--------------------------------------------------------------------- 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." ----------------------------- ADDENDUM by a reader: ----------------------------- There are several ways to make Windows95 work for the Blind and one way would be to us a voice recognition system like the one that comes with the IBM Aptiva computer. Voice recognition would get around the problem of menu depths. Another system that is good is the voice recognition done by Dragon Systems. Some of the products Dragon Systems is known for are language tutoring programs that use its excellent voice recognition. Eventually a system could be developed for the Blind that could speak what icon the user had moved the mouse cursor over. Sort of like the dropdown explanations appear now in Microsoft Word when you put the cursor over an icon without clicking. Also.... Many companies (like Apple, IBM, and Microsoft) have faxback phone numbers that you can call to have information faxed to you concerning what software/hardware is available to provide "easy access" to computers for the disabled, no matter what their disability is. P.S. A dark horse question. Does anyone know if Raymond Kurzweil (who at onetime worked with the famous visually impaired musician, Stevie Wonder) is still working in the area of speech recognition or in the development of tools to assist people with disabilities??