Why IT should be accessible to the disabled

by Gary H. Anthes

April 30, 2001 —

I had to put on my glasses to read the restaurant check. No big deal; I do that all the time.

But Gregg Vanderheiden, whom I was interviewing over breakfast, pounced on the check, almost literally. "Look at this," he demanded. "Look at all this white space. The key information on this check could easily have been printed bigger, without making the check bigger."

There may be no one in your IT shop who is blind, in a wheelchair or otherwise obviously disabled. In fact, if your company isn't very big, there may be no one there with a severe disability. So the whole notion of making IT accessible to people with disabilities may be one you never consider.

But you should.

Vanderheiden is an "assistive technology" expert and director of the University of Wisconsin's Trace Research & Development Center, where ways to make IT accessible to the disabled are conceived. My slight difficulty with the check gave him the opportunity to make several points I had never considered.

First, the population of disabled workers, especially among older employees, is far larger than commonly believed, if you include people with modest impairments. Second, making technology easier for disabled employees to use can bring productivity gains to all workers, even those without disabilities. Third, IT designers too often give no thought at all to accessibility issues. And fourth, the cost of making IT more accessible is often trivially low.

"People just don't think about this stuff," said Vanderheiden, looking at the check with some disdain. "It's not hard. It doesn't cost any money. It's just changing the bits in the program."

Vanderheiden tells of a supermarket that installed a checkout station for employees with limited eyesight. It had extra-large displays and keys and was intended for use primarily by older employees. But the store discovered that even the youngest, most visually able workers preferred the special station and that all employees worked faster there and made fewer errors. The store put the special devices at all of its checkout stations.

The person who designed that restaurant check was probably a twentysomething analyst with 20/20 vision. Or maybe the check wasn't designed at all; maybe it was just "implemented" by a twentysomething programmer with 20/20 vision. In any case, it's a good bet that the company that developed the check-printing software has no corporate IT standards for accessibility.

According to the Census Bureau, about 15% of adults between the ages of 18 and 24 have either a mild or severe disability. That number jumps to 25% for people between the ages of 35 and 44 and to a whopping 59% in the 55-to-64 age bracket.

And of course, the population you now have to consider isn't limited to your own employees, like those in the supermarket, whom you can observe and assist. There are the customers and business partners who access your Web site and who'll click elsewhere if your site isn't easy to use.

Laws, common sense and basic respect will, in most cases, ensure that you give obviously disabled employees what they need to get the job done. It's far less likely that your IT standards say anything at all about how to make your systems and their output more usable by people like me.

But you should have standards like that. Don't be shortsighted in designing your systems.

Computerworld