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. The 31-year-old resident of Eugene, Ore., 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 Wed., Sept. 27, 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 [a similar one]," she said. "I can't tell you how good it makes me feel."

Runyan's achievement is marred by just one shortcoming—as she competes in Sydney, her blind and sight-impaired fans will be unable to follow her progress on the official Olympic website, Olympics.com. 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 that the problems be fixed.

The controversy over the official Olympic Games website has focused public attention on the unbalanced state of the progress of the technological revolution. While most Internet users are now privy to an array of web-based information, business, and entertainment services, a significant portion of the population is left in the dark. Commenting on the controversy surrounding Olympics.com, founder and CTO of WebABLE.com Mike Paciello said, "These kinds of problems result when corporations fail to keep in touch with users and user needs."

Paciello gave a talk at Yale last April "for the purpose of building awareness and helping those who had web sites to create them [to be accessible]." His company, which has been up as a website since 1995, aims "to make the Internet and World Wide Web accessible to people with disabilities."

Paciello's company is just one of a new breed of companies—including product and software vendors, service organizations, and consulting firms—that are beginning to address the computing needs of the blind community. And those needs are especially critical in a university setting such as Yale, where the need for computer and Internet access for class work, syllabi, and other course materials is on the rise.

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. Alternatively, they can opt to use the services of student notetakers.

Yet when viewing course materials online, many blind students 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, actually have their professors send them the assignments in electronic format by e-mail.

Gunnarsson, a Computer Science and Economics major, completes his assignments using the JAWS speech program and a device that converts electronic information into Braille. An avid swimmer, Gunnarsson was frustrated with not being able to use the official Olympics website.

The Olympics website is hardly an exception. Most sites do not comply with the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) guidelines on accessibility, which include providing text equivalents for all non-text elements like graphics and videos, difficult for text-to-speech programs such as Kurzweil and JAWS to process.

According to York, however, the future is promising for visually-impaired computer users, both because of growing awareness of their needs and because of advances in product development. In fact, Saul Nadata, TD '01, is creating "a program that would enable blind computer users to view the web" for his senior project. Nad-ata believes that much of the inaccessibility on the Internet is due to "frames, complicated tables, and certain common form elements incorporated into the design," features that Nadata calls "a death trap for blind people." Nadata's program would identify pages with these complicating stylistic features and reduce them to a simpler, more accessible text-based format.

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

See an expanded version of this article in the online exclusive at yaleherald.com.

Graphic by Sarah England.

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