Left
Out Online
by
Scott Carlson
Electronic media should
be a boon for people with disabilities, but few colleges embrace
the many new technologies that could help.
So far, Berry Cuffee has
performed as well as anyone in his first distance-education course
at George Mason University. He is a graduate student in education,
planning to concentrate on a study of "assistive
technology," the software and hardware designed to help people
with disabilities use computers. For him, however, accessing online
course materials and keeping up with virtual class discussions are
no small feats.
Mr. Cuffee, 42, was once an actor in Hollywood, and had even been
a double for Wesley Snipes. He was paralyzed in a car accident 10
years ago, right after he landed his first big role.
Now, he cannot turn the pages of a book, type on a keyboard, or
insert a disk into a computer. Instead, his computer interprets his
voice commands to browse the Web, open e-mail, scroll through electronic
books, and write papers. The system generally works well, but it
sometimes needs repeated commands, and it remains to be seen how
well it will work with, say, a live chat for a class discussion.
Online media should be a boon for people with disabilities, but
Mr. Cuffee and other advocates for disabled students say that as
colleges push more of their business online, too few institutions
are sufficiently prepared to accommodate those who are blind, deaf,
or motor impaired. In fact, advocates for disabled students who have
studied college websites say the accessibility of colleges' online
resources is decreasing as college and course sites feature more
video clips, animated menus, and pages that are most easily reached
with a mouse.
A group of such advocates, computer-industry representatives, and
college administrators met in Washington to discuss raising awareness
of technology that helps disabled students. Among their goals was
drafting a policy to encourage colleges to make computers more accessible.
Some colleges already have accessibility policies. But at others,
such policies are only now being formed, have stalled, or are nonexistent.
"It's ironic that we're talking 50 years after Brown vs. Board
of Education," says Mr. Cuffee, who navigates the George Mason
campus with a motorized wheelchair. At his parents' house here, he
has a row of computers that respond to his voice commands. "Here
we are in what is known as the information age, and disabled people
are in a world of information apartheid."
Slow ProgressIn 2000 officials at 25 top-tier universities wrote
a letter to President Clinton expressing their support for the development
of better assistive technologies and promising to do more on their
campuses. But those colleges have made spotty progress.
At Tulane University,
which signed the letter to Mr. Clinton, David J. Tylicki, the manager
of disability services, says he doesn't know of any online-accessibility
policy in the works at the university. Asked how he might accommodate
a blind student in a class with a required online discussion, he
is stumped. "That I'd probably
have to give some thought to," he says.
Many institutions are
only now giving thought to providing accessible technology for
the disabled and are "scrambling around for solutions
and ways to deal with it," says Jeff Finlay, a technology project
manager at the University of Maryland's University College who wants
to improve computer access for disabled students. "The whole
issue of providing accessible courses out of the box is not something
universities have thought about. But they are starting to."
College officials who attended the Washington meeting were brought
there by a mix of conscience and concern for the law. Some administrators
have long believed that the Americans With Disabilities Act and the
Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which guarantee equal access to education,
apply to online courses, though others say the law is unclear on
that point.
In the past few years, however, stricter and more-specific measures
have been enacted to improve online communications for those with
disabilities. In 1998 Congress beefed up a portion of the Rehabilitation
Act known as Section 508. The new provision requires federal agencies
to buy and use accessibility technology for disabled people, and
it provides guidelines for accessibility. Many states have started
adopting their own versions of the law.
Tracy B. Mitrano, director
of Cornell University's computer-policy-and-law program, foresees
a day when the standard applies not only to federal agencies, but
to any institution that takes federal money. She says she attended
the meeting in Washington because she wants Cornell to be ahead
of the law and because "it's the right thing to
do."
More Disabled
Students
The number
of people with disabilities in America is steadily increasing,
and more people with disabilities are attending college than in
the past.
Troy R. Justesen, an acting assistant secretary for special education
and rehabilitation services at the U.S. Education Department, says
the number of students who identify themselves as disabled (which
includes those who are learning disabled) has grown from 3 percent
in 1973 to almost 10 percent in 2000, the latest year for which statistics
are available. He says the Education Department is investing in research
on accessibility technology to serve those students.
Education Department
statistics indicate that disabled people who enroll in college
graduate at lower rates than any other group of people, Mr. Justesen
says. With distance education, online course materials, and new
technologies under development, "they are
going to have access to higher-ed curriculum in ways that they have
never had before," he says. "The challenge has been for
the colleges to adopt the standards that they need to adopt" to
make online education more accessible, he adds.
Mr. Cuffee's college experience
is an example both of the benefits of technology and of the barriers
that someone with disabilities can encounter. George Mason is a
leader in disabilities technology, running an extensive program
to make all facets of the university accessible to those with disabilities.
