1 INTRODUCTION

This report has been prepared as part of a project funded by the 'AccessAbility Grants Program'. AccessAbility is a grants program administered by the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, initiated in 1997, pursuant to the Investing for Growth statement and aimed at making online services more accessible for people with disabilities.

The work has predominantly been carried out by Tim Noonan on behalf of Blind Citizens Australia – Australia’s national organization of people who are blind and vision impaired

The most recent version of this report can be found on the Blind Citizens Australia website at http://www.bca.org.au/ecrep.htm

Statistics from the ABS and a variety of other sources are demonstrating the momentum with which electronic commerce is taking hold in our society. More people are now using the Internet (at home, work and elsewhere) than ever before, more people are buying goods over the Internet, the banks are having increasing success with electronic banking (particularly Internet banking) and the Australian Government has the stated objective of implementing a world class model for delivery of all appropriate government services online by 2001, as well as an intention to eliminate the majority of paper-based requirements for the majority of financial transactions.

Keith Hazelton, IT Architect at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the following about E-Commerce:

“It is now possible to conduct virtually any traditional business function electronically, from marketing to sales to delivery to post-sales support to accounting, customer service and business-to-business links.”

Unfortunately, many of these exciting possibilities promised by E-Commerce may be denied to a significant number of Australians due to the lack of planning for and appropriate consideration of the particular needs of people with disabilities. Although the Government states that it wants the Information Economy to be accessible to all, until very recently, there is little evidence that it has yet put in place many mechanisms at all to actually achieve this goal.

One of the primary purposes of this report is to clearly articulate the issues, the barriers, and the potential opportunities presented by this new era of technology and social change.

As will be strongly emphasised in the subsequent sections of this document, this problem of E-Commerce inaccessibility is not a small one – in fact, if not adequately addressed, it may have one of the most significant negative social impacts on people with disabilities than have any other social changes in the last 30 years.

1.1 Some Key Accessible E-Commerce Developments and Papers

This project, as well as the recently announced Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s inquiry into the impacts of E-Commerce and new technologies on people who are older or who have a disability (which is discussed further in section 8.3 below) are two positive Australian endeavours working to minimise these access restrictions.

Earlier this year, the area of accessible E-Commerce was examined from a social and US legislative perspective in an excellent paper by Cynthia Waddell titled ‘The Growing Digital Divide in Access for People with Disabilities: Overcoming Barriers to Participation' which is online at http://www.aasa.dshs.wa.gov/access/waddell.htm

In that paper Cynthia Waddell makes the following two statements, which fully apply to the Australian situation:

“Unless the civil rights of America’s 54 Million people with disabilities are addressed during this period of rapid technological development, the community will be locked out from participation on the basis of disability and the technological world will not be enriched by their diverse contributions. … Because the benefits for overcoming these barriers extend beyond the community of people with disabilities, there are practical and significant business reasons for addressing this issue. Rather than creating a growing digital divide, emerging technology can enable full participation in the digital economy for everyone, regardless of age, disability or the limitations of the technology available.”

“Whether the digital barrier is the inaccessible design of Internet/intranet websites, Internet service provider “portals”, incompatible browsers, or inaccessible web‑based platforms for online business, the trend is growing and must be addressed at the infancy of the digital economy. Already, exciting electronic and information technology features are emerging in the areas of information appliances, real-time conference participation, audiostreaming telephone voice browsers, search engines, news groups, chat rooms and 3D imaging. Unless functionality solutions for accessibility are addressed today, the state of the digital divide tomorrow may be impossible to overcome.”

The recently released Issues paper prepared by David Mason of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission titled ‘Issues Paper: Accessibility of electronic commerce and other new service delivery technologies for older Australians and people with a disability’ online at www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/current_inquiries/ecom/ecommerce_issues_paper.htm is another excellent reference on the state of Accessibility of E-Commerce in Australia. That report strongly complements the content of this paper. Information about The HREOC E-Commerce Reference that issues paper was prepared for can be found at http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/current_inquiries/ecom/ecom.html

A variety of other initiatives are described throughout this report, which are all working to increase accessibility of information, services and technologies.

1.2 Project Background

During 1999, with funding from the Commonwealth Government’s ‘AccessAbility Grants Program’, Blind Citizens Australia has been investigating the impacts of Electronic Commerce on people with disabilities in Australia, and in particular people who are blind or vision impaired. This work has lead to this issues paper.

