Wildcat Files 2/The Wildcat Files 2 (Arsenal Computer).ISO/health/winblind.txt

Text File | 1995-01-03 | 10KB | 190 lines

         the following article was published in the  business section
    of the Boston Globe newspaper for Monday, October 17, 1994.  The
    text of it is produced below for the benefit of persons who are
    print handicapped.  The text may appear a bit out of line as it
    has been hand-input into the computer as dictated vocally to the
    transcriber...


                         *** TEXT OF ARTICLE ***


    "The Blind Community is at the highest risk right now of being
    first liberated by computers in the eighties and now enslaved in
    the nineties. " - Charles Crawford - Massachusetts Commissioner
    for the Blind.


                       GETTING SHUT OUT BY WINDOWS

      Visual nature of popular computer program proves a threat to
    blind workers.

    By Michael Putzel of the Globe staff.

         Jamal Mazrui had learned a lot about computers and
    information management software in four years on the job at
    Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.  So when he was
    asked, he jumped at the chance to design a new system for another
    department.

         Then he ran into Windows.

         Mazrui is blind.  He became a specialist in his field using
    machines that let him hear what he can't see.  Those machines
    read words displayed on a computer screen, but they can't help
    him point with a mouse and click on the icons and boxes displayed
    on computer screens running software called Microsoft Windows.

         "It looked like things were go" for Mazrui's project, using
    a popular database software package that works without Windows,
    the thirty year old Somerville man recounted recently.  Then the
    people who had approached him heard about Microsoft Access, a
    database program they were told would be easier for workers in
    the department to use.

         Access, however, is a Windows-based product.

         "they opted to go with it and hire an outside consultant to
    develop this for them," Mazrui said, adding that his own job
    eventually will have to be restructured because the school's
    computer services department has recommended that Windows be
    adopted throughout the school.

         The great selling point of Windows, the operating system
    that has revolutionized computing in corporate america, is that,
    in general, it is easier to use than systems requiring the user
    to learn and type in sometimes cryptic commands.

         To thousands of blind workers who can't see the graphic
    images on the screen, however, Windows has become not just an
    obstacle, but a threat.

         "The blind community is at the highest risk right now of
    being first liberated by computers in the eighties and now
    enslaved in the nineties." Said Charles Crawford, Massachusetts
    Commissioner for the Blind.

         Jeffrey Turner, a systems analyst for John Hancock Financial
    Services in Boston, who also is blind, said the widespread
    adoption of Windows in his office and others around the country
    "is just killing us."

         Turner has been writing computer programs for his company
    for nearly ten years and said John Hancock has spent more than
    ten thousand dollars for the special equipment he needs to do his
    job despite his blindness.  But Turner is now the only person in
    his department who is not linked to his colleagues by a local
    area computer network.

         He can't use the E-mail system the company is adopting, nor
    does he work in Microsoft Word, the standard word processing
    program used by his colleagues.  They operate under Windows.
    "I'm locked out of it all," Turner said. The Blind "are going
    backwards with technology advancing."  Turner has spent his
    career working with mainframe computers, which use text commands
    and computer language he understands.  But the company's
    development efforts are concentrated on smaller, Windows-based
    machines, and he can't work on the most challenging new projects.
       "When they look at who they can consider for these positions,
    the cherries of the project, they couldn't consider me because I
    don't have access to Windows," Turner said.     Several companies
    produce software designed to read the information on a Windows
    screen and translate it into audible speech.  The programs do
    help some users who run relatively modest programs.  But Mazrui,
    Turner and numerous blind users with considerable computer
    expertise said the screen-reading programs tend to "get lost" and
    misinterpret icons or information displayed in boxes on the
    screen.     "Despite the best efforts of a number of
    manufacturers to make this environment accessible to persons who
    are blind, it has been a well intentioned but dismal failure,"
    Crawford said.
         In their book "Solutions; Access technologies for people who
    are blind," produced locally by National Braille Press, Olga
    Espinola and Diane Croft compare the development of graphical
    computer environments to dropping a guillotine on blind users.

         "The technique of choosing from among pictorial images,
    called icons, in lieu of words, has been a deadly development"
    for the blind, the authors wrote.

         An illustration of the problem blind users face shows
    equally well why the graphical environment has proven so popular
    outside the blind community.

         "Instead of seeing the word "mailbox" on the computer
    screen, for example, you'll actually see a picture of a mailbox,"
    explained Espinola and Croft, both of whom are blind.  "You can
    point your mouse to the mailbox, click the button, and presto,
    the mailbox opens up and you can read messages people have left
    for you."  The key, of course, is being able to find the mailbox
    on the screen.

         The Sensory Access Foundation, in a review of screen-reading
    programs that attempt to translate the information displayed on a
    Windows screen into audio for blind users, characterized the
    situation as a "nightmare."

         Although IBM has made great strides with it's screen reader
    for the company;s OS/2 operating system, the reviewers said,
    similar programs for Windows have serious problems, either
    because they are unreliable or because they don't work with some
    of the most common Windows programs.

         the biggest problem for developers of screen-reading
    software, the reviewers said, is that programmers have few
    standards that would make it easier to write programs for the
    blind, and where standards do exist, the programmers frequently
    don't follow them.

         Nick DDotson of Pensacola, Florida a pioneer of finding ways
    for the blind to use CD-ROM and multimedia technology, said the
    problem is not confined to Windows itself but extends to many
    programs designed to run under Windows.

         Microsoft's own programming groups don't follow corporate
    guidelines in writing computer code that a screen reader can
    follow, Dotson said, and it is, therefore, impossible to impose
    any discipline on other software developers.

         Greg Lowney, Microsoft's senior program manager for dealing
    with issues affecting the disabled, acknowledged that the
    computer industry overlooked the implications of moving to the
    graphical Windows environment.  But the blind community also
    ignored the issue initially, he said, because it wasn't apparent
    when Windows was introduced four years ago how quickly the new
    system would supplant the old.

         The company now is working with developers of adaptive
    hardware and software to give them the technical information they
    need to design aids for the next version of Windows, which is due
    out in 1995.  But Lowney admitted the new product, to be called
    Windows95, will not contain sufficient code of it's own to make
    future Windows-based programs accessible to the blind.

         Jennifer Simpson, a Washington Lobbyist who serves on a
    technology task force of the national Consortium for Citizens
    with Disabilities said it is difficult to legislate a solution.

         "We don't want to lock into any one technology," she said,
    because that could impede progress.  Simpson added, however, that
    making new programs and devices accessible is critical to
    millions of disabled people, "and nobody's thinking about this
    stuff, which is what it boils down to."

         Joseph J. Lazzaro, another author of a book on adaptive
    technologies, said blind people "are having many of the gains we
    have achieved over the last ten years taken away, and the chief
    culprit is Microsoft Windows."     Lazzaro said he doesn't expect
    to use drawing or visual art software on his computer but
    programs like Windows that use graphical images in place of
    written commands are not inherently closed to the blind.   By
    building "hooks" into the computer code to identify graphic
    images in words as well as pictures and by setting strict rules
    for programming where boxes appear up on the screen, Microsoft
    could make Windows accessible to the blind, Lazzaro said.
    "These are computers," he added. "It's not like trying to get a
    stone statue to talk."