A New Cellphone Nods to the Needs of the Disabled – Foundation works to make tech accessible to the blind

BONNIE O’DAY, a slight woman with nimble fingers, is standing in the dining room of her home in Alexandria, Va., demonstrating how she uses her cellphone. She presses some buttons and the phone emits a beep. "I don’t know what I just did," Dr. O’Day said. "It beeps and I don’t know what’s going on."

By LISA GUERNSEY

For most users, a glance at the screen would answer that question. But Dr. O’Day, a 48-year-old senior research associate at the Cornell Center for Policy Research in Washington, has a condition called low vision, meaning she can discern little more than forms and colors.

She can make and receive calls by feeling her way around the keys. But she has no way of knowing that her battery is almost fully charged and that she is receiving a fairly strong signal. She cannot read the caller ID. It is difficult for her to add contacts to the phone book and impossible to scroll through it to retrieve stored phone numbers. For that, she must use her five-pound, $3,500 Braille computer.

Those barriers led Dr. O’Day to file a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission last year against her service provider, Verizon Wireless, and Audiovox, which made the cellphone she was using at the time. Her case against Verizon is still pending, but in December she settled her case with Audiovox after the company agreed to include new features in its next crop of phones.

The first of those models, the Toshiba VM4050, became available last week at Sprint PCS retailers. (Toshiba owns part of Audiovox’s wireless subsidiary.) One of its tricks is the ability to talk: when this feature is turned on, it tells users in a recorded voice that, say, the battery is low or the phone is in roaming mode.

Darren Burton, a technology associate for the American Foundation for the Blind, has been using the phone for about a week to evaluate its ease of use. "This is certainly a significant step forward," said Mr. Burton, who said he most appreciated the voiced reports on battery level, signal status, roaming, new voice-mail messages and missed calls. But he said it still had "a way to go” in making other features equally accessible, like the phone’s menus, e-mail in-box, text messaging and Internet browser.

Advocates for the blind say they hope Dr. O’Day’s case will prompt other companies to address the needs of disabled people, as required by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Section 255 of the law says telephone makers and service providers must do all that is "readily achievable" to make their products and services accessible to people with disabilities. Dr. O’Day helped push for the 1996 law as a member of the National Council on Disability, an advisory board to the president and Congress. She was appointed to the agency by President Bill Clinton in 1994 and served for eight years.

Makers of land-line telephones have long since created telephones like the one that hangs in Dr. O’Day’s kitchen and announces the caller ID for each incoming call. But when AccessWorld, a publication of the American Foundation for the Blind, queried 10 cellphone companies about the law two years ago, it found that only two of the companies were aware of its requirements.

"We were hoping that Section 255 would be the impetus" for improvements to cellphones, Dr. O’Day said. "Unfortunately, we had little compliance up until last year."

She also faulted the F.C.C., which is charged with making sure that companies comply with the law. In June 2001, she sent an informal complaint to the commission, but its initial response indicated that it had no intention of taking action, she said.

"The F.C.C. sat on the informal complaint for 18 months and did nothing," she said.

Eventually, Dr. O’Day sought help from two lawyers, Scott H. Strauss and Allison L. Driver of the Washington law firm Spiegel & McDiarmid. The two, working pro bono, helped her file formal complaints in February 2003. (Informal complaints do not have to conform to a specific format and can be sent by anyone to notify the F.C.C. of problems. Formal ones usually require the help of a lawyer, can lead to an F.C.C. order that interprets the law and may result in damages being awarded to the complainant.)

Thomas D. Wyatt, deputy bureau chief for the F.C.C.’s consumer and governmental affairs division, said he was aware of Dr. O’Day’s case and could "understand her frustration." But, he said, "the issues were fairly complex and technical and conducive to work in the formal context."

Indeed, part of Dr. O’Day’s discussions with Audiovox included a technical conference with engineers who discussed the feasibility of enhancing the phone by improving both hardware and software.

Verizon, which declined to comment aside from saying that discussions with Dr. O’Day were continuing, has previously argued that technical accessibility issues are the province of manufacturers rather than service providers. Yet Dr. O’Day’s lawyers argue that it is service providers like Verizon that wield the most leverage, since they have influence over aspects of the design of the cellphones that they offer to their subscribers.

Travis Larson, a spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, a trade group for mobile phone companies, said its members "are committed to providing accessibility," and pointed out that the association has created a Web site, http://www.accesswireless.org, to provide information about phones with features to help the disabled. The Web site describes features like tactile buttons, which can be distinguished by touch, and audible cues like beeps, but it does not include any reference to voice output, the feature that Audiovox has just agreed to add to its phones.

Voice output is one of the three most desirable features among blind users, according to the American Foundation for the Blind, which surveyed 20 such users and pinpointed 16 features that it now uses to evaluate new phone models. Besides voice output like talking menus and spoken numbers on caller ID, the features at the top of the list included tactile keys and manuals in Braille or spoken form.