The university's home page is set up for "screen readers," programs
that read Web pages aloud for blind users. A wheelchair icon on
the home page leads to a description of the university's online-accessibility
policies, which can be read by a screen reader.
When Mr. Cuffee arrived at George Mason in 2000, he enrolled in
the law school, hoping to use his law degree to help fight for the
rights of disabled people. Because he can't turn pages, the staff
members of the disabilities-services office at George Mason digitized
his law books for him. But professors often assigned readings too
late to be scanned in time for class. Mr. Cuffee soon fell behind,
and he dropped out after two courses. He says he will take another
shot at the law school in the fall.
Now that he is taking his course on assistive technology through
the education school, he thinks he'll be able to keep up.
At home, Mr. Cuffee gives a demonstration of the technology crowding
his room. With simple voice commands, he can move a cursor across
the screen and click on a link, or open a word-processing program.
He starts dictating an example of writing.
"Today Scott has come over," Mr. Cuffee says, but the
computer writes "Today's cicadas come over." He tells the
computer to highlight "cicadas" and change it to "Scott
has." Then he finishes the sentence, error free: "to interview
me about how assistive technology will help me in higher education." The
whole exercise takes only a bit longer than it would for someone
who could type.
A Lab Full of Gadgets
The
distance-education course Mr. Cuffee will take includes some
online discissions. Kristine S. Neuber, who sets up assistive technology
for the university students, says she is eager to see whether
Mr. Cuffee's voice-activated technology can keep up with those
discussions.
George Mason runs a lab full of technological gadgets and software
that can help people with disabilities get around on the Web and
type papers Beven people who are completely paralyzed and unable
to speak.
In the lab, Ms. Neuber
sits down at a computer and demonstrates a screen reader. For screen
readers to work properly, Web developers must add codes to their
Websites that describe nontext elements, such as pictures. If a
Web page contains a banner graphic announcing what the page is
about, for instance, a blind person won't know it is there unless
the Web page has a code that says something like "graphic:
college logo." The screen reader looks for such codes and deciphers
the page for a blind user.
Ms. Neuber advises other institutions on setting up online-accessibility
policies. Creating an office to review Web pages before they go online
would be impossible at a large, decentralized institution, she says.
Instead, she tells institutions to first try to raise awareness and
to train faculty and staff members in making Websites accessible,
then create a policy.
"If you tell people, 'Here's the policy you need to follow,'
you get a lot of negative feedback," says Ms. Neuber. "It's
perceived as just another problem created by people with disabilities."
Clear Guidelines
Online-access
policies are important, advocates say, because they offer faculty
and staff members clear procedures for disabled students. Mr.
Finlay, of the University of Maryland's University College, says
professors frequently don't know how to handle queries from students
with disabilities who are having trouble with their online course
work.
"Often what will happen is that the professor will try really
hard to help the student, but the professor might not understand
the problem," he says. "The faculty member might say, 'Why
don't you just skip the assignment?' This is insulting to the student
and also illegal."
Getting a policy in place can be an arduous process, however.
At Temple University, Amy S. Goldman, associate director of the
Institute on Disabilities, says her staff worked on a policy for
two years, then took it to administrators for approval. The administrators
shot it down, preferring to deal with disabled students' problems
case by case.
Without a policy, institutions can be inconsistent about whether
online services are accessible, say officials at Web Accessibility
in Mind, a group based at Utah State University. The group has analyzed
hundreds of college Web pages over the past three years. Although
the number of accessible sites is growing, the latest study shows
that less than 30 percent of the home pages surveyed were deemed
accessible. WebAIM's researchers say they generally found that the
deeper one goes into a college Website, the less accessible the pages
get.
Sachin Pavrithran, a graduate student who is blind and works in
WebAIM's office, recently used his screen reader to go through the
Web pages of universities that had signed the letter to President
Clinton. He found that most had fairly accessible sites.
But one page on Washington University's site, for example, had
160 links -- a cumbersome number for blind people using screen readers
because the computer has to recite the links one by one. The home
page for the law school at Tulane, meanwhile, was almost completely
unreadable.
Testing Accessibility
Visiting
other institutions online, Mr. Pavrithran finds serious problems
right on their home pages. Pennsylvania State University's Website
offers a text-only alternative page for users of screen readers. "We
don't recommend this," he says. "In
our experience, the text-only page is not usually kept up to date." (Penn
State's Web page, however, appears to be up to date.)
Augsburg College, a small
liberal-arts institution in Minneapolis, has a snazzy, animated
home page. But none of it is programmed for a screen reader, which
instead "just says 'button, button, button,'" Mr.
