Yale makes cyber-strides for visually impaired Elis

Last July, Marla Runyan made history by becoming the first legally blind athlete to qualify for the American Olympic team in any sport. "My vision is just a circumstance that happened and I don't look at it as a barrier," Runyan said after her victory. The 31-year-old resident of Eugene, Oregon, who suffers from a degenerative retinal disorder known as Stargardt's Disease, competed this week in the women's 1,500 meters event in Sydney, Australia, advancing on Wednesday to the semifinals. "I can't even tell you the letters I've gotten from so many parents and children and teenagers who have the same condition or similar," she said. "I can't tell you how good it makes me feel."

Runyan's achievement, a testament to the ability of the human will to triumph over physical adversity, is marred by just one small irony—as she competes in Sidney, her blind and sight impaired fans will be unable to follow her progress on the official Olympic website, which logs more than 1.5 million page views per day. A representative of the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) told ZDNet Australia that the process of making the site accessible to visually impaired computer users "would cost in excess of AU $2 million [approximately $1.1 million US] and 368 working days to complete." Because of the cost and labor required to implement necessary changes, the site has remained inaccessible to sight impaired users, despite an order by Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HEREOC) that the problems be fixed.

The controversy over the official site of the Olympic Games provides a revealing example of unequal strides in the so-called technological revolution. While most Internet users are now privy to an astonishing array of web-based information, business, and entertainment services, significant portions of the population are simply left in the dark. It is not the difficulty of making websites accessible to all users that sparks debates such as the one surrounding Olympics.com. Rather, as founder and CTO of WebABLE.comMike Paciello put it, "These kinds of problems result when corporations fail to keep in touch with users and user needs."

Paciello's company made a presentation at Yale last April "for the purpose of building awareness and helping those who had web sites to create them accessibly." WebABLE.com aims "to make the Internet and World Wide Web accessible to people with disabilities," and is one example of a wide variety of companies—including product and software vendors, services organizations, and consulting firms—that are beginning to address the computing needs of the blind community. And those needs are especially noticeable at Yale, where the necessity of computer and Internet access for class work, syllabi, and other course materials, is growing.

Visually impaired at Yale

Judy York, Director of Resources at Yale's Office of Disabilities, noted that of the approximately 200 students that make use of her office's services, only a small minority have visual impairments, and perhaps only 10 students are blind or legally blind. Nevertheless, the Disabilities Office, provider of assistive services to Yale's disabled community, has implemented some services exclusively for use by the visually impaired.

One such service is the public computer system in the Office of Disabilities, which is reserved for students with special needs and makes use of text reading programs such as Kurzweil and JAWS. According to York, "Most [blind] students on campus are supported with their own equipment," such as "Braille and Speak" machines that can be used to take notes in class, or they can opt to use the services of student notetakers hired by the Disabilities Office. In addition, York mentioned that the libraries have been discussing possible efforts to make several student-use computer stations blind accessible. Sterling Memorial Library already boasts a reading room with a closed-circuit television system that allows sight-impaired students to magnify print resources to more legible sizes.

Yet when viewing course materials online, many blind students actually prefer to use the available resources directly rather than printing the information out on special Braille printers, a process that produces high volumes of paper and presents storage issues. Some blind students, like Birkir Gunnarsson, MC '02, have their professors send them the assignments in electronic format by e-mail.

Gunnarsson, a Computer Science and Economics major who learned to read Braille when he was about 5, manages to complete his Computer Science assignments using the JAWS speech program and a device that converts electronic information into Braille that he can "read" with his fingers. An avid swimmer himself, Gunnarsson was frustrated with the difficulty of accessing swimming results at the official Olympics website. Instead, he was forced to consult a less complicated website for the information.

Paciello explained that the difficulty with sites such as Olympics.com lies in the fact that "the larger a site is, the more difficult it is to make accessible," particularly when content is dynamic. The problem, Paciello noted, is that "for the most part, sites are not designed with accessibility as a goal." Often they do not conform to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) guidelines on accessibility, which include providing text equivalents for all non-text elements like graphics and videos. When information is presented in a format that is difficult for text to speech programs such as Kurzweil and JAWS to process, visually impaired people have difficulties understanding even the most basic information presented by a webpage.

In the case of the Olympics website, navigation is difficult for a blind person because there are over 400 links on the main page, each of which must be read aloud by the particular text to speech program being used.

Legal Action

The controversy began in late October of 1998 when Curtis Chong, Director of Technology for the National Federation of the Blind, complained in a letter to AOL executives that "blind people find the AOL software difficult if not impossible to use with their screen access programs." Screen access programs are the software that converts information on the screen to a non-visual format, such as the JAWS or Kurzweil programs utilized by many members of Yale's visually impaired community.

AOL promised action, but after about a year without concrete results, the NFB decided to file a complaint in Federal District Court. Among the demands of the complaint, as described in the press release, were that AOL "provide text labels for all graphics" and "permit keyboard access to all functions." The end result of all the NFB's efforts has been a promise by AOL executives to release a new version of the software that is more blind accessible.

The Future

Paciello echoed York's optimistic sentiments. In his words, "There's no doubt that things are going to get better for the blind."

Graphic by Sarah England.

Related News Yale's newest community service organization, "Unite For Sight," founded this fall by Jennifer Staple TD '03, is dedicated to preserving sight locally and internationally. Unite For Sight will begin this year's activities with a campus-wide eyeglass drive called "Donate Your Eyes". The drive will begin Sunday, October 1 and last throughout the month of October. Bins will be placed around campus, including in all dining halls and in Dwight Hall. At the conclusion of the drive, all prescription glasses and non-prescription sunglasses will be sent for distribution in third world countries. In its dedication to preventing blindness in New Haven, Unite For Sight's activities include vision screenings to detect lazy eye and cross eye in young children. If undiagnosed by the age of 5, these diseases lead to blindness. Vision Education programs inform the adult community about such eye diseases as cataracts, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and macular degeneration. For further information about Unite For Sight's eyeglass drive or its other activities, contact Jennifer.Staple@yale.edu or the website at www.uniteforsight.org.

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