Category: News and Views
Good day, thank you for your time and attention. My name is Reginald Deal, and as I noted in the subject line of my post, I am writing concerning the ADA. While I know ADA is rooted in Federal Legislation from 1990, I want to take a couple moments and explain why I am writing
I am a totally blind citizen of 34 years; all I have ever known as I have said to others is life with darkness. But such darkness is just physical in nature, for I have been able to overcome and accomplish many goals. But there are significant issues that I feel are important to all Americans who are in the same situation as I am.
I right you as a graduate student in Texas; this issue is something that is of major importance and thus my letter today.
The reason I want to correspond with you about the ADA, is because of the fact that in large part, the 1990 legislation does nothing to deal with modern technology. IN this respect, what I mean is that many aspects of modern technology are not being designed with access to the blind or other disabilities in mind. While companies and other agencies have to follow significant guidelines in terms of architectural and physical access, technological access has so far at the Federal level failed to be addressed. It is my hope to now work with members of your organization to push laws and in short order at both Federal and state levels nationally. Creating awareness can no longer be the only goal, making change must now take place. Too long these issues have been pushed aside in the name of politics.
Let me now spend some time going into detail about the situation at hand. I’m going to speak about two main themes, access to equipment in public buildings and access to electronic resources online and elsewhere. When I speak of access in public buildings to technology, I am specifically looking at banks and stores. How often do you go through the checkout line at any number of stores each week to purchase a variety of goods? When you get to the counter to pay, you slide your card through a device and then often times if you are using a debit card, you are asked for a PIN. Now you would not give your PIN to anyone I am sure, not the clerk, your best friend, and no one because it could jeopardize the security of your financial information. So why should a blind person be expected to jeopardize his or her security? Is the security of the blind person’s financial data some how not as important? Touch screens are so inaccessible, that the only recourse is to literally tell the clerk or someone near by who is assisting my PIN number. Such activity is not just discriminatory; it is shameful in all ways imaginable. No one, be it me, a blinded veteran, an older person who loses site, no one what so ever should be forced into this situation.
Similar issues exist when it comes to banking ATM machines for the very same argument that I just put forward. Yet most machines have no speech option and are now fully touch screen oriented.
Even the voting machine, which should have leveled the playing field for the blind has only kept us on the sidelines and forced us to rely in many cases on a poll worker or a friend to register our vote. Sure some electronic machines have been made accessible, but the quality is lacking and frankly, what good are they if the poll workers do not even know how to run them properly?
We are talking about basic constitutional rights here, rights that every citizen of the United States, from coast to coast should expect to have upheld by our officials at all levels, local, state, and Federal.
The second area I wanted to write about deals with the Internet. ADA does not address this issue well at all, giving business the right to not fall under such guidelines if they are primarily a web only business, such as Yahoo Inc. Unfortunately, numerous internet sites, from Yahoo, to mlb.com (the official Major League Baseball site), to even my own credit union here at home are now using internet coding that cannot be accessed by the blind. Today, my credit union, which has a web site at www.qualtrust.com, began using the captcha security coding to log on. The sites I just mentioned and many others like them, use this security box to prevent unwanted spam and automated registration. Seven United States Senators also use this feature on their web contact forms.
These captions are not accessible to the blind, for one very basic reason and one reason that all designers should already know about. The captions are graphics; graphics are unable to be read by the screen reader we use to navigate the internet. As a result, I and every single other blind man and woman in every single state in the union, are forced to simply not have access to the services we want, or we have to literally give our account password and logon information to someone else who can then pretend they are our account holders and log on that way. I have to give my friend my password to purchase my baseball tickets, since when? I and every other blind person who wants to use our online banking have to give our account numbers and passwords to friends to log on for us, as several institutions like Qualtrust are not allowing access in the way I just described? I thought it was a crime to take access of another person’s password, yet these agencies force us to literally give our passwords out to someone else to do the work for us? When was such behavior suddenly deemed legal or moral?
Given this backdrop and given that every person outside the blind community responds by saying something along the lines of “We were never aware of the situation” or “This is the first time someone has ever pointed this out”, demonstrates a need for legislation. Anyone who actually gets on google and does a search on inaccessible captcha or internet accessibility will find writings by many organizations about such issues, including the National Federation of the Blind, the American Foundation for the blind, and the American Counsel of the Blind. The World Wide Web Consortium also published extensive research about this same issue over two years ago.
So why is this important? Citizens of allstate are denied the right to freely conduct business transactions, they are being denied the right to security, and they are being denied the right to freely express themselves. When a citizen cannot register for a service online, purchase a ticket, pay a bill, or in some cases even write their own United States Senator, the constitution has been violated. I have not even touched on the fact that many businesses like Fidelity Investments will tell a blind worker as they did me, we would like to hire you but cannot because the computer systems are not compatible to the software that gives you access. Officials at the Federal level have seemed to turn a blind eye to these issues. For this reason, it is my sincere hope that you can speak with me and bring me or other blind citizens from around the nation, to speak before state assemblies, the Congress, and technical programmers. Would you let your son or daughter give away their security if tey were blind, or let them be denied a job for the same lack of technical access? Please work with me and others to change tis climate in America, work with us to enact legislation that will bring an end to such practice.
If you were forced to give your PIN numbers and passwords to someone else just so you could complete a transaction at a store or via the web, how would you feel? Now imagine how every blind American and I feel when this happens over, and over, and over again.
Please share this letter with anyone you can contact, together we can bring about the necessary change.