AccessAbility is a grants program administered by the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, initiated in 1997, pursuant to the Investing for Growth statement and aimed at making online services more accessible for people with disabilities. In 1998, $1.5 million was provided for projects covering a range of disability groups. A second and final round of funding for this Grants program was held in 1999, and the outcomes are expected to be announced during November 1999.

This Accessible E-Commerce project has the following aims:

§ To investigate the positive and negative impacts of E-Commerce on people with disabilities;

§ To produce two discussion papers which explain the field and provide information about the current state-of-play in Australia and abroad;

§ To conduct one or more ‘Accessible E-Commerce’ seminars for stake-holders including people with disabilities, people working in the disability field, Government and those working in the E-Commerce industry; and

§ To develop recommendations for further research required in the field, in order to maximise the accessibility of future and developing online Australian E-Commerce services and products.

During the progress of the research, it has become evident that the most vital requirements for positive change will involve the activities listed below. Funding is being sought to further pursue these important areas of work during the year 2000.

§ Educate and raise awareness within the E-Commerce industry of - A. the need for accessible design and B. practical and achievable approaches which can lead to accessible E-Commerce products and services. In particular, online and self service banking, internet-based grocery shopping, and accessibility of Government services were identified as priority areas;

§ Inform Government about the barriers being presented by E-Commerce, and influence future policy and priorities to maximise the accessibility of Government and non-Government E-Commerce facilities;

§ Educate and inform people with disabilities, as well as people working in the disability industry about the possible barriers being created by E-Commerce developments, so that both these groups can bring pressure to bear on developers and policy-makers.

§ Become involved in national and international E-Commerce-related standards efforts to both educate, and to influence E-Commerce efforts;

§ Prepare a list of recommendations for Government and Industry which will lead to practices and activities that will maximise the accessibility of current and future E-Commerce services and facilities.

Publication by this ‘Accessible E-Commerce’ project of discussion papers (such as this one) is a strong first step towards achieving some of these goals. This project is also providing substantial input to HREOC’s recently announced inquiry into E-Commerce accessibility for people who are older and who have a disability.

Blind Citizens Australia is actively seeking partnerships and strategic alliances to further these goals. If you are interested in working with Blind Citizens Australia to improve the accessibility of E-Commerce facilities, please contact the author at tnoonan@softspeak.com.au

1.3 What is the Problem?

New technology has often been described as a double-edged sword – on one edge, having the potential to give incredible independence and participation on all levels – but on the other also having the potential to further deny access, close doors, and severely isolate people with disabilities from full participation in education, employment, recreation and social interaction.

But the problem isn't really with the technology per se; for it is just a malleable tool which can be used to create the myriad equipment and services that are desired.

1.4 What is Electronic Commerce?

Definitions of E-Commerce are many and varied and no one definition really gives an adequate perspective on the area.

Roger Clarke (a leading Australian Authority on E-Commerce) defines E-Commerce as:

“The conduct of commerce in goods and services, with the assistance of telecommunications and telecommunications-based tools.”

Mary-Anne Goldsworthy (an Executive Officer of the Centre for Electronic Commerce, Monash University) says the following about the subject:

“Electronic Commerce is fast becoming the catch-all phrase for electronic means of communicating information and business transactions. The fastest growing area of electronic commerce in Australia and the rest of the world is the use of the Internet and online services for exchanging knowledge, for advertising and marketing, for selling and buying, for banking, and for the emergence of entirely new ways of doing business and communicating with individuals and organizations.

Electronic commerce is levelling the playing field for small companies to trade as if they were much larger corporations in a global marketplace, and for regional businesses and communities to participate in cultural, social and commercial networks in a seamless and borderless way.”

About E-Commerce, Keith Hazelton, IT Architect at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says:

“E-Commerce (or electronic commerce) is much more than buying and selling over the Internet. Some authors prefer the term "e-business" because it calls to mind more of the ways that information technology (IT) can serve an institution's mission.”

He goes on to say

However, as this report explains, many of these new ways of doing things may not be accessible to many people with disabilities.

Most of the Government's strategies focus on the 'Information Economy' rather than just on E-Commerce. The Information Economy can be interpreted quite broadly, and incorporates online access to information and services, online interaction for commercial or social/cultural purposes. The Information Economy considers participation in society as well as the economy.

For practical purposes in this research, we are concerned with all aspects of technology which directly or indirectly impact on people with disabilities and their participation in the economy (and to a lesser extent) society in general. For that reason this project doesn't significantly concern itself with behind the scenes machine-to-machine protocols such as EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and the like, because these don't tend to have a differential effect on people with disabilities versus people who are not disabled.

