Legislation and access to the World-Wide Web

Alistair D N Edwards


Department of Computer Science

University of York
York
England
YO1 5DD

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alistair@minster.york.ac.uk

alistair@minster.york.ac.uk

Abstract

Internet users have long enjoyed its spirit of anarchy. By its very nature it is hard - if not impossible - to regulate. Up to now most debates regarding regulation and legislation have become mired in principles of censorship and free speech. Yet if it is agreed that the World-Wide Web is going to become a primary source of information, then exclusion from it due to disability is likely to be illegal. This raises a number of questions.

Introduction

People with disabilities are at a disadvantage in daily living relative to other people. In many countries this fact is acknowledged by the existence of laws which have the intention of reducing that disadvantage. One area that such laws applies to is the communication and the provision of information and other services which might be obtained over the Internet including the World-Wide Web (`the Web'). It would seem that any such laws should be applied to ensure fair access to the Web. However, the nature of the Web and the Internet is such that the application of such laws is not as straight forward as might be presumed and that is the topic of this paper.

The assertion is made that this paper is an attempt to objectively discuss questions relating to legislation and Web accessibility. The author is not attempting to uphold any particular stance with respect to the desirability or otherwise of legislative control of the Internet with any objective.

Background

Before further discussion, it is necessary to clarify some terminology. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons (UN, 1981) defines three important terms as follows:

Impairment

Any loss or abnormality of psychological, physiological or anatomical structure or function.

Disability

Any restriction or lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being.

Handicap

A disadvantage for a given individual, resulting from an impairment or disability, that limits or prevents the fulfillment of a role (depending on age, sex and social and cultural factors) for that individual.

Furthermore, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) states

The term disability means, with respect to an individual: a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual...

So, by definition, where a person has a disability they are at a disadvantage compared to other people in every-day activities. Laws such as the ADA in the United States and the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) in the UK have the objective of reducing the handicapping effect of disabilities. In other words whereas an impairment is usually impossible to remedy it usually is feasible to adjust peoples' environments such that they are less disadvantaged.

Currently the Web (and the Internet in general) is a convenient means of communication and source of information for a significant number of people. The amount of information accessible and the facilities provided are growing. So now there is the option to perform many tasks via the Web which formerly were only available directly. If current trends continue, it seems likely that people will become reliant on the Web, that for some activities it will become the default form of interaction. Further than that, it may become not merely an option but a necessity. At that point, to not have access to the Web will become a handicap.

There are any number of reasons why an individual may be unable to access the Web. Lack of finance is one obvious barrier, and that is being addressed through the provision of public access terminals in places like libraries. In other areas of daily activity, such as access to buildings, laws have been enacted to ensure that barriers to disabled people are removed. So will the same (or similar) laws be applied to the electronic access required to the Web? To answer that question one has to address a number of issues:

Current disability legislation

Legislation on the rights of people with disabilities varies greatly between countries. Possibly the most comprehensive law is the Americans with Disabilities Act in the USA. Corresponding legislation has recently been enacted in the UK in the form of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). Though these laws have a very different approach in terms of enforcement, many of the objectives behind them are similar inasmuch as they aim to reduce (or eliminate) unfair discrimination on the grounds of disability.

Of particular relevance are the attempts to facilitate equal access to services. For instance, the DDA states (Part III):

It is unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person... in refusing to provide, or deliberately not providing, to the disabled person any service which he provides, or is prepared to provide, to members of the public;... The following are examples of services to which this section [applies]... access to and use of means of communication; access to and use of information services

(Similar provision exist in the ADA). `Access to and use of means of communication; access to and use of information services' would seem clearly to apply to facilities such as the Web and it is probably only a matter of time before the law is tested in this area.

Another important piece of US legislation is the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 as amended in 1986 with the addition of Section 508, entitled `Electronic Equipment Accessibility'. Broadly Section 508 states that any computers that are to be used by Federal Government agencies must be capable of being adapted to be accessible to workers with disabilities. Specifically this includes

Federal agencies shall provide handicapped employees and non-handicapped employees equivalent access to electronic office equipment to the extent such needs are determined by the agency... and the required accessibility can be provided by industry. In providing equivalent access to electronic office equipment, agencies shall consider:

i. access to and use of the same data bases and application programs by handicapped and non-handicapped employees,

ii. utilization of enhancement capabilities for manipulating data (i.e., special peripherals) to attain equivalent end results by disabled and non-handicapped employees; and

iii. access to and use of equivalent communications capabilities by disabled employees.

This would seem to imply that if use of the Web is to be an integral part of the job of a Federal employee, then equal access for any disabled employees must be attainable

Another related act is Public Law 100-542, the Telecommunications Accessibility Enhancement Act of 1988. This ensures the accessibility of the federal telecommunications system for communications with and within the federal government. It means, for instance, that telecommunications devices for the deaf (TDDs) must be provided as an alternative to the telephone both for communication within federal agencies and for the public to communicate with the agencies.

While these latter laws apply only to Federal Government agencies, their effects are more wide-spread. If a manufacturer devises an accessibility solution in order to achieve conformance with these laws, then that solution can also be made available more widely.

To the best of the author's knowledge, no actions regarding Web accessibility have yet been brought under any of these acts in either the USA or UK - yet.

Aspects of accessibility

For material to be accessible to as many people as possible it must be available in a flexible format. That is to say that there must be available redundancy of representation. Secondly that redundancy must be exploited by the originator of the material. The commonest format of material on the Web is the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). On the whole HTML does have a good level of redundancy available but it is up to the page designer whether use is made of it.

