cannot claim to have that level of knowledge. I take to task the educators who are not as informed or ignorant of the subtle and not-so-subtle issues in the blind community, and yet make decisions that impact the lives of blind children. This has unfortunately been a problem in the past couple of decades as the number of blind people using Braille declined.Technology is an empowering tool for people with disabilities, and also a tool that should be used carefully and appropriately – especially in cases where non-technological approaches can be just as beneficial, if not more so, to a person with a disability. I have had a cochlear implant (CI) for five years and I love it. Children as young as 8 months have undergone surgery for CI’s. The popular media has called the CI a device that “cures” their deafness and helps them to “hear again” (as if babies born deaf had ever heard sound in the first place!). This has given some parents the mistaken assumption that the CI will fix everything that is wrong with the baby’s hearing – when that is never the case. Consistent therapy, lots of elbow grease, and active parental involvement are essential to the educational success of a child implanted with a CI.This is the important rule that should be observed no matter what type of disability: evaluate each person on an individual basis, and evaluate that person well in the context of known tools, devices, and methods that have been verified to succeed for other persons with the same disability. It’s the approach I have tried to take in my writings and commentaries about issues relevant to people with disabilities, especially in the business world.
Let Your Fingers Do The Hiring: Responding to Your Comments
Last week, I wrote an article about Braille, the blind, and unemployment, titled, “Let Your Fingers Do the Hiring: Blind People and Employment.” With one exception to date, blind people I reached out to, or who posted comments on my blog, were positive in their praise of my article. My followup post is in response to a successful blind professional who wrote a point-by-point response that challenges the points I presented in my article. Given the points he made, his response is best addressed here in a full post instead of in the Comments section.Michael Squillace, a software engineer who is blind and does not use Braille, has posted his comments here in full. Below are my responses, with Squillace's comments in italics:
Since you have seemed to come up empty-handed in terms of finding information regarding, "..blind people who were able to lead quality lives without the use of Braille," let me assure you that there are plenty of us.
I stand by my article 100%. Perhaps some sentences could have been phrased better, but my basic argument remains unchanged.People who succeeded in their lives and careers without relying on Braille should definitely be recognized. When I searched on the web for, and inquired around about, blind people who grew up and how they were educated, I was very skeptical of the lack of information on blind people who were successful without Braille. I knew they were out there -- those 10% of employed and legally blind people who do not use Braille -- and I wanted to give them their due in my article, but I just had no empirical information available, and thus no stories to tell. After I posted this article, I emailed some blind people and advocates for the blind, and asked for their feedback. The comments of those who responded were uniformly positive, which surprised me given the fact that I could not find successful blind or visually-impaired people who do not use Braille.I would appreciate information on any blind people who do not rely on Braille and have become successful in their lives or careers. The more diversity, the better.Yet this is not the point of my article, which is about the decline of Braille as a result of decisions made by schools that were not well-informed and did not consider the whole spectrum of educational options available to blind and visually-impaired children. It is unfortunately an ongoing problem in other disability groups.
I resent the comment that our lives as blind persons have been an "unmitigated disaster" simply due to our not using braille, many of us by our own choice. You might just as well claim that blind people live intolerably horrible lives and have made little progress in the years since the Federal Rehabilitations Act because they did not receive, say, adequate orientation and mobility training, which many of us have not.
Yes, “unmitigated disaster” were strong words to use. There is no denying that 50% of blind people used Braille in the 1960’s and just 10% use Braille today, and that the statistics I show indicate the educational level among blind people have declined during that time. It is a disaster nonetheless, whether it was caused by declining use of Braille or other factors, and I was perhaps dramatic with the use of “unmitigated.” This does not mean that there are no blind people who have succeeded in their lives and careers without the use of Braille.This article in last December's New York Times was one of the guiding posts for my article. It examines both sides of the braille debate -- those who prefer to read print, and those who prefer to read Braille.Michael, you clearly have done well without relying on Braille, and I am not surprised there are others like you. Born profoundly deaf, I do speak and listen well, and did not learn sign language until I was 21. I worked extremely hard to be where I am in terms of spoken communication. Just as I worked very hard to learn to speak, I am sure that some blind people have to work just as hard as I did to be able to spell and write well, and it is easier for some to do so by learning Braille. This is not to say that every blind person has to learn Braille. I certainly did not need sign language in order to speak and listen well, but other deaf people I know do want sign language to aid in their educational development, and they have become successful in their lives as a result.You mentioned “many of us by our own choice.” I have no statistics or hard data, but it would be safe to assume that blind and visually-impaired people who are not successful in their careers, and do not use Braille, came into this situation through decisions made for them during their childhoods that may have something to do with not using Braille. Among the deaf and hard-of-hearing, and in other disability groups, some people have had choices made for them that in retrospect were ill-advised. For blind people who became successful, whether they rely on Braille or not, the choices they made have little to do with the points I make in my article.The other person who made a comment to my article says, and it bears repeating here: "I think the argument is that blind children need to be taught braille or they will have a strong potential to not be able to communicate in a written form effectively. Being able to write and spell is critical to getting a good job."
