Curtis Chong knows exactly how sharp the line between technological haves and have-nots can be. Blind since birth and a computer operator since he was 18, he's watched the ups and downs of accessibility since sightless computer geeks attached garter belt elastic across the fronts of image printers in the first attempts to make computers print Braille.
That was back in 1971. Now Chong is a systems administrator for American Express and president of the National Federation for the Blind in Computer Science. "I used to hire sight-readers so I could do my work, but then in the mid-'80s text-based programs became the norm and we had talking terminals. Blind people were at the peak of tech equity in the late '80s," he says.
But the 1990s' rise of graphical interfaces began eating away at the ground blind computer-users had gained.
"At least with Windows we had a single monster to battle," Chong says. "With the Web, though, there's no one in particular to blame. There's no one we can go to and say, "Look, you're a big, bad company. You have to fix this now."
With Monday's planned announcement of the Worldwide Access Initiative at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in Santa Clara, California, Chong believes there's room for optimism.
Run by the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the W3C develops common standards for the Web. WAI, which was spawned during a January White House meeting on the need to make sure some 49 million disabled Americans aren't consigned to permanent technological disenfranchisement, has already received significant government support; on Thursday, the Department of Education announced that it would join with the National Science Foundation to pony up a possible US$800,000 for the initiative.
"It's not a solution, but it is a step in the right direction," Chong says. "At least the people who are setting the standards are thinking about accessibility relatively early."