Pavrithran says.
The University of Phoenix's
home page opens with three animated links that lead to different
types of courses the university offers. The screen reader recites
technical gibberish when it encounters them. "I pretty much skipped over those three links because
I don't know what they are," Mr. Pavrithran says.
Axel Schmetzke, a librarian at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens
Point, used automated software to analyze the Websites of top library
schools and of his own university system, and found similar problems.
In the past five years, Web pages at various Wisconsin campuses,
such as River Falls, have become significantly less accessible, according
to his report.
Michael Woolsey, the Webmaster
at River Falls, says he tries to make sure that the university's
sites are accessible, but he cannot control what departments and
professors put up on their own. He says he recently advised the
communicative-disorders department to redesign its Website, which
features a greeting in the form of an audio file -- completely
inaccessible to deaf people.
In Mr. Schmetzke's study of library pages, about 50 percent of those
he surveyed were deemed accessible. Twenty of the 49 American libraries
he surveyed got dismal scores, with less than 20 percent of their
pages accessible. Sites for the various schools of library science
fared even worse.
"What concerns me is that the organizations that train the
next batch of librarians aren't concerned about accessibility, or
they would have made their own pages accessible," he says.
'Radical Activism'
Because
those more sophisticated visual features are becoming more common,
even in online courses, institutions should start thinking about how to
deal with them now, says Marty Blair, policy director for the National
Center on Disability and Access to Education, which organized the
conference in Washington.
Disabled people generally
take one of two routes to gain accommodations at a university:
building awareness that leads to a policy, or engaging in "radical activism," which
can take the form of a lawsuit.
Mr. Blair cites a lawsuit filed against two University of California
campuses in 1999 by a group of deaf students who charged that the
campuses had failed to provide adequate accommodations for classes.
The universities settled with the students in 2002, paying $1-million
in legal fees and promising to improve accessibility.
Mr. Blair says he'd rather persuade colleges on moral grounds than
bring up the specter of lawsuits. Providing accessible online services
upfront is more efficient, he says, and makes the university a more
attractive place for students with disabilities. He says Utah State
University, where he works, enrolls disproportionately more blind
students than other institutions in the state because it offers more
services for them.
His group doesn't expect
to have a policy that it can show to institutions for at least
a couple of years. "Since we're dealing with universities
that are decentralized and independent, finding a model policy that
can be readily adopted is not going to be easy," he says. "But
we need to take steps in that direction. We want to give them a foundation
to work from."
In the meantime, Mr. Cuffee
is waiting for the day when Web pages are easy for everyone to
operate, when books and notes can be offered in electronic format,
and when all professors wear microphones so their lectures can
be transcribed by people or by voice-recognition software. Mr.
Cuffee's fear is that even in the assistive-technology program
at George Mason, he might someday run into the same problems he
had at the law school -- that he'll encounter materials that he
can't work with, and professors who won't understand the challenges
he faces.
"Professors think, 'I have been teaching this way for so long,
so why do I need to change?'" he says. "There are times
when I feel like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man."
Problems and Solutions
for Disabled Users
Web Accessibility in Mind, a group based at Utah State University,
produces educational materials and presentations about online accessibility
in education. Some of the group's suggestions on accessible website
design are detailed below.
For blind computer users:
Challenge: Blind users
can't see images, photos, and graphics.
Solution: Provide
written descriptions of the images that can be interpreted
by "screen
reader" software, which uses a voice synthesizer to read aloud and characterize
a visual computer display.
Challenge: Blind users
often must listen to a screen readers' long descriptions of Web
pages.
Solution: Create links,
which a screen reader can translate, to allow users to skip
navigational menus, long lists of items, and other elements that
might be difficult or tedious to listen to.
Challenge: Blind users
generally do not use a mouse.
Solution: Avoid features like pull-down menus that require the use
of a mouse. Make the site navigable with a keyboard.
Challenge: Complex data
tables and graphs can't be interpreted clearly by a screen reader.
Solution: Provide written
summaries that blind users can hear with a screen reader.
For deaf computer users:
Challenge: Deaf users
cannot hear the audio in multimedia.
Solution: Provide transcripts
of audio clips and synchronous captioning for video clips.
For motor impaired computer
users:
Challenge: Motor-impaired
users may not be able to operate a mouse.
Solution: Make sure that
all functions are available from the keyboard. Users should be
able to move from link to link by pressing the tab button, and
those links should be navigable in a logical order.
Users may need voice-activated software, which generally cannot
replicate mouse movement as effectively as it can replicate keyboard
usage.
All functions should be available from the keyboard.
SOURCE: Web Accessibility in Mind
Copyright @ 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