While the focus is E-Commerce, attention is also given to the accessibility of online information, and the ability for Australians to access new modes of Government service delivery.

1.5 Project Scope – People with Disabilities

This project addresses people with disabilities, who include a variety of disability groups and people with combinations of disabilities.

However the technology access barriers encountered by people who are either blind or vision impaired are the primary focus of this work.

The US Access Board identified the following groups of people with disabilities as requiring particular attention as affecting equal access to information technologies:

§ visual disabilities (e.g., blindness, low vision and lack of color perception)

§ hearing disabilities (e.g., hard of hearing, deafness)

§ people with physical disabilities (e.g., limited strength, reach or manipulation, tremor, lack of sensation)

§ people with speech disabilities

§ people with language, learning or cognitive disabilities (e.g., reading disabilities, thinking, remembering, sequencing disabilities)

§ other disabilities (e.g., epilepsy, short stature), and

§ individuals with any combination of these disabling conditions (e.g., deaf‑blindness)

(Electronic and Information Technology Access Advisory Committee Final Report to U.S. Access Board, May 12 1999, http://www.access-board.gov/pubs/eitaacrpt.htm

It needs to also be recognised that while most people generally focus on people with permanent disabilities, throughout their lives many people may temporarily have a variety of disabilities including reduced vision due to surgery or infection, a mobility impairment due to a broken leg, inability to use a hand, or type due to a broken arm, a hearing impairment due to an ear infection, and so on.

Although the perceived overall percentage of people with disabilities in our society may not seem that high, this is clearly not the case when we consider specific cross-sections of the population, such as people over 55. As we get older, our bodies are more likely to start exhibiting reduction in function in the senses, memory and comprehension, and of course physical agility and energy levels.

The most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics study (Disability, Ageing and Carers 1998, ABS, April 1999) indicates that 19% of the Australian community overall, or 3.6 million people have a disability, but this rises to approximately 35% for people aged 55 to 59; 44% for people aged 65 to 69; 60% for people aged 75 to 79; and 84% for people aged 85 and over.

It is widely recognised that we as a group live longer, and that the average age of the population is continuing to increase. It is estimated that by the year 2020 the number of people over 65 will have doubled from the numbers in that group in 1996. This means that over time there will increasingly be more people with disabilities, and that they will have those disabilities for longer.

A good summary of statistics relating to vision impairment in Australia is found in ‘Everybody’s Business’ (a Blind Citizens Australia report prepared by Gunela Astbrink). Some of these figures include:

§ 1.5% of people in Australia are estimated to have a vision impairment which cannot be corrected by glasses.

§ The ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) estimated that 13.6% of the population aged 75 or over had a vision impairment. Gunela Astbrink notes that this figure could be on the ‘low’ side due to the self-reporting approach the ABS took in this study.

§ Research in the UK found that 35% of people with a vision impairment also had a hearing impairment, and excluding hearing impairments, 67% of people with a vision impairment also had another disability such as arthritis.

§ Research carried out by the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) in the UK found that 59% of people with a vision impairment needed assistance in dealing with mail, leaflets and paying bills.

A document summarising the numbers of people in Europe with different disabilities can be found at http://www.eyecue.co.uk/eyecue/pats/text/6a.html

2 SHOPPING

This section examines different kinds of shopping and explores how new approaches to shopping provide opportunities and some major barriers for people with disabilities. Internet shopping is discussed in more detail in sections 4.6 and 4.7 below.

Shopping is something which everyone in our community needs to be able to do. Often, for people with disabilities, this basic task is quite difficult and cannot be conducted with independence or any degree of privacy.

Like the freedom of being able to drive a car, or receiving a key to the front door, the right to select and buy goods is central to democratic capitalist society. Daily, people with disabilities have rights and freedoms denied to them, which are taken for granted by most Australians. It is critical that the basic freedom of shopping remains available to all Australians, and that all people are able to shop with independence and also with the right to privacy.

Simple tasks like walking from store to store, browsing a supermarket shelf or reading through a department store catalogue, can be very difficult for many people with disabilities. E-Commerce developments have the potential to make some of these tasks easier, but aren't likely to do so in the near future for all disabled groups.

Some cannot reach or carry goods, others can't see the products in order to know what is available, or where to go to find what they require, others may need assistance in selecting the right kinds of products for their needs.