It is true that braille literacy has significantly decreased but that should not be equated with or somehow naturally imply that literacy or communicative skills of blind persons have diminished.
Nowhere in my article do I say that literacy has diminished, or that communicative skills have diminished. All I have written about is the ability of blind individuals to express themselves in the written word, either through Braille or without.
the fact that 90% of persons who use braille are employed should not be surprising. Since, given your own statistics, most of these adults have been of workforce age longer than those who do not learn braille, naturally they have had more of an opportunity to find stable, long-term, gainful employment. More generally, however, the fact that there is such a high unemployment rate among blind adults is, I believe, not attributable to their lack of braille usage. Rather, I believe that access to assistive technologies like screen readers and screen magnifiers in this information age significantly hinders opportunities in education, employment, and entertainment.
I cite these statistics in my article without further interpretation of the numbers. I lay out the numbers for people to digest, and have not offered further discussion on them other than to paint a fuller picture of the blind community. However, one sentence I wrote, “Employment statistics paint an even more powerful picture of how blind people live out their lives,” could have been more diplomatically worded.Can you elaborate further on what you mean about assistive technologies like screen readers and screen magnifiers, which “hinder opportunities?” How does this square with your achievements in utilizing those assistive technologies?
Also, since you are so interested in the differences among different groups of PWDS, consider that blind people still face a great deal of fear and ignorance in all walks of life. People still talk about me in the third person to my wife, still cower at my approach, and still speak to me as if I am deaf rather than blind. I do not believe that any other disability group faces more fear or ignorance on a regular basis and many (like your own) face much less. Finally, I find it a little odd that you, as a deaf person, would have so much to say about blindness and how best to cope with it. I would not think of making claims about the benefits of sign language for your community because I know so little about it and because signing is so foreign to me as a blind person. Regardless of the statistics you find so intriguing, perhaps you ought best to refrain from judging the quality of life of a group of persons so entirely different in their lifestyle and their everyday activities from your own.
It is presumptuous to say that the blind community “faces more fear or ignorance on a regular basis” than other disability groups, mine included. Each disability group has its own challenges in how it is perceived and labeled by the non-disabled population. There should not be, and never should be, any moral hierarchy among disability groups in terms of how they are negatively perceived by non-disabled people. It is enough to say that there should never be one single case of negative labeling or perception of any individual with a disability, ever.As you find it odd that I, “as a deaf person, would have so much to say about blindness and how best to cope with it,” I also find it odd that you take the moral road and say that blind people like you face more fear or ignorance than other disability groups, without knowing much about what other disability groups, including mine, face in their own worlds. Like Ana Rodarte, a woman featured on Oprah who has severe neurofibromatosis, a condition in which her face is so extremely disfigured that people scream and run away wherever she goes. Or a intelligent person in a wheelchair I met who has little control over the motor functions of his face and, as a result, drools into a cup – I have seen, to paraphrase your own words, “people talk in the third person about him, still cower at his approach, and speak of him as if he is deaf rather than mobility-impaired.” Or a child with dyslexia – people may think she is not intelligent and lacks attention, a perception that could do as much psychological damage to her self-esteem as someone who talks about a blind child in the third person and ignores him.No one should make a subjective moral determination that a group with a particular disability faces more fear or ignorance on a regular basis than another group with a different disability. We can make definitive moral determinations about individuals with disabilities based on their particular situation (i.e. a blind child in New Jersey was teased and made fun of by a group of boys, and then dragged and beaten up on the street, versus a child on a wheelchair in Texas who is just teased in the school halls but do not suffer physical abuse). But we should not make the same moral determinations about disability groups as a whole. Otherwise this invites labeling and stereotyping.Finally, in response to the comment that I “as a deaf person, would have so much to say about blindness and how best to cope with it,” where do I say in my article how blind people should cope with their own disability? I do not step on a soapbox and claim to be an expert on blindness, but instead try to draw on primary and secondary sources and comment as best I can on a disability I have no personal familiarity with. All the commentary in my article is based on information from different perspectives that are available on the web, including scientific articles, newspaper clippings, and the websites of the National Federation of the Blind (which according to the New York Times "frowns upon" reading print) and American Foundation for the Blind.Some blind and visually-impaired people, and their advocates, have written me to say it was a well-done article. Yet I do not seek perfection -- I always seek out opposing viewpoints in an effort to promote diversity, original thinking and honest critique. Thanks, Michael, for your insights and please feel free to comment anytime.
