Disability, Human Rights, and Information Technology

Jonathan Lazar, Michael Ashley Stein, Jonathan Lazar, Michael Ashley Stein

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780812294095
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Derecho laboral y del empleo

Disability, Human Rights, and Information Technology addresses the global issue of equal access to information and communications technology (ICT) by persons with disabilities. The right to access the same digital content at the same time and at the same cost as people without disabilities is implicit in several human rights instruments and is featured prominently in Articles 9 and 21 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The right to access ICT, moreover, invokes complementary civil and human rights issues: freedom of expression; freedom to information; political participation; civic engagement; inclusive education; the right to access the highest level of scientific and technological information; and participation in social and cultural opportunities.Despite the ready availability and minimal cost of technology to enable people with disabilities to access ICT on an equal footing as consumers without disabilities, prevailing practice around the globe continues to result in their exclusion. Questions and complexities may also arise where technologies advance ahead of existing laws and policies, where legal norms are established but not yet implemented, or where legal rights are defined but clear technical implementations are not yet established.At the intersection of human-computer interaction, disability rights, civil rights, human rights, international development, and public policy, the volume's contributors examine crucial yet underexplored areas, including technology access for people with cognitive impairments, public financing of information technology, accessibility and e-learning, and human rights and social inclusion. Contributors: John Bertot, Peter Blanck, Judy Brewer, Joyram Chakraborty, Tim Elder, Jim Fruchterman, G. Anthony Giannoumis, Paul Jaeger, Sanjay Jain, Deborah Kaplan, Raja Kushalnagar, Jonathan Lazar, Fredric I. Lederer, Janet E. Lord, Ravi Malhotra, Jorge Manhique, Mirriam Nthenge, Joyojeet Pal, Megan A. Rusciano, David Sloan, Michael Ashley Stein, Brian Wentz, Marco Winckler, Mary J. Ziegler.

PART I

Participation and Inclusion

CHAPTER 1

Standards Bodies, Access to Information Technology, and Human Rights

Judy Brewer

Introduction

The Web has been a focal point of accessibility-standardization efforts since 1997 through work within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)¹ Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI),² and increasingly also through work throughout the Web community. The scope of work done through WAI has ranged from promoting awareness of the need for accessibility of the Web, to development of guidelines and technical specifications, coordination with research communities, and coordination with other standards organizations to ensure international harmonization of accessibility standards. During this time, accessibility of information on the Web has improved greatly. However, many accessibility barriers remain; and although many Web innovations improve accessibility, new barriers are still often inadvertently introduced as technologies advance.

This chapter explores the landscape of Web accessibility from the perspective of development of accessible information and communication technology (ICT) standards. It examines the importance of addressing accessibility support in mainstream technologies from the design stage onward; the need to engage different stakeholder groups, including end users, at the design table; and the challenges of addressing accessibility for people with disabilities within the intensely competitive and constantly evolving technology sector.

The Relevance of Standardization to Ensuring Accessibility of ICT

For many people who have worked on human rights, including disability rights, standards organizations may not be the first vehicle one thinks of when considering options for influencing the design of key technologies. Standards bodies are sometimes considered relevant primarily for capturing established practices in their fields rather than as a venue through which to help shape social aspects of technology design.

Yet because ICT occupies such a central role in society and the pace of technology change is constantly accelerating, it has become critically important to ensure that accessibility requirements are addressed at the design stage of ICT product and service development. After they have been released to the market, accessibility products and services may be difficult to retrofit—and by then, people with disabilities have already been left behind by the latest innovations. Standards bodies provide an opportunity to address accessibility principles early in the pipeline of emerging technologies.

Most ICT requires some degree of standardization in order to ensure interoperability with other parts of the technology infrastructure. Some standards organizations provide an effective setting in which to solicit perspectives and help articulate requirements from across a global community.

W3C WAI has been instrumental in developing guidelines and specifications that address a wide variety of user needs for accessibility and has been able to achieve broad international consensus on these. It also provides a coordinated process of accessibility review of mainstream Web standards in areas as diverse as graphics, media, mobile web, payments, security, digital publishing and e-readers, geolocation, automotive navigation, TV, and more. It has also enabled identification of potential accessibility barriers at early stages in the design process, when problems can still be relatively easily addressed. For accessibility requirements that require dedicated specifications or application programming interfaces (APIs), W3C provides a forum in which accessibility experts and advocates can work hand in hand with developers of mainstream technologies to ensure architecturally compatible design approaches for accessibility requirements. This aspect of WAI work is pursued through the Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group (previously the Protocols and Formats Working Group).³

Accessibility of ICT as a Human Right

Today, some of the most critical tools of society—for education, employment, commerce, health care, civic participation, entertainment, and more—are those used in the information society. The Web is one of the most important tools for communication and interaction, facilitating access to and integration into society. In the relatively short span of twenty-five years, the Web has evolved from an interesting and nice-to-have luxury to an essential means of interacting with the world. Even in areas that are off the electric grid or devoid of landline telecommunications, or both, access to the Internet and the Web through mobile devices has been increasing rapidly. There is a growing commitment to providing low-cost or no-cost global Internet services that will help reach the great majority of the world’s population.⁴ Although the availability of digital technology has increased access to information for many people with disabilities, the accessibility of that newly available information is still inconsistent, so for people with disabilities it is sometimes possible to get to Web content but not possible to perceive, understand, or interact with that content. If access to the Internet and the Web becomes nearly ubiquitous, yet unaddressed accessibility barriers in ICT remain, this could paradoxically exacerbate social and economic inequities that are already present for people with disabilities just at the time when the digital environment is finally providing the tools and opportunity to undo those inequities.