Some supermarkets offer a free service where a staff member assists the person with his or her shopping needs, but this varies from location to location, and more particularly is limited by available staffing resources at the store. As shops become larger and less personalised, as employee time needs to be accounted for more precisely, and as staffing numbers are cut through increased efficiencies and new technology, this kind of one-on-one service is at serious risk of being unavailable, or only being provided at a significant cost to the individual.

For these reasons, home-delivery shopping services have a lot of appeal for people with disabilities, so long as the catalogues of goods can be accessed, and so long as the extra cost of this style of shopping isn't prohibitive.

2.1 Modes of Shopping

2.1.1 Conventional Shopping

We are all familiar with traditional shopping where we physically travel to a shop, walk through the aisles and select our goods.

In such cases both physical disabilities and sensory disabilities can make this task difficult.

2.1.2 Telephone Shopping

Based on advertising, we can call and purchase goods over the phone e.g. DemTel, TVSN pizzas etc.

Such approaches can be very friendly to people with disabilities, because products are often both verbally and visually described and demonstrated. People don’t need to concern themselves with travel to and from a shop.

2.1.3 Internet Shopping

Internet shopping is becoming more popular where products are selected, a form is completed and the goods are shipped.

If the Internet shopping site is designed in accordance with the ‘Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0’ found at
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505
which are published by the Web Access Initiative (WAI), then there is a good chance that most people with disabilities (who have Internet access) will be able to benefit from the service.

Internet usage for shopping and other activities is discussed in more detail in sections 4.6 and 4.7 below.

2.1.4 Interactive TV and Appliance-Based Shopping

Soon to be available in Australia are set-top-box-based shopping services, where the TV and cable service are used to provide product information and ordering facilities.

At present none of these set-top-box products are accessible to people who are blind or vision impaired, and a variety of different and often proprietary operating systems are used in such devices.

It is hoped that Windows CE will evolve to incorporate more Active Accessibility functionality, but some companies have already had success producing voice access to specific Windows CE applications – e.g. The Productivity Works

Many newer devices are being based on the JAVA language. This also has strong potential for accessibility in the future.

Discussed further in section 7.3 below are smart appliances which in the future are expected to automate re-stocking the kitchen and bathroom, by reading product barcodes as discarded items are thrown into the ‘smart’ bin. You might be able to ask your microwave oven or refrigerator to order some ingredients, find the best price from online shopping sites and have them delivered that evening. However, this level of functionality is not present yet.

But because current set-top-boxes and early smart appliances are inexpensively made, and because they aren’t fully-fledged multi-function computers, they tend to have more limited input and output options. This could mean that people with various physical disabilities will also have difficulty gaining access to such services.

Depending on the disability and the technology, some of these newer forms of shopping have the potential to provide major advantages over more traditional shopping methods; however, those approaches that rely heavily on visual presentation, or which require use of inaccessible devices or software, will cause major problems for people who are blind or vision impaired. Those approaches which don't provide alternative input options may present barriers for people with physical disabilities.

The Trace Center explores a variety of possible approaches to accessing home-based appliances and public services at http://www.trace.wisc.edu/world/irstds.html

2.2 Catalogues and Packaging

With the expanding use of XML for marking up digital data (such as store catalogues etc) it may be feasible for people who are blind or vision impaired to browse an online electronic catalogue on the web with textual product descriptions and a high degree of accessibility, even though sighted shoppers might be able to visually browse the catalogue in a visual format e.g. virtually walking down shop aisles - looking at pictures of the products as they move by.

For people who are blind or vision impaired, the glossy catalogues that appear in our letterboxes cannot usually be read using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning technology, due to the complex layout and reliance on pictures and the like. This problem of catalogue access is also a problem for home shopping services selling groceries etc, where one is often required to identify the goods required, based on catalogue item numbers.

The Royal National Institute for the Blind is currently researching the area of packaging and labelling for goods in supermarkets. Its research has found that many disabled and elderly people have extreme problems just opening many goods, due to packaging. This work also includes recommendations on labelling, and colour-contrast for packaging, in order for people to more easily identify and differentiate one product from another.

For more information on this project see 'The Forgotten Customers: One in Ten', at http://www.rnib.org.uk/wedo/research/sru/packag.htm

2.3 Barcodes

All major products now available for purchase contain a unique barcode which identifies them to the store's computers for check-out, stock control and the like. Some stores in the United States (and on trial in Australia) now offer their sighted shoppers a hand-held barcode reader which the shopper can use to scan the goods on the shelf, get pricing information, keep a tally of goods added to the trolley etc. At present, no stores are offering such a service which is accessible to people who are unable to read the visual display on these readers.