Let Your Fingers Do the Hiring: Blind People and Employment
In the disability world, there is often a difference of opinion on whether it is more appropriate to enroll a disabled child in a school specifically geared toward him or her, or to mainstream the child with non-disabled children in the general educational system. The decision on how to enroll a disabled child has major implications on the way the child spends his or her life as an adult, and importantly, the type of career the adult pursues.The degree of difference in educational approaches varies by disability -- those with serious developmental disabilities are usually placed in disability-specific schools, while paraplegics and quadriplegics are generally mainstreamed. Some types of disability, especially deafness, lend themselves to more complex debates on educational approaches. Generally, if a disabled child is put in a school that specifically educates children with the same type of disability, he/she would get an education geared toward accommodating the disability, but at the expense of forgoing educational opportunities otherwise available to mainstreamed children. On the other hand, while the disabled child who is mainstreamed may develop a strong education and interact on a regular basis with non-disabled children, this would be at the expense of social development, especially where the non-disabled peers are not appreciative and accommodating of the child's disability (up to the point of bullying, deliberate ignorance, or just an innocuous lack of awareness of the disabled condition). Technology has, particularly in the last decade, become a very strong influence in the decisions parents and professionals make in the education of disabled children.This debate has been surprisingly consistent across all types of disabilities, including the deaf, the blind, the mentally challenged, etc. What is very interesting about this debate is that, depending on the disability, the benefits of one educational approach is more obvious, while with other disabilities, the benefits of either educational approach (mainstreamed and non-mainstreamed) are not as clear-cut and often result in very spirited and emotional discussions on the fate of the child. As a deaf person, I have often experienced a high level of tension in the dialogue between those who champion sign language as a primary mode of communication in education (usually requiring schools well-trained in sign language, or sign language programs within mainstreamed schools), while others emphasize the auditory-verbal method (which is used to a great extent in mainstreamed education and at oral schools for the deaf).
In the blind and visually-impaired community, however, there is stronger and stronger evidence indicating that as more blind children are mainstreamed, they are increasingly becoming divorced from Braille, a mode of communication that is essential to their ability to understand and interpret the written word. As a person who values the appropriateness of different modes of education for different people with the same disability, I tried over the years to find information on blind people who were able to lead quality lives without the use of Braille, and have come up almost empty in my research. Looking at the available statistics on employment and education for the blind, it is patently evident that the blind community has been very ill-served by the lack of use of Braille in education in the last three decades.In 1973, Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability in Federal programs, and in programs that receive assistance from the U.S. Government. Among the more well known sections of this act are Sections 504 and 508, which requires these programs to provide reasonable accommodations to children and adults with disabilities, using technologies that enable these people to have functional equivalence to those in the non-disabled population.The passage of this act had a major impact on the education of people with disabilities, as it made it possible for PwD's to receive an education in mainstreamed settings, increasing access to educational, professional and social options. Over the next few decades, however, the application of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 has been uneven, as many PwD's saw their quality of life increase, while other PwD's suffered. For the blind community, the 1973 Act has been an unmitigated disaster, with across-the-board declines in blind people's quality of life. For many decades before the 1960's, the blind and visually-impaired relied on the Braille system to help them read, and express themselves through writing. In an age where the written word, aided by the Industrial Revolution and its impact on book publishing and world literacy, became a crucial part of a person's life, Braille enabled the blind to better understand and express the written word and keep themselves on a par with the seeing world. In schools for the blind, teachers used the Braille system to help blind children learn English.Starting in the early 1960's, and accelerating after the 1973 passage of the Rehabilitation Act, the decisions to educate blind children increasingly resided with administrators in thousands of school districts, and less on schools for the blind. With the advent of new technologies that enabled blind people to utilize more diverse tools to understand the written word, school districts increasingly determined that if blind students could rely on these new -- and cheaper -- technologies, it did not make sense for the schools to pay for the more expensive outlay of braille devices. So, a whole generation of blind children grew up with little access to Braille.According to a study by the National Federation of the Blind, less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind people in the U.S. use Braille, compared to 50 percent a generation ago. Other statistics show that among legally blind children, just 12 percent read in Braille, and Braille literacy rates are declining around the world.More interestingly, over 70 percent of blind adults are unemployed, and 50 percent of blind high school students drop out.Employment statistics paint an even more powerful picture of how blind people live out their lives: 90 percent of blind adults who are Braille-literate are employed, while just 33 percent of blind adults who do not use Braille are employed.