An example is the use of graphic images on HTML pages. Wherever an image is to be displayed there is the facility to include an alternative or alt text. Thus, where the image is not appropriate, the text can be accessed instead. However, there is no compulsion for the page's author to include the alt text. Even if it is included, there is no way to ensure that it says anything useful, that is truly a useful alternative to the picture.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international industry consortium which exists to develop common standards for the evolution of the World Wide Web. It has an explicit commitment to the accessibility of the Web but it has no powers to enforce its views on accessibility.

At the same time, much work has already been expended on how pages should be designed in order to ensure accessibility. Pages can easily be checked against such guidelines by ways of the guide to `speech friendly' pages and the Speech Friendly Ribbon Award . The Speech-Friendly Ribbon represents an attempt to get around the lack of enforcement; designers are encourage to want the endorsement of a ribbon that they may display on their pages to show that they have `done their bit' for accessibility.

The other aspect of accessibility is the browser. If a page is well designed then it should be accessible through a non-visual browser. That may take the form of a custom-built speech-based browser, such as Webspeak or a visual browser with a screen reader adaptation. Neither of these solutions is much use, though, if the pages they display are designed inaccessibly.

The legislative climate

There is considerable concern internationally regarding the use of the Internet. This is mainly focused on the unregulated availability of pornographic material. For instance, Thimbleby (1995) - in an address at a scientific conference which was nevertheless widely reported by the press - reported that the Internet includes material which `makes "adult shops" in London's Soho look very tame indeed'. One response to the situation is to legislate. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) is one attempt at such legislation in the USA, though at the time of writing it is under legal challenge with regard to its constitutional status. A question arises as to whether legislation specific to Internet accessibility might be enacted in addition to the existing disability laws.

Unlike the CDA, legislation regarding accessibility would be concerned not with what material is available on the Web, but how it is presented. It would not therefore be subject to the same questions regarding freedom of speech. Nevertheless, if the attempts to regulate the Web (through such acts as the CDA) should fail, it will be that much more difficult to achieve successful regulation in other areas.

The climate of opinion among Internet users is generally hostile to the application of the law. The anarchy that is almost inherent in a distributed decentralized system is seen my many as one of its strengths. With no one dictating how the network is to be used its potential is limited only by the imaginations of its users. It would seem likely that any attempt to impose legislation on formatting and accessibility would meet with resistance.

Feasibility

No one owns the Internet. The computers and communication lines that make up the physical structure are each owned by some individual or body but the network is more than the hardware on which it runs. If a segment of the network is withdrawn or disconnected it still survives, and, like Hydra, will probably grow a replacement `head'.

There are many participants in the network. There are users, who have a network connection through which they acquire material and can choose to make available material. Network connections are usually rented from service providers. The service providers control the access their clients receive. They can decide what physical access to provide (such matters as communication bandwidth, for instance), but they can also decide to filter material accessed via their facilities. This is another approach to the pornography problem, whereby some service providers have agreed to attempt to not allow certain kinds of material to be accessed via their facilities.

One problem with any attempt to screen material is the sheer size of the network. New material is added hourly and most screening relies on human intervention. Technology can help. For instance, SurfWatch is a piece of software that blocks access to specific sites. Nevertheless the database that the software uses to identify those sites must be maintained with human assistance.

The geographical diversity causes further problems. Suppose it is decided that accessibility laws in the USA do apply to the Web, can they be enforced on a page designer or service provider in Europe? Such questions of jurisdiction do not apply only to accessibility legislation but the answers are not clear-cut. Chapter 7 of Rosenoer, (1997) cites cases which have gone both ways, either concluding that the laws of one state can be applied to people and material in other states or that they cannot. It depends on the exact basis of the legal challenge. Only time and case law will show whether accessibility laws can be applied across the Web.

Alternatives to the legislative approach

The development of the Web, its protocols and data formats are closely intertwined. W3C has no power (nor presumably desire) to force its principles regarding accessibility on Web users. The alternative is for page designers to voluntarily ensure good accessibility. The existence of guidelines and accessibility test programs can help. It would be good if the Speech-Friendly Ribbon achieved such a status that it was seen as a prestigious award that designer would want people to see attached to their pages.

In other aspects of life awareness may be raised by political and direct action. Most Web sites have an email address to which comments are encouraged. Perhaps visitors (whether blind or sighted) should answer such invitations with comments regarding accessibility, possibly including positive advice and directions to further sources of information. The extreme of boycotting inaccessible sites seems to be a counter-productive possibility, since on the whole it is the visitor to a site who is receiving a service (information) and who is thus the one to lose out by not visiting. Technically it would not be very difficult to design a browser that will only load accessible pages (as judged either by an automatic scan through them or by looking for the Speech-Friendly ribbon) but with the current state of the Web, such a browser might find few pages to load!

Service providers have some power over their customers, but again there is the question of who is doing a favour for whom. Perhaps service providers could vet the sites they service and provide (again) positive encouragement to good practice; it seems unlikely that they would go so far as withdrawing support for inaccessible sites.

Conclusions

Accessibility in the narrow sense of physical admission to buildings has often been given rather a low priority - until the law has been invoked to enforce it. By a similar token, it appears that it was only when such laws as the ADA and Section 508 were invoked that system manufactures began to make real efforts to make computers accessible. The same may be true of the access to information which the Web provides. The laws which are already in existence would seem to mandate such access, but there remains an open question as to whether such laws can and should be applied to the Web.

References

Rosenoer, J. (1997). CyberLaw. New York: Springer.

Thimbleby, H. (1995). Problems in the global village. Presented at `Discovery and Invention', The British Association Annual Festival of Science, (Newcastle).

UN (1981). The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons. Unesco Courier 1: pp. 6-7.



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