Technically, the task of adding a speech chip and storage onto a barcode reading device isn't that big a problem. In fact, several such products do exist. These work by storing a locally-built database on a personal computer, so that barcodes can be associated with a spoken message, or with a text description.

There are a few different kinds of barcode scanners, however, and those that can scan a product from all perspectives (such as the ones used at the check-out) are quite expensive. Cheaper barcode scanners - which require accurate alignment of the scanner over the product barcode - are readily available, but very difficult for blind or vision impaired people to reliably use.

Three examples of PC-based personal barcode reading systems the author is aware of are: An Australian barcode product sold by Dunbar Computers 08 82777190; a German barcode package sold by PC-Software-Developments, details at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jewish_software/quikinfo.htm and a US barcode product from Ann Morris Enterprises in the United States. Ann Morris Enterprises website is at http://www.annmorris.com

There are several barriers to accessing product barcode information for people who can't see product labelling, such as

§ There are literally millions of products which have a unique barcode. It’s neither feasible nor possible to store all the particulars of these products in a hand-held device.

§ The product's price isn't an inherent part of the product's identification – this value is stored in the store's computer, and can vary from store chain to store chain and even stores within a chain. So, any barcode reading system for use by people who can't read the visual display, needs to obtain the current pricing for the product being scanned, in addition to the product description.

§ Barcodes aren't usually printed in standard or readily identifiable locations on a product. Thus for a person who is blind, the task of even finding the barcode is a major challenge. Unless some kind of tactual clue were embossed near the barcode, a hand-held reader would still present difficulties to the shopper.

§ The audio output from a barcode reader would need a volume control to accommodate ambient noise and to provide a degree of privacy for the customer. Perhaps a socket for an ear-phone could also be added. An extreme example of this need might be a shopper who intentionally (or inadvertently) scanned a box of condoms, and the reader telling the whole aisle what the person had scanned.

2.4 Paying for Goods

Whether its trying to identify what notes one is holding, confirming that the right change has been issued, inserting a credit card correctly into the card reader, entering a PIN on an EFTPOS terminal, or checking the particulars of a shopping docket, any or all of these tasks can present major challenges for people with disabilities.

In the supermarket or other shop-fronts, goods are commonly paid for in any of the following ways, with the following potential difficulties:

2.4.1 Cash

§ People with intellectual disabilities may have difficulty counting cash and change;

§ People with physical disabilities might encounter difficulties handling coins and notes;

§ People who are blind or vision impaired may have difficulty denominating notes they hold and change received;

§ Elderly people may be confused with change and handling coins.

Thus these cash transactions can be time-consuming and frustrating for a wide range of parties, and require a significant level of trust between the parties.

2.4.2 Credit Card

§ Writing a signature is difficult for some people, or may not be very legible, causing lack of validation;

§ Because some transactions are instantaneous and others delayed, and because banks "hold" funds aside until all transaction processes have been completed, it can be confusing for some elderly or intellectually disabled people about the true status of their credit at a particular time;

§ People who have difficulties travelling independently from their home or place of work are more likely to use their credit card over the telephone, potentially exposing them to a greater risk of credit card fraud.

2.4.3 EFTPOS (debit card)

Very common today, this system directly debits the amount of funds being paid from a bank account which is linked to the holder's mag-stripe card.

In the three months leading up to February 1999, the ABS found that 64% of people used EFTPOS to pay for goods, compared to 58% in the previous year.

§ For people who are blind or vision impaired, entry of the required PIN for EFTPOS transactions is often difficult or impossible, due to the card reader design. Some units are touch-sensitive, accepting digits when any of the buttons are slightly touched for orientation. A good example of this is the intellect keypad reader, which is in common use in many banks and shop-fronts. Coles supermarkets used to exclusively use this reader but more recently have changed over to a unit which can reliably be accessed by touch;

§ People with severe motor disabilities may not be able to enter their PIN at all. For EFTPOS and ATM transactions, this inability may require them to reveal this to a friend, or even the shop assistant. Such a revelation of the PIN is in contravention of the banking conditions-of-use for the account and the PIN could be overheard by another shopper or passer-by. Trust is critical in such situations;

§ People with memory impairments, or who have dyslexia, may have difficulty recalling or reliably entering their PIN;

§ For people who are blind, it may be unclear which orientation to use when inserting a card into a card access device;

§ For people with physical disabilities, it may not be possible to reach the card reader, or the person may not have the fine motor control required to insert the card or easily enter their PIN.

