Jon Gunderson, Department of Rehabilitation and Educational Services

(I,NU) = Inaudible or not understandable

Barb: I am speaking with Professor Jon Gunderson, the Coordinator of Assistive Communication and information technology accessibility in the Division of Rehabilitation Education Services. He also has adjunct faculty positions in the Departments of Community Health and Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hi! Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your current interests, including the web accessibility initiative?

Jon: Yes. My main job responsibility here at the University of Illinois is to look at computer accessibility or information technology accessibility by students with disabilities. This is kind of a unique position for disability services. But I think it's a critical one and one that we'll be seeing more of as information technology is integrated more and more into the classroom. One of my overall interests is what I call independent literacy for persons with disabilities. This not only includes independent literacy in terms of creating print and reading print materials, but also access to the new information age technology that students are being required to use more and more in their classes.

In the past, disability services, in terms of accommodating students with disabilities, was basically/if a student couldn't use an information technology, they were often accommodated out of that technology, either by giving them a different assignment or they had a surrogate, somebody to read the information off the computer screen or to type into the computer for them. Which means they weren't directly doing it themselves, but they could complete their assignments. Many schools often develop what they called specialized adaptive computer rooms so the student could come and basically have some adaptive speech help or speech input technology or alternative keyboards or adjustable tables so that they could position themselves at the keyboard to use the computer. So that they could do some things independently. So we have this basically this model of either somebody not having to do it or doing it through a surrogate or the specialized room that was someplace where somebody could get access to some equipment that would help them provide access.

Well in the new educational setting, at least here at the University of Illinois, more and more of the instruction is being put on the world wide web or through electronic information technology. Burks Oakley, who has been a leader on this campus in these issues, estimates that by the end of this century, you know 50 to 60 maybe even 70 percent of all classes at the U of I will have some type of computer components to enhance the interaction of students with/between themselves and the instructor. So this is a big shift in the use of technology, whereas back in the 80s you know you could probably go to most universities without ever having to touch a computer if you didn't want to. Even if you were an able-bodied student. But at the University of Illinois and many other universities around the country, that's not going to be an option. And that is pushing into lower and lower grades in terms of secondary and primary education too. So you've got/so one of the problems with the current technique is when students weren't developing skills in these technologies or that they only had limited access due to this special room.

So from the initiatives we have here at the university, one is to try to upgrade the accessibility of instructional and library reference areas throughout campus. And we've just gone through a process of providing accessible workstations, either adjustable tables and 21 inch monitors to over 40 instructional labs or library reference areas around campus, through various grants from both the library and the educational technology board. So this is an initiative to bring the students into the mainstream where able-bodied students are.

But not all types of disabilities can be accommodated in public labs. Like you can't use voice-input technology in a public lab because it would disturb other people around you. Or the noise around you would make the/render the voice recognition technology difficult to use because of the background noise. So some of those things we are developing and also we have specialized technology so they are probably only useful to students with disabilities where development/what we call alternative reading rooms. We currently have 3 libraries on campus that have this technology but allow students to do/have voice input computers so they can create papers or control a computer through voice input. Voice output technology and scanner technology so people can bring their print materials in and scan them in the computer and have them read to them or save them onto a floppy disk for them to read later on their own computers. The third level we have is to provide technology for specific accommodations where students with disabilities need/have specific needs for a particular lab. So often with our more severely physically involved students we have to provide specialized workstations so that they can work in the same labs as other students/able-bodied students. So we're trying to do a lot of things to/one basically provide the electronic curb cuts into the computer system so wherever a student goes on campus many of our students with disabilities don't have to have any special accommodation. They can go to that lab and know that there will be equipment there. They don't have to make any special requests. For students who need print materials converted to speech, instead of having to bring materials over to our conversion office to have somebody read it onto tape, they can bring it to one of the alternative reading rooms and read it themselves. And get it in a much more timely fashion. And also developing skills. And these are very important skills for students to develop because under the existing legislation there's/it's much different from what a university or a educational system must provide the student with a disability for accommodations as opposed to what a business has to provide.

So if a student graduates from the University of Illinois and isn't familiar or skilled in the use of either computer technology or to be able to convert materials independently, when they go into a job interview and the person asks them well how do you use e-mail/say they're blind or severely visually impaired, they say well I didn't have to use e-mail because I couldn't use the computer technology there and they didn't/they said I didn't have to do it. Or print materials--Oh I just brought the materials to the conversion center here at the (I,NU) and they converted them all to tape. You know, don't you have something like that here for me? Well most businesses I'm sure don't have any conversion processes and if you can't use simple technologies like e-mail, the skill/many employers require that as a basic skill, your chances of getting that job are probably pretty small. But if students can come in and say this is the technology I need to do this, to do this, I can convert my own print materials or at least most of them on my own, I have some problems with these types of print materials, they're in a much stronger position to get a job. And currently for students with severe or people with severe disabilities there's a 70/approximately 70% unemployment rate. And so clearly while skills in these areas aren't the only reason for that, it's a critical aspect for employers to consider hiring people with severe disabilities.

