Greetings and felicitations:
Following is a letter I sent to William Gates, Chair/Chief
Executive Officer of Microsoft. This has to do with the Internet
Explorer 4.0 debacle.
Regards,
Curtis Chong
President
National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science
=================================================================
October 14, 1997
Mr. William H. Gates III
Chairman/Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, Washington 98052
Dear Mr. Gates:
My name is Curtis Chong. I am the president of the National
Federation of the Blind in Computer Science (NFBCS). This
organization is a division of the National Federation of the
Blind, a nationwide organization of blind men and women with more
than 50,000 members throughout the fifty states, the District of
Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Since its inception, NFBCS has worked
hard to improve the ability of persons who are blind to program
and use computers without sighted assistance. Over the years, we
have worked with a variety of companies in the computer industry,
Microsoft being the most recent.
I am writing to you because I think it is important for you,
as the chief executive officer of Microsoft, to understand
exactly what it is that the company has lost due to the most
recent debacle with Internet Explorer Version 4.0, otherwise
known as IE4. Time and time again, at conferences and on a
variety of Internet mailing lists, blind people were advised
that, when IE4 was released in its final form, it would contain
Microsoft's Active Accessibility. As you may know, Active
Accessibility, which Microsoft took years to design and develop,
represents a way for application programs running under Windows
to pass important information to third party accessibility
aidsțamong them screen reading programs for the blind. If an
application is coded to use Active Accessibility and if a screen
reading program is written to take advantage of this interface,
the blind computer user can be provided with critical information
about what the application is doing and is therefore in a better
position to use the application independently. Well, as it turns
out, although we were promised Active Accessibility with IE4, the
final version ultimately released did not fully implement this
feature. There are those who say that Active Accessibility was
totally eliminated in IE4.
Internet Explorer Version 3.02, which contains keyboard
navigation capabilities and Active Accessibility, is quite useful
to the blind; it works very well with the screen readers we use.
IE4, on the other hand, is far less accessiblețin short,
virtually useless to someone who is blind. A blind computer user
who migrates from Version 3.02 to Version 4.0 is, in effect,
taking a step backward. Given this information, it is easy to
understand why blind people around the world feel more than a
little betrayed by the release of IE4.
Why is this significant? Ever since Windows and Microsoft's
efforts to promote this graphical operating system began to be
recognized as a problem within the community of blind computer
users, Microsoft was always viewed with mistrust, cynicism, and,
in some quarters, active dislike. In 1995, at its Accessibility
Summit, Microsoft unveiled its corporate Accessibility Policy. To
be frank, no one from outside the company was tremendously
enthused about it, regarding it as a marketing ploy and an
attempt by the company to save face. Nevertheless, as Microsoft
employeesțparticularly people in its Accessibility Teamțkept on
promoting the policy and demonstrating that Active Accessibility
was really more than just vaporware, people began to feel that
perhaps Microsoft was truly interested in accessibility after
all. This feeling was strengthened when, in May of this year, the
actual application programming interface code for Active
Accessibility was released. People felt that at long last there
was some code for programmers to get their teeth into. When the
manager of Microsoft's Windows Accessibility Group spoke at the
1997 NFBCS meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, he was warmly
received. The discussions which took place were upbeat and
optimistic.
Mr. Gates, all of this optimism and good will, all of the
trust that has been gained so laboriously over the past two
years: all of this has been wiped out because the Internet
Explorer development team made a decision to release IE4 without
full support for Active Accessibility. By releasing IE4 the way
it did, Microsoft has convinced every naysayer in the world that,
as far as Microsoft is concerned, accessibility is nothing more
than a sham. At best, accessibility cannot compete effectively
with other corporate priorities.
In the public announcement about IE4 released by Microsoft
on the World Wide Web, we are told that "Microsoft Internet
Explorer 4.0 introduces a number of advances that make the World
Wide Web more accessible to computer users with disabilities."
The term "accessible" is particularly ironic in this context when
one reads the injunction, contained in the same announcement,
"Users Who Are Blind may want to remain with version 3.0 for the
time being." How long, we ask? And does IE4 really make the World
Wide Web more accessible to the blind? In truth, it doesn't.
The bottom line here is that Microsoft has lost a good deal
of trust and good will as far as the blind community is
concerned. To say that the level of cynicism has been heightened
is an understatement. It may well be that Microsoft is quite
willing to pay this cost. After all, the blind do not represent a
significant share of the market. If this is the case, then we may
have no choice but to seek redress through other channels. On the
other hand, it may well be that you and Microsoft as a company
really are interested in making software accessible to us. If so,
then you should know that you have taken a significant step
backward.
Yours sincerely,
Curtis Chong, President
National Federation of the Blind
in Computer Science
CC/jb
cc: Paul Maritz, Group Vice President
Platforms and Applications
Microsoft Corporation
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