The TRACE Center has developed a conceptual prototype of an accessible EFTPOS terminal device. This unit would be portable, would have easily accessed buttons, a headphone jack and volume control and could read magnetic stripe cards and read/write smart cards. A description of the TRACE EFTPOS terminal can be found at http://trace.wisc.edu/world/kiosks/itms/prototypes/pos.html

3 BANKING AND FINANCE

This section explores the area of banking, and a range of financial activities that people with disabilities might wish to perform. Issues of selecting a bank and branch, ATM accessibility issues, internet banking, and accessing financial and promotional information are discussed.

3.1 Selecting a Banking Institution

For people with disabilities, selecting a bank is far more involved than just choosing the bank with the cheapest fees.

The glossy printed brochures are difficult or impossible for blind and vision impaired people to access. They also don't tend to scan well using optical character recognition software. Pricing and features are intentionally complex so as to make direct comparison of institutions difficult. Obviously, this is an added problem for people with mild intellectual disabilities. Also see section 3.5 below.

Many people with disabilities don't independently drive or are unable to walk even short distances – so finding branches and ATMs nearby is a major necessity. With the closure of branches, this problem is compounded.

Depending on the bank, and depending on the branch, ATM (Automatic Teller Machine) facilities are either impossible, or difficult for people who are blind or vision impaired to access. Some employ touch screen technology (Westpac is a case in point) and virtually none provide any audible feedback to the user regarding the next step of the transaction or the results of actions. People with physical disabilities may not be able to access the ATM keypad, card reader or cash dispenser, due to its height from the ground, steps leading to the machine, or due to other physical barriers.

One alternative is to find ATMs that are nearby which are more accessible to the person, however, customers are usually financially penalised if they opt to use an ATM which isn't owned by the establishment they bank with – even though this alternative machine might be more accessible and nearby. Also see section 3.3 below for a comprehensive coverage of ATM issues.

People who are blind or vision impaired may also need to select a bank which offers accessible Internet banking facilities. Usually this reduces the range of suitable banks to just one or two. Also see section 3.4 below for further discussion of internet banking.

3.2 Telephone Banking

In the three months leading up to February 1999, the ABS found that 39% of people used the telephone to pay bills or transfer funds, compared to only 29% in the previous year.

For people who are blind or vision impaired, telephone banking offers many benefits and increased independence.

However for people who are both deaf and blind (deaf-blind) audio-based telephone services present obvious problems, due to their auditory mode of output. The United States Federal Communications Commission recently found that many people with hearing impairments encountered major problems when attempting to use automated telephone services through a relay service. In particular they encountered difficulties getting connected with a human, and with the short time allowed for responses to questions.

St. George Bank was the first bank in Australia to provide a TTY based telephone banking service for its deaf and hard-of-hearing customers. This service offers text-based alternatives for all the spoken prompts presented through its telephone banking service, meaning that people using a TTY (also called a TDD or text telephone) can independently gain access to these services.

There are also various interactive voice response (IVR) services in the United States which provide a TTY service which corresponds to the audio service used by hearing callers. Furthermore, the recently announced updates to US FCC legislation relating to accessibility of telecommunications technologies makes specific mention of voicemail and other telephone-based services as an area where increased accessibility will be required. For more information see http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/News_Releases/1999/nrcc9048.txt

For people who are blind or vision impaired, as well as for the huge number of Australians who don't have a computer with Internet connectivity, telephone-based information services such as phone banking have clear advantages for timely and independent access to information and for carrying out simple transactions.

All automated telephone services in Australia should be compliant with the Australian and New Zealand standard (AS/NZS 4263) which deals with user interface requirements for interactive voice response services. In preparing this standard, consideration was given to the needs of elderly and users with physical disabilities, including allowing longer waiting times for responses to questions, consistency of frequently used commands etc. Tim Noonan is a member of the Standards Committee (IT/22) responsible for this standard. Unfortunately the standard isn't accessible on the web, but an article discussing the Australian and New Zealand IVR standard and good IVR design can be found at www.softspeak.com.au/ivrpap98.htm

A good report titled ‘Telephones: what Features do Disabled People need’ covers the kinds of features required on telephones by different groups of people with disabilities. It also has a good statistical break-down of various disabled groups in the European Union. This report can be found at http://www.tiresias.org/phoneability/telephones/

3.3 Self-service Banking (ATMs)

Over the years ATM usage has increased markedly. In the three months leading up to February 1999, the ABS found that 71% of people used ATMs compared to 66% in the previous year.