Why the shift away from Braille? Budgetary reasons were the major driving force behind the school districts' decisions, fueled by the districts' perception that blind people would benefit from the new technologies that did not utilize Braille and render the raised-dot mode of reading unnecessary. Screen readers, raised print, and text-to-speech devices, especially in computers and the Internet, have widened the spectrum of selections available to blind people and given them powerful tools to read and interpret the written word. Unfortunately, all of these new technologies lack one essential ingredient that is very important to blind people: their ability to express themselves through the written word. Short of typing on the computer -- which makes it more time-consuming to correct their own typing mistakes -- there is no other technology short of Braille that enables blind people to accurately, expressively, and efficiently communicate in their writing style. While the average seeing person takes for granted the ease of picking up a pen and writing his or her words on paper, or pulling up a keyboard and typing away, this mundane but essential act of writing is not easily available to the blind person.Proponents of alternate forms of technology point to the fact that non-blind people cannot understand Braille and thus would have a hard time communicating with them on legal documents, literature, newspapers, and other expressions of the written word. By enabling blind people to communicate on a platform that is easily understandable by non-blind people, they can better interact in the world at large. That may be true, but it fails to consider blind people's ability to express themselves through the written word. The non-Braille technologies put the power of control in the hands of non-blind people. Braille gives blind people the ability to control their own flow of communication, and perform on the same functional platform as non-blind people.Fortunately there has been a strong push by advocates for the blind community to return Braille to its rightful, historic place in the annals of the blind. Braille readers that transmit text from a computer, such as a document or a website, have been developed, and blind people sometimes prefer to input their words in Braille than on standard computer keyboards which require not only the ability to type, but also a speech synthesizer and a screen reader to read back what is written.Nothing is more plain to the eye than a statistic that shows that 90% of employed blind people use Braille, while 2 out of 3 unemployed blind people do not use Braille.
Making Videogames Accessible for Disabled Gamers: The Value of Brand Equity
For many people, videogames are a luxury, a guilt trip, like eating a piece of sinful chocolate. It is not always looked on favorably, usually by parents, if videogames are played more than a few hours each day. For people with disabilities, the perspective is refreshingly different. Video games have been an effective way for some people to deal with their disability and, in some cases, help them function more effectively and independently by sharpening their physical, mental and developmental abilities. Among those whose disabilities greatly limit their mobility and/or cognition, certain videogames such as MMORPG's (massively multiplayer online role playing games) enable them to pursue a lifestyle that helps keep them connected to the world at large and provide some measure of independence. However, the video game industry, as a whole, does not generally develop games with the disabled customer in mind. In my opinion, they are missing out on a great way to improve their games' brand equity.Last month, during the 2009 Spike TV Video Game Awards, Stevie Wonder presented the Best Music Game award to “The Beatles: Rock Band.” Then he said, “Throughout the world, an estimated 650 million people, or 10% of the population, have a disability. As one of the 10%, I want to see the companies that make these video games, make them accessible, so people like me can enjoy them too.” This met with cheers from the crowd.Why is this an important issue for the disabled gaming community? The reasons are many:
1. Blind people cannot easily see the graphics in video games. Increasingly, video games are dominated by complex and detailed graphics. Alternate color schemes and descriptive audio can be developed by designers to enable blind people to participate in these games.2. Deaf people cannot understand the audibly spoken words. With more and more games utilizing audio cues and spoken words, there is a need for continued support of captioning to supplement these spoken words.3. Individuals with limited use of their hands cannot play regular joysticks or consoles, and must instead use special equipment to enable them to play the game.4. Even many MMORPG games are out of reach for some disabled people who cannot type, or who type slowly. Since communication is an essential part of effective MMORPG play, these gamers either have to play without communication, or would rather not communicate because of the fear that slow typing would put off the other players in the game.