This need for the tools of the information society to be accessible to people with disabilities is articulated in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), adopted by the United Nations in 2006. The CRPD restates, with specific reference to the needs of people with disabilities, basic rights that people without disabilities in many countries have been able to take for granted for years but that people with disabilities have often been denied.

Articles 9 and 21 of the CRPD, among a number of other provisions, address the right of accessibility to information and to the tools of the information society for people with disabilities. To paraphrase the portions relating to ICT from these two articles, the CRPD directs that state parties to the convention shall take appropriate measures to ensure persons with disabilities access, on an equal basis with others, to information and communications, including information and communications technologies and systems, and electronic services and emergency services (from Article 9(1)(b)).⁵ Additionally, the CRPD directs that states shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that persons with disabilities can exercise the right to freedom of expression and opinion, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas on an equal basis with others and through all forms of communication of their choice, including information in accessible formats and technologies, and communications (from Article 21(a, c, e)).⁶

In these two articles, it is significant to note that both the tools of the information society and the rights and freedoms afforded by these tools to people with disabilities were important to the framers of this convention, and that these are just as important as the many other rights enumerated in this treaty, including access to education and to the built environment. For people with disabilities around the world, the CRPD has been an important milestone in societal recognition of equal status.

Prior to the development of the CRPD, some countries already had treaties, legislation, or policies that promoted or required accessibility of the Web, or, more generally, of accessibility of information and communication systems. In some countries, these have taken a civil rights approach; in other cases, they have focused on procurement approaches that require accessibility of ICTs purchased or acquired for government usage. The first of these was Section 508,⁷ originally added to the U.S. Rehabilitation Act in 1986 and amended several times since then. In 2014, the European Norm 301 549, which also took a procurement approach, was adopted in Europe.⁸ An increasing number of countries have already developed or are developing similar policies.

Examples of Accessibility Barriers and Requirements for Web Content

The scope of Web accessibility encompasses a broad range of functional requirements across different disabilities and the needs of older users. For someone who is hard of hearing or deaf watching a web-based TV broadcast that is interrupted by an announcement of emergency evacuation information, access to real-time streaming captions or sign language can be lifesaving. For a student with a visual disability taking an exam based on interpretation of complex visual data, description of visually presented information embedded in an infographic may be essential to fair assessment of her or his knowledge. For someone with an intellectual disability who is trying to interpret health-care information from a website, consistency of navigation menus and understandability of language used on a Web page may be important. For someone with limited fine motor control who is trying to fill out and submit an online financial form before it expires and she or he has to restart the process, an option to extend the time to fill out a form may be critical. For someone with a photosensitive seizure disorder, being able to avoid strobing lights in web content may be important. For an older user who may have changes in vision, hearing, dexterity, or short-term memory, or a combination of these changes, accessibility support on the Web may be useful regardless of whether that individual considers herself or himself to have a “disability.”⁹

The Web can be made accessible for persons in all of these situations, but to do so requires several things working together in concert. It requires web-accessibility guidelines that set out accessibility requirements; features in web specifications that support provision of accessibility information, such as captions and descriptions of images; browsers or mobile applications that can render the embedded accessibility information; content authors who provide the necessary accessibility information; an awareness of the benefits of using a common set of guidelines internationally; policies to ensure that accessibility guidelines are used; and evaluation tools and processes to assess whether a website conforms to accessibility.

Information on many websites is dynamic and interactive. For instance, Web users may need to expand nested menus or drag and drop objects on a Web page. For people who are using computers with assistive technologies such as screen readers or voice recognition, compatibility between browsers or mobile applications and assistive technologies may be essential to accessing information on a Web page or in Web applications, or completing tasks such as filling out and submitting forms. Use of accessibility-supporting specifications such as Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) 1.0¹⁰ in the design of these websites can enable accessibility of dynamic and interactive content on websites.

Accessibility also needs to intersect well with other aspects of technology usage, such as privacy, security, internationalization, and the operation of these technologies across different devices and platforms. For instance, people who are blind may need their screen readers to voice pronunciations from phonetic dictionaries for multiple languages, and they may need to ensure that security provisions do not disrupt interoperability between browsers and assistive technologies. Assistive technologies may require more direct access to the core functions of an application, which may be interpreted as attempts to hack into the system itself, triggering a shutdown of the system. These kinds of considerations can be identified and addressed by accessibility application programming interface mapping (accessibility APIs, AAMs) developed through joint work between accessibility groups and other working groups within W3C.

Elements of a Standards-Development Process That Can Support Inclusive Design

The process used in developing standards can have a significant impact on outcomes with regard to needs of end users, including people with disabilities. In August 2012, W3C was an inaugural signatory to the principles of Open Stand, along with the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).¹¹ Open Stand’s modern paradigm for standards¹² recognizes characteristics of standardization processes that have contributed to the success of the Internet and the Web. These include the following:

1. Cooperation
2. Adherence to principles (due process; broad consensus; transparency; balance; openness)
3. Collective empowerment
4. Availability
5. Voluntary adoption

W3C’s standards-development process has encompassed elements of these principles since its founding in 1994 and has continued evolving with regard to openness, transparency, and availability, for instance, through its pioneering royalty-free patent policy.¹³ The W3C process¹⁴ has been instrumental in ensuring an effective environment for developing accessibility standards.

Several ...