More recently, ATM manufacturers see their products as self-service machines, with the capability of providing other banking or generic services. These might include providing on-line access to information on banking services, ticket issuing etc. In the future, ATMs may be used to transfer value to a smart card-based electronic purse, instead of issuing physical cash. The distinction between ATM's and Information kiosks will continue to blur over time.

Until very recently, there were no banks in Australia providing ATMs which are accessible to people who are blind or vision impaired. Some machines contain a raised dot on the 5 key, others have Braille numbers on the numeric keypad, and others still, have no tactile indicators whatsoever. Token Braille on key-tops is the extent to which the majority of banks in Australia have gone to, in order to make ATMs easier to use - and that was predominantly in response to the threat of a DDA action.

Although Braille symbols on ten or twelve of the ATM keys may seem like a good start, the reality is that such adaptations are almost insignificant. This is for several reasons, the least of which is that all the function keys on ATMs are not brailled, and the screen output on the ATM is obviously not accessible. Touch-screen-based ATMs don't even have physical function keys – the screen is touched where the function is displayed.

In addition, the number of blind and vision impaired people who know Braille is a small proportion of the total number of blind and vision impaired people. Also, most modern ATMs use metal keys which can be very cold to the touch at various times of the year, further impeding their readability.

The real challenge for a blind person in using an ATM is being able to "read" what the screen displays, and to be able to identify which of the multi-function buttons is associated with which function.

Even when a sequence of button-presses is memorised by a blind user, this approach falls down when the person needs to perform an infrequently used task, when they move to another model of machine, when they use an ATM from another bank, and when software upgrades are carried out by the bank to add new services or functionality.

ATM accessibility in Australia needs to go a lot further before the machines can be used with independence and confidence by anyone who has difficulty reading the ATM screen.

Recently the Bank of Queensland has installed some ATM units which provide a level of voice output for customers. At the time of writing it is not known whether these machines are specifically to assist blind and vision impaired customers, or just a feature aimed at the general public. Early feedback suggested that the screen position made it difficult for many people to read, making the voice messages of additional assistance to sighted members of the public also.

Interbold (manufacturers of IBM ATMs) and NCR have both developed voice output technology for ATM use, but it is only very recently that any of these more accessible technologies have been deployed.

In September 1999 NCR issued an announcement about their philosophy of ATM design and their new range of ‘Access for All’ ATM machines. NCR state in this announcement that their approach to accessible ATMs and self-service machines goes “far beyond” the legislative requirements of the ADA, and emphasises their commitment to an inclusive ATM design philosophy. Some of the interesting features in this product range include consistent location of the keypad, card access device, cash dispenser and screen; voice guidance available through an ear-phone jack; automatic brightness adjusting screen to provide optimal viewing in bright sunlight and darkness; redesigned keypad with clearly delineated keys, reduced resistance, increased key travel etc; and the ability to use the physical keypad as an alternative to on-screen function buttons. The NCR ‘Access for All’ announcement is online at http://www3.ncr.com/product/financial/product/sss/access.htm

Wells Fargo in the United States recently announced a trial of talking ATM machines for their blind and vision impaired customers. Wells Fargo's response was probably due to the threat of a class-action lawsuit by a chapter of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and others regarding the bank's lack of accessible ATM services.

A week later, CitiBank followed with similar announcements, which were assisted through collaboration between them and the American Council of the Blind (ACB).

NCR - a major ATM manufacturer - (as part of a research consortium known as the SATURN Project (Smart card And Terminal Usability Requirements and Needs) coordinated by the European Union) was involved in developing an accessible prototype ATM. Attention was given to clear screen layouts for low vision users, voice output via a headphone jack for blind users, use of both contacted and contact less smart cards for machine transactions and use of the customer's smart card to store the user interface preferences of the user, e.g. voice output, large screen display etc.