The second part of the thing/initiative we have here at the University is providing working with the University to help them create technology that's more accessible or educational materials that are more accessible. Why it can have a lot of adaptive computer technology if you for example put an image on a web page but there's no text description of it, there's no way software can try to figure out what that image is and have it spoken something to somebody who's like visually impaired or blind, or maybe has a learning disability and has trouble understanding images. So we need to work with the instructors on campus who are creating and putting up web based content and other types of electronic content to make sure they design it in such a way so that it's accessible to all students and can easily/the information can be perceived through a number of different auditory, visual, channels. And typically most people design for the visual channel and so getting people to provide supplemental information for people who can't see that is a tremendous challenge. I think part of that challenge will be the tools that people use to be able to create the materials. So we're trying to help/we're beginning to help instructors understand what kind of tools are available so that/and we're creating materials that these technologies/technology helps them create more accessible materials. This gets into some of the work that I've been doing with the W3C which is the world wide web consortium. They have a program called the web accessibility initiative or WAI for short that is.

I'm trying to look at/not just for educational systems, but look at how to design technology for web based or web based technologies, how they can be more accessible. So they have an initiative to want to help develop guidelines for web authors so the instructors and the types of things that they should do when they're creating web based documents, to make them accessible so when you insert an image or a table or other types of elements into your web page, the kinds of supplemental information you should be adding to those types of elements. The second, which I'm more involved in as the chair of the group, is user agent group, which is looking at user agents like browsers, multi-media players, how can they be designed so that they can be adjusted or more compatible with the system technologies, so that they can be used by people with disabilities just through the built-in adjustments in the user agent or provide information to assistive technology in a more compatible way? So that assistive technology can provide better alternative renderings for people with more severe disabilities. The third areas also critical for people who are authoring technologies is the tools area. So that authoring tools that are used by people creating web materials will consider accessibility issues as people develop the materials. There's already one product from a company called SoftQuad that in its tools menu has something called CheckAccessibility and it'll actually go through a web page that you've loaded into SoftQuad and check for different types of tags and helps you repair them actually. So you can go through and actually fix your web page using this menu option called CheckAccessibility. So there's progress being made there. But there are hundreds of tools out there to create web pages and it's been a real challenge to get the attention of a lot of these different tool developers.

Barb: Yeah that sort of leads me into my next question, is that how/what is the best way to educate people about these access issues?

Jon: Well I think that most people developing web pages/I think one of the things the information tech/our information oriented society has done is put a lot of time pressures on people; people to be more productive. And so things like thinking about accessibility often get put pretty low on the priority list when I have to get my web pages done so I can move on to my next project or to get more web pages done. I think that/I think most people want to try to do the right thing. It's when they can and when it seems reasonable to do so. I think certainly there's a lot of people who advocate more legislation related to web page or information technology accessibility. Which would mean that mainly for public entities like well a university if you are creating instructional materials on the web just like you must provide an accessible version of that materials. Right now that could be creating printer braille materials that wouldn't be live active pages but you could provide some alternative media. Well that could become more restrictive. If you create electronic materials you have to create accessible electronic materials. It's not good enough for you to create just some alternative media for that particular web page information. There's also some people who advocate that you know just like stores have to have physical accessibility requirements for a store like wheelchair ramps, curb cuts, making sure reaches aisles, wheelchairs can get through aisles, there's a good enough turning radius and things like that should be applied to businesses that create web sites. That if you're a public company selling to the general public that there should be accessible standards for those too.

But those things take a long time in coming and policing may be difficult. I mean to remodel a public building you have to have a license to/either architectural license or an engineering license that requires you to know what the accessibility that now includes knowledge of accessibility codes under ADA. And ADA is very specific about what types of things. But I think when you start talking about web sites and things like that, most people/I mean there's no license to create a web site or software in general. Pretty much anybody can do it. So I think regulation of that would be difficult and monitoring of it. I think the critical aspect will be raising people's awareness. I think the big thing is if tools can encourage accessibility, people might be creating accessible web pages without even knowing it. So when you insert an image into your/using your web page tool, it automatically prompts you for information on all text, you know, that would say if you couldn't see this image, what would you want somebody to know about it?

Barb: Yeah.

Jon: With some examples/and a lot of people thinking that they have to do it will just put it in. Because they/what if I don't do it? My web page won't be right, you know, because they don't understand that if they didn't do it, it wouldn't make any difference. But I think the real/I mean there's kind of a club approach where you have to do it, which I think is/would take a long time. But I think with a tools approach of tool vendors, I think part of that is to raise awareness. A lot of HTML authoring groups are interested in helping put pressure on tool makers to help to encourage them to put these features into tools. And so if there's a demand, I'd say well you know this tool does it and your tool doesn't, I'm going to buy this other person's tool, you know, tool makers will take notice of that. So I think that's really more where you see a better education. I think publicity about it, there's things like bobby/many people use for bobby web page checker and put the bobby seal of approval on their pages. Let's say that they're compliant with a certain level of accessibility. Although bobby isn't/you can still get a bobby approval without having being what I would consider accessible. But it's a first level that many people have used to/at least if you're compliant with bobby, you have a certain level of accessibility you've had to pass. So that's sometimes a very useful tool for people to use. Although some of the times comments that come back from bobby if you're not familiar with HTML may be difficult to understand and figure out how to fix using your tool.

Barb: Yeah.

Jon: That's where things like SoftQuad that help you check accessibility, help you repair the page come in.

Barb: Ok, well thank you very much.