Bowst Team
Let’s time travel back to the early 90s. Come with me, if you will, to one of my high school classes. I am wearing a flannel shirt with overalls and writing Nirvana lyrics on the cover of a spiral bound notebook. If there was a computer in the classroom, it would be a Macintosh LC II, but most classrooms don’t have a computer and this one is not an exception. From the hallway, you can hear students greeting each other: “Wasssssssuppppp!” In the classroom, someone’s pager — yes, I said a PAGER — is going off, much to the teacher’s annoyance; the girl next to me takes a scrunchie off her wrist and bundles up her hair with it. Oh, yes, the 90s were a fine time indeed.
My teacher is describing this … thing… that he is all excited about, so naturally, my classmates and I look bored. “So I have what’s called a modem,” he says, “and it lets me talk to other people who ALSO have modems with my computer.”
“But couldn’t you just CALL them?” I asked. I was skeptical of this business, which my teacher referred to as the “internet”. “Wouldn’t that be easier?”
“No, no,” he said, “It’s really cool. Last night I talked to the guy who wrote the piece we’re studying. It was amazing.”
“Yeah,” I said, confident in my teenaged ability to know everything. “That’s NEVER gonna take off.”
As it turns out, my ability to predict the future is terrible. To be fair, however, I didn’t think that the internet would take off because of accessibility; I couldn’t envision a future where everyone had the equipment that was needed to be able to participate online in the way my teacher was describing. As we can see — just by virtue of the fact that you are currently reading this online post — I was wrong and the internet actually took over the entire world. It changed the way we speak about things, adding vocabulary and phrases (“I’m going to Google it!”), but it also changed how we communicate with each other, and how we interact personally and professionally.
The other thing that it changed was how we get information. Everything is online, it seems. Need a permit from your town? The application is online. Want to file your taxes? All of the paperwork is online. Want to take a college course? You can do it entirely online. Want to know more about a product and potentially purchase it? Go online!
Yes, Mr. Teacher Guy, this is really cool. It also makes life easier.
Except for when it doesn’t.
Teenaged Me was wrong about the phenomenon that the internet would become, but she was right about one thing: accessibility can be an issue. The problem with everything being available online is that not everyone is or can be online. There are still billions of people on the planet who don’t have internet access due to either their extremely rural location or for financial reasons. There are yet more people who do have internet service but who can’t access it effectively due to disabilities that render the web difficult or impossible to use.
You might be thinking, well, what’s the big deal? I mean, not being able to get online is probably inconvenient, but it shouldn’t impact someone’s quality of life, right? Wrong.
Inability to access websites and electronic technology can have a huge social and economic impact on people. For example:
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Many companies now only accept job applications online. No internet, no job application, no job. Additionally, recruiters often rely on social media to find applicants, and someone without an internet presence is disadvantaged as a result.
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Lack of internet access can limit educational opportunities — people who can’t afford traditional higher education, or who don’t have the time due to their job schedule can take classes online and further their education and earning potential, but only if they can get online.
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In both educational and professional settings, collaboration is often necessary. The internet facilitates collaboration — without it, individuals are left out.
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Many resources are primarily available digitally at this time. Government forms for financial aid, taxes, etc are all more easily accessed online than they are in hard copy, and educational resources online are vast and to-the-moment, giving people with web access an advantage.
For the purposes of this series, we will focus primarily on how to ensure that individuals with disabilities are able to successfully navigate and use the internet. For example, how do you make sure that someone with visual impairment has fair and equal access to the web? How do you grant someone who cannot hear full web access? How do you make sure that people with disabilities are not left behind and left out of the digital world?
The federal government has been working on inclusivity for individuals with disabilities for some time. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in federal programs, federal employment, and the employment practices of federal contractors. The Americans with Disabilities Act followed; passed by Congress in 1990, it was the first comprehensive civil rights law that addressed the needs of people with disabilities and attempted to establish fair and equal access to employment, public services and accommodations, and telecommunications.
As technology continued to evolve, so did the laws designed to make sure there was equal access for people with disabilities. In 1998, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was amended* by the Workforce Investment Act. Section 508 provides a guarantee that electronic and information technologies (EIT) produced by of for the federal government will be accessible to individuals with disabilities.
As a result of Section 508, all federal agencies must make sure that the needs of all end users are accounted for when developing, procuring, maintaining, or using EIT. Section 508 has a long list of carefully prescribed standards for EIT that dictate what a website must do in order to be compliant, but the end goal was simple: all future instances of electronic and information technology used by the federal government must be compatible with assistive technology for individuals with disabilities, thereby making sure that living with a disability did not keep anyone from the advantages of access to the web and websites.
It should be noted however that, strictly speaking, Section 508 applies only to EIT that is used by federal agencies so that either employees or citizens with disabilities could, with assistive technology, access the web sites and information that the government is putting out there. The standards of Section 508 do not apply to websites not in use by the federal government.
In an effort to set accessibility standard for all websites, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) for web designers in 1999 to help those designing and developing on the web to make sure that their work would be inclusive of those with disabilities. Those were guidelines were revised and released as WCAG 2.0 in 2008. WCAG 2.0 is widely accepted as the standard for the creation of accessible websites, and many institutions, both public and private, are adopting those standards as their own.
Of course, once standards are established, then web sites need to be designed according to them in order to be compliant. As discussed, websites need to be compatible with assistive technology, but designing with assistive technology in mind is not the only way to build a site that “works” for individuals with disabilities; web designers and developers can also make choices that enhance the accessibility of a site without relying on assistive technology. How does that work? Stay tuned — we’ll discuss that in our next installment!
*Additional revisions to Section 508 were proposed in February of 2015, but have not yet been formally adopted.
