Greetings:
I thought that you might be interested in reading the
justification of a company called ObjectSoft as to why it cannot
make its SmartSign kiosks accessible to the totally unsighted
(blind). Apparently, the city of San Francisco has put one of
these SmartSigns kiosks up, and some people with disabilities
rightfully created a fuss about it.
There are many undercurrents here, but the most obvious point to
be made is that companies are beginning to learn how to use
reasonable accommodation as a means of ducking accessibility. I
imagine that other companies will begin to use similar arguments.
Best regards,
Curtis Chong
chong99@concentric.net
=================================================================
"ObjectSoft has gone to great thought and expense to comply with
the ADA in the design of its SmartSign kiosks. The kiosk provides
accommodation for wheelchair access. The interactive touch screen
is placed at the required ADA height of XX" to accommodate
wheelchair based users. It accommodates sight-impaired persons to
the extent of ensuring that there are "no protrusions." We also
accommodate color-blindness by ensuring that no function is
solely dependent on color. We accommodate sight-impaired persons
by ensuring a minimum type height in accordance with ADA. We
accommodate deaf persons by ensuring that all-important spoken
messages are also reflected in on-screen text. We accommodate the
hard of hearing by providing an easy-to-use on-screen volume
control. ObjectSoft's SmartSign kiosk, like every general-purpose
kiosk on the market (to the knowledge of ObjectSoft), does not
accommodate totally unsighted (blind) persons.
ObjectSoft's kiosks are based on a touch screen and the latest released
version of the Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE4) as a browser. This
browser, which was developed by Microsoft at a cost of many millions of
dollars, is the only one to accommodate ActiveX controls that are used
in ObjectSoft's programming. We discussed with the relevant expert at
the American Institutes for the Blind what technological features could
be developed to accommodate a blind person. The suggestion was to
provide a special access mode for blind persons. In this special mode,
to be entered by pressing a special key, each touch on the screen would
result in the underlying text being spoken using synthetic speech, with
a separate "Action" key being defined to actually execute a selected
function.
IE4 does provide certain facilities for synthetic text to speech.
Unfortunately, these facilities do not work with touch screens because
of a bug in IE4 that precludes the use of drag and drop with touch
screens. Microsoft does not make source code for IE4 available, and
although we have reported the bug, Microsoft has not provided a fix or a
workaround. It is unknown if changing to a different browser would
remedy the problem. However, it is certain that changing browsers would
involve an expenditure of many person-years of effort. Furthermore, even
if this bug were to be addressed in the future the software necessary to
support the accommodations for blind persons are totally beyond the
financial resources of ObjectSoft, which had sales in 1997 of $600,000
and incurred a loss of $2,500,000. We estimate that the effort involved
would be in the range of 20,000 hours of programming and a cost of about
$1,000,000. Clearly, these facts would constitute an "undue hardship" as
defined in section 302(b)(2)(A)(iii) of the ADA law, and therefore
ObjectSoft is clearly exempt from making this accommodation.
Also, ObjectSoft spoke with a representative of the Department of
Justice's ADA Information Line (800-514-0301) and was told that there
are no specific regulations governing Internet-based kiosks and that we
are not required to provide access to the blind if such access would
require "fundamental alteration of our business." The Access
Board (Architectural and Transportation Barrier Compliance Board)
referred us to the Trace Research and Development Center
http://www.tracecenter.org/, which has a paper by John Gill who, is the
expert on this subject http://www.eyecue.co.uk/pats/3a.html. It is
apparent that while it is possible to design a specific site to
accommodate blind people, there is no solution for accommodating a
multitude of pre-existing sites, as is our case.
Nevertheless, in the spirit of ADA, ObjectSoft is committed to trying to
makes its kiosks available to the greatest number of persons. We will
continue to work with the national Institutes for the Blind, with the
Trace Center and with Microsoft to seek technological solutions to this
problem."
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 02 2012 - 01:30:04 PST