These are only the tip of the iceberg. Many other examples abound of video games that are inaccessible to elements of the disabled population. Even if people with disabilities are able to play and enjoy many different videogames, the game experience is incomplete if some gameplay elements are not accessible.According to Information Solutions Group, more than 20% of casual videogame players have a physical, mental or developmental disability, a percentage that is higher than the percentage of the general population that identifies itself as disabled (between 10% and 15%). And these gamers play more frequently, for more hours a week, and for longer times per gaming session. A surprising statistic: of those gamers who are disabled, almost 70% are female – which literally flips the gender gap on an activity that is invariably considered to be male-oriented. Another interesting statistic shows that those with mental or physical disabilities viewed video gaming as a way to relieve stress, while those with developmental or learning disabilities found that video gaming led to improved concentration and coordination/manual dexterity.Many video game developers do not always take disabled gamers into account when designing their games, because subconsciously the diversity of disabilities is mind-boggling – the perfect heterogeneous sample that, in their minds, would render efficient implementation of accessible features impossible without a commitment of significant resources. In ROI-speak, this would not be an "effective" use of these resources. Another reason that is brought up is that the population of disabled gamers is not big enough to justify the investment.
The reality is, many of the video game barriers can be overcome easily with a good bit of game design and a demonstrated commitment by developers and programmers to address these issues in close communication with designers and proponents of video game accessibility. For example, EA Sports now releases a version of its Madden football series, called “My Football Game,” which is designed for the special needs gamer. It looks and feels like a Madden game, but with customizable playing speeds, and a “Step Up” feature that enables the gamer to practice football skills before going into game mode. It was developed in close consultation with VTree, a leader in the special needs software industry. Another game, World of Warcraft, uses Color Blind 4.0 to help color-blind gamers distinguish the shades of color that is essential to good gameplay. (Disclosure: I have no association with these video game developers, and have never played these games. I am a strategy and simulation guy, with a weakness for the Civilization series.)There is even a group dedicated to accessible gaming for the disabled, called the AbleGamers Foundation, which runs AbleGamers.com. Among other things, AbleGamers.com writes reviews of video games that incorporate accessibility rankings for visual, hearing, and mobility disabilities.
When I came across some discussion threads in various game forums about making videogames accessible to people with disabilities, I found some ignorance on the value that disabled gamers bring to the videogame industry – to wit, that the disabled population isn’t big enough for video game designers to engineer games with them in mind. Maybe, but when the worldwide video gamer market is pegged at 300 to 400 million users, those with disabilities would range between 60 and 80 million based on the Information Solutions Group survey. Keeping in mind that disabled gamers constitute a larger proportion of the video game market compared to the general population, there is certainly benefit in devoting some resources to ensuring that the games are accessible to the 20% of its own market that plays videogames longer, more deeply, and more often than the typical video gamer.Even if a significant slice of the disabled gamer market does not have a need for any accessible features, and even if the disabled population is not homogeneous enough to justify an efficient implementation of accessible features, making a concerted effort to align a video game with the capabilities of a disabled gamer would go a long way toward building respect and brand equity for the game itself.Closed captioning on TV is a great analogy. It was developed in the early 1980’s for the deaf and hard-of-hearing market, which comprises approximately 8%-10% of the U.S. population, and of which a small slice of it has a major need for captioning. A major effort was made at the national level to implement and ultimately expand captioning to the major broadcast networks, and then onto cable and movies. Starting in the mid-1990’s, a federal law required all new TV’s to be equipped with a closed captioning chip. Now, closed captioning is a regular feature of the TV landscape, with unexpected applications beyond the deaf and hard-of-hearing market. Sports bars and restaurants love it because it enables patrons to follow games and CNBC over ambient noise. Non-English-speaking immigrants to the United States, as well as people who cannot read, have used closed captioning as excellent practice for learning English, by connecting the written word (the captions) with the spoken word (what is being said on the screen) – dramatically increasing literacy rates.When a gamer – disabled or not – sees the availability of accessibility features on a game he plays, he/she may or may not use it depending on his preferences. But, invariably, the gamer will recall that the designers of that game took the effort to include these features. This will increase the positive perception of the brand of the game itself.