A few phones marketed in Europe and Japan already meet some of those needs. Recent reviews in Access World have focused on a pair of Nokia phones that are compatible with talking software for the blind. They use the G.S.M. wireless standard, which is more conducive to development of third-party software than the C.D.M.A. standard, which remains dominant in the United States. They are not cheap, however. With software, one of the phones costs over $500 and the other almost $800.

The new Toshiba-Audiovox phone, which features a color display screen and digital camera with video capabilities, is now selling for $180 to users who sign a two-year Sprint service contract. It is one of the first to put voice output into a handset that runs on C.D.M.A. It does not read menus or words on the screen aloud, but it has a "voice guidance" feature that can be turned on by holding down the menu key for two seconds.

With voice guidance, users can find their way through menus by listening to beeps or waiting for vibrations that indicate their place in the menu. When the O.K. key is pressed and held for a few seconds, a female voice announces the battery level and signal strength. The same voice reads out caller ID numbers when calls come in and when users scroll through the call logs.

The features may also appeal to people who see perfectly well, said Katie Wasserman, vice president for marketing at Audiovox. "If you are driving, it allows you to focus," she said. "You don’t have to look down at the handset to realize who is calling you." Mr. Larson of the cellular trade group said that the industry was also aware that as the years go by, a greater proportion of cellphone users will be elderly and will make use of such accessibility features.

Dr. O’Day has argued all along that features for the blind could turn out to have unexpected benefits for the broader public, just as wheelchair ramps have for people with baby strollers. But until more companies actually sell phones with those features, she said, she will keep pushing to ensure that access for disabled people is taken into account as mobile technology evolves.

"People may say these are trivial things right now," Dr. O’Day said. "But this technology is developing very quickly. If we don’t act now, we’re going to lose the ability to keep up."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Foundation works to make tech accessible to the blind

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (AP) — Technology advances that give independence to the blind and visually impaired are being tested at an American Foundation for the Blind facility in West Virginia.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-02-13-blind-ambition_x.htm?csp=27

The New York nonprofit that Helen Keller devoted her life to opened the technology and employment center in Huntington last year after earlier receiving a $3 million trust bequeathed by deceased Huntington-area postal worker James Tubert to aid the blind in Cabell and Wayne counties.

Since then, the center has drawn national attention to problems with cell phones, voting machines, diabetes equipment and computer software. People who are blind or visually impaired have limited access to the same technology that sighted people buy off the shelf, said Darren Burton, a researcher for the nonprofit organization who lost his vision 11 years ago.

"The technology I do have access to — like talking computers — has affected my life so greatly," Burton said. "The basics of reading and writing were given back to me, as well as the ability to be employed."

Inside the association’s lab, researchers conduct a battery of tests to determine whether products meet the needs of blind or visually impaired consumers. Their goal is to increase awareness and influence companies to think about accessibility during initial design stages, said Mark Uslan, director of operations and technology.

The first test a cell phone receives is what Burton jokingly calls the sanity check — can he feel the buttons?

"I can feel the 5," Burton said in the lab as he picked up a Toshiba model. "There’s a little nib there, although it could be more substantial."

Other phones don’t pass the initial test.

"These are probably the worst buttons I’ve seen," Burton said, rubbing his fingers across the face of a Samsung VI 660. "They’re flat, totally flush with the panel."

Although special products are available for individuals with visual impairment, they are often expensive and bulky. A blood glucose monitor at a local drug store costs around $25, Uslan said. A device that’s added onto the monitor to make it useable by the visually impaired costs around $500.

"There is a need for some special products; I don’t mean to underplay that, but in many cases, you’re much better off designing products to be useable by everyone," Uslan said. "If you can make it useable by a blind person, it’s going to be more useable for everyone."

As baby boomers age, more people will require products designed with visual impairment in mind. The leading cause of vision impairment and blindness is age-related eye disease, according to "Vision Problems in the U.S.," a publication of Prevent Blindness America and the National Eye Institute.

Accessibility could be an important issue for West Virginia, which has one of the nation’s highest median ages.

"We’re outliving our eyes," Burton said.

The ever-evolving characteristic of technology also poses challenges for the visually impaired. Information is difficult to access because devices increasingly rely on graphic icons, touch screens, scrolling menus or complex visual displays.

"Although there have been improvements, it seems like we’re going backward in other areas," Burton said. "Ovens coming out now all have flat touch screens, instead of knobs. I don’ t even know where to touch. If they put some type of a tactile nature of where I could feel 1, 2, 3, 4, that would be nice."

The center is working with the Marshall University School of Medicine to gain credibility to publish its research in well-known medical journals such as Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics, Uslan said.

Researchers have proposed product changes, and companies including Adobe Systems Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. are starting to listen.

A voting system that the center influenced should be on the market by June, said Yung Nguyen, president and CEO of IVS LLC., a voting services company in Louisville The company has designed a system with voice output and a special keypad that resembles buttons on a telephone.

Researchers hope to expand their work to other products such as stereos, DVD players, ovens — the potential is limitless, Burton said. Product changes take time, but by using careful research and raising public awareness, the center should increase its opportunities to consult with manufacturers, Uslan said.

"You have faith and you keep cranking away at these things," he said. "You never know when somebody’s going to call."

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