[laptop-accessibility] Thinking outside the box

[ashettle at patriot.net]

Duane King (with a quote from Albert Calahan) said:

"> Perhaps there is a need for both. Common stuff that gets
> used every day could be written to be optimal for audio control.
> Random seldom-used things could get the normal treatment.
Exactly.  You really don not need to an image application for example to
have accessibility controls, at least not for the fully blind.  The reason
the partially sighted have more tools and greater ease of use on today's
desktop  is because as much as the sighted developers may want to help,
they still find comfort in the gui.. and this leads to the sighted who are
working on  helping out blind accessibility to invariably start using or
adapting GUI items, or wasting time trying to get GUI's to work with
audio...  so the idea of not using the GUI available seems to be a strange
and impossible one."

I don't speak computerese so I don't understand this "GUI" stuff -- but I
do understand the general point here.  I see a similar situation when
talking with hearing people about accessibility for deaf people.  When I
started my current job, I asked my employer for a TTY that plugs directly
into the phone jack.  The guy who came to help hook me up so I could use
the phone (via TTY) kept wanting to plug in both a phone AND the TTY and
was rather perplexed when I said I didn't need the phone at all, just the
TTY.

This is one more reason why designers and developers (for ANY product, not
just the XO) should always be consulting carefully and directly with
people with disabilities when designing accessibility features.  They may
need feedback directly from disabled consumers in order to "shake up"
their old ways of thinking and understand what the REAL needs are, not
their preconceptions of the needs.

I think it can also help to bear in mind general principles of "universal
design" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design).  Universal design
is partly about making things (building, technology, whatever) more
accessible to people with disabilities -- but it's also a philosophy, a
paradigm, a way of thinking.  In the old approach, companies usually
design a product meant for "average people" -- moderately educated (high
school graduate or higher) non-disabled people between the ages of 18 and
65 in the "average" weight range with no particular health conditions etc
etc. -- and then "add on" features for anyone who doesn't fit those
standards as an afterthought. (Oh, we forgot about children.  Oh, we
forgot about elderly people with arthritis.  Oh, we forgot blind people,
deaf people, people with cerebral palsy, people with intellectual
disabilities, etc)

With "universal design" you take a new idea in the conceptualization stage
and think FROM THE BEGINNING how to make it as usable as possible by as
wide a number of people as possible, including people who just don't have
a standard body size and shape, or a standard pair of eyes and ears and
legs and hips and arms and hands working to standardized standards as
described in the Requistion Manual for Standard Homo Sapiens.  So instead
of building one entrance for people with legs that work to standardized
specifications and a separate (ramped) entrance for everyone else, a
building might be designed in a way that everyone can use the same
entrance, while also being attractive and friendly to use for everyone. 
Or instead of building a computer to be used by people with standard eyes
and ears and then going, "Ooops, this feature and that one isn't
accessible, we need a fix now," it would be designed with accessibility in
mind from the start.  (The above wikipedia link gives a general intro to
the idea of "universal design" for both buildings and technology; then
there's also
http://www.aarp.org/families/home_design/a2004-03-23-whatis_univdesign.html
which is really about houses, not technology, but the general philosophy
is still roughly applicable.)

It's too late obviously to start the XO off on universal design principles
(that should have started 5-plus years ago).  But we can certainly move
forward on those principles from here on out.

At the same time, "universal design" does have certain inherent
limitations.  There will always be exceptions, and exceptions to the
exceptions.  Sometimes people with different disabilities -- or even the
same disability but with different needs -- will need directly conflicting
accommodations.  Audio for hearing blind people and visuals for sighted
deaf people, for example.  To some extent you can solve this by simply
providing both: a visual equivalent for every auditory feature, and an
auditory equivalent for every visual feature, as well as a tactile
equivalent for both in order to accommodate people who are both deaf AND
blind.  But in other cases, it may not be possible to design universal
accessibility into the standard product.  In other words, the goal of the
perfectly universally accessible XO for every child may not be fully
achievable (though we SHOULD be aiming for something as close to it as
possible).  In some cases we might need to resort to a few "add on"
features.  In this case, we would need to:

1. Design a feature in the XO that makes it easy to "plug in" any required
additional equipment (for example, suppose it were decided that adding a
Braille interface to every XO were not desireable or feasible, for cost or
other reasons.  That means you need a way to plug in a separate Braille
interface so that deaf-blind children can still use the XO, or so hearing
blind children can still use the XO to learn Braille and use Braille to
read text in situations when they don't want to use sound--for example if
they're studying at home after their younger siblings have gone to bed and
don't want to disturb them).

2. Of course, design the "plug in" feature so that it is cheap, sturdy,
affordable, etc.

3. Figure out a way to make it easy for individual children in individual
schools to request these plug in features (for one thing, make sure ALL
children and ALL schools and ALL governments are aware they exist in the
first place), and make it easy for governments to figure out how many they
need to order and how to identify where they need to be sent.  Kids who
need the plug-in feature should not be left out simply because they (and
their teachers or schools) don't realize that they even have the option of
asking for one.

One approach: have an announcement in the XO laptop itself that this
feature is available; this announcement would instruct students to "ask
their teacher" for this feature, and would instruct teachers to "consult
the contact person at the school who orders these computers."

Sorry for throwing so many different ideas into one email.  I hope it was
still possible to follow the multiple threads.

Andrea Shettle, MSW
ashettle at patriot.net
http://wecando.wordpress.com