Running on Artificial Legs in Cambodia
When I came across this Tuesday's New York Times article about an annual 10k race in Cambodia for athletes with artificial legs, as part of the Angkor Wat International Half-Marathon, I was intrigued, because I visited this country two years ago. In the summer of 2007, my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I traveled through Laos and Cambodia and had an amazing time in these Southeast Asian countries. When we arrived in Siem Reap, Cambodia after several days in Laos, we walked its streets, checking out the local crowds and wondering what it was like for them to grow up in a country that is slowly recovering from the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. What immediately struck me was the realization that most of the people on the streets appeared to be under 30 years old, with little or no memory of the ravages of forced work labor under Pol Pot and the famine that followed under Vietnamese occupation. And that, among those aged over 30, a few of them were missing limbs and/or otherwise disfigured – presumably from the wars and famines of the 1970’s.
Admittedly our visit was mostly sanitized – we visited Angkor Wat and the many historic ruins surrounding Siem Reap, stayed in the Foreign Correspondents Club in both Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, and toured the sights in Phnom Penh including the Royal Palace, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the haunting Choeung Ek fields, whose green meadows barely cover the scars of mass graves of thousands of people killed by Khmer Rouge soldiers.Yet during this visit I was able to get a sense of the real Cambodia beyond the tourist attractions -- whole families on motorbikes riding through streets, locals in a poor neighborhood besieging my driver as he stepped out to buy water, and the occasional if not unusual sight of someone without an arm or a leg. That Cambodia and, in particular, Siem Reap could include 3,500 people with artificial legs from around the world (including 1,700 Cambodians) in the various Angkor Wat half-marathon events, is a commentary on the country’s determination in dealing with its past. And just as importantly, if not more so, there are evidently people in Cambodia who make a genuine effort to increase the level of acceptance of people with disabilities within society, in a country with an unusually high concentration of people with disabilities within its general population primarily due to war, famine, and more recently, land mine accidents. (The proceeds from the half-marathon events go toward purchasing artificial limbs for land mine victims, among other efforts.)While in college at Brown University, I met a fellow student, Arn Chorn-Pond (click here for Chorn-Pond's bio) in a class we both attended. When Chorn-Pond was a child growing up in Cambodia, he survived the Khmer Rouge's killing fields by playing the flute to keep Pol Pot’s soldiers entertained. At Brown, he noticed that I was using a sign language interpreter to understand the professor in our class. He walked up to me, introduced himself, and commented on his amazement that I was able to rely on this type of support to get me through college. He said in Cambodia there are many people who are deaf who do not have the same kind of opportunities I have, and there are so many people who became blinded from Khmer Rouge's genocidal practices, war injuries and the land mines that dot the Cambodian landscape. He said there was little support in Cambodia for people with disabilities. That was in the late 1980’s.
I was constantly reminded of his words when we traveled through Cambodia. When we visited the Bakong ruins outside Siem Reap, we came upon a group of blind musicians soliciting money. There was a sign near them indicating they were victims of land mines, and also a cup for coins. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this group, as we have come across many beggars who may be controlled by people behind the scenes who get a cut of the donations. Yet, the reality is, they're blind, they were children during the Khmer Rouge regime and the war with Vietnam, and one cannot imagine what they experienced then.Cambodia is increasingly becoming modernized -- its first skyscraper is going up in Phnom Penh, and, prior to the 2009 global financial crisis, its economy expanded very rapidly. It is not without its many issues, as corruption is rife within its political system, and the child sex trade has been a serious, ongoing problem. Its population is booming -- over 75% of Cambodians are under age 30 and memories of the Khmer Rouge are fading. With all that is going on today, the legacy of Pol Pot is in danger of being cast aside. Yet, after what Arn Chorn-Pond told me two decades ago about the difficult experiences of people with disabilities in his homeland, the annual Angkor Wat half-marathon event is progress enough, a well-deserved recognition of the perseverance of disabled Cambodians in bettering themselves and maintaining their pride and dignity.