An informative report on the findings of the Saturn project and guidelines for good ATM design can be found at http://www.stakes.fi/include/cases.html

Another document by John Gill which discusses accessibility of ATMs is titled ‘Making Cash Dispensors Easier to Use’ which is online at http://www.rnib.org.uk/wedo/research/sru/mcdeu.htm

The TRACE Center has also prepared a description (including detailed diagrams) of an on-paper prototype of an accessible ATM which can be found at http://trace.wisc.edu/world/kiosks/itms/prototypes/tsn_atm.html

A list of four standards documents relating to ATM accessibility can be found on the Trace Center cite at http://trace.wisc.edu/world/kiosks/itms/atm_stds.html. Australia, Canada, the US and the UK all have standards, drafts or guidelines which address this topic to some degree.

To demonstrate the potential of Java for accessibility, Sun have been demonstrating an ATM that operates on the Java language, and which adjusts its user interface features according to the preferences stored on a Java ring (an alternative to a smart card). For more information on the Java language, see section 7.3 below.

A very interesting futuristic ATM prototype is being trialled by NCR in Canada. Named Stella, this ATM has no screen, no card reader and uses voice synthesis to present information to the customer and voice recognition to process the user’s spoken requests. According to the Stella news release found at http://www.atmmagazine.com/news.html?article=1304 Stella uses the customer’s Iris to recognise the person, then retrieves previous transaction details making commonly conducted transactions very rapid. It was unclear from the article whether this Stella prototype could deal with a person with no visible iris, such as a person with artificial eyes.

3.4 Internet Banking

From the banks’ perspective, Internet banking is clearly the way of the future. Whereas it might cost an average of $3 for an over-the-counter transaction, $1 to $1.50 for ATM transactions, $1.50 for a telephone banking transaction (accounting for non-local calls), it costs an average of 12 cents for an Internet banking transaction.

The ABS found that in the three months leading up to February 1999, 2% of adults use the Internet to pay bills or transfer funds, as opposed to less than 1% the previous year.

In April this year, research firm www.consult found that the number of Australians using online banking services had tripled since June 1998, and more than 145,000 Australians now regularly use such facilities.

Most respondents used Commonwealth Bank's Internet services but the number using Westpac's online services grew at the fastest rate over the year.

The research found that although users prefer the browser-based approach to online banking, that they also like some of the additional features often offered by online services which require special client-side software to be downloaded. From an accessibility perspective, this preference for browser-based access will hopefully mean that this is the direction to be taken by most banks over time. This is demonstrated by St.George and Advance bank now using browsers.

Because many people like to do their banking from the office, browser-based approaches have the big advantage of not being potentially locked out by company firewalls, another driver towards browser-only solutions.

Internet banking (if accessible) offers many advantages to some groups of people with disabilities, but in some of its present forms it isn't accessible to a large number of people in this group.

Many Internet banking services are very visual and aesthetic in design. This can hinder accessibility, particularly for people who are using voice output for their computer.

A secure Internet connection is required in order to bank on-line. Some of the browsers commonly used by people who are blind or vision impaired (e.g. most versions of Lynx) don't support secure (SSL) transactions. For an explanation of SSL, see section 4.9 below.

Some banks require special programs to be installed on the customer's computer, (sometimes termed client-side software) but in many cases such programs aren't accessible to voice output software. The Commonwealth Bank is a case in point. Some Internet banking services also require the user to be using one of the two popular browsers in order to access their service. Whether this is because of specific functionality of their site, or just lack of awareness of other browsers varies from organization to organization. Whatever the reason, if you don't use Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, then such sites won't let you proceed past the opening screen.

This means that pwWebSpeak and Lynx can't be used for these applications, even though they are commonly utilised by blind and vision impaired customers. St.George Bank's Internet banking service is one example of a service that discriminates based on browser used. This site is extremely visual in format and cannot be accessed using screenreading technology.

Both the Commonwealth Bank and St.George Bank require the user to enter his/her password on a virtual keypad. This keypad appears at different locations on the screen, and cannot be accessed by people using screenreader technology. Furthermore, although ATMs and telephones use the telephone keypad layout the St.George Bank virtual keypad adopts the adding machine keypad layout – unfamiliar and confusing to many users, whether disabled or not.

The potential benefits of Internet banking services include:

§ Brochures, advertising and pricing information can often be accessed online;

§ Recent transactions and past statements may be accessible, in an accessible form. Generally, because of the layout of printed statements, they can be difficult to scan with optical character recognition software.

§ People who are deaf-blind and who also have the required equipment and computer skills could independently undertake banking tasks and access their transaction records.

§ People who are home-bound can conduct banking without the need of physically getting to the branch

§ When and if digital cash technologies increase in wide use, it will be possible to use Internet banking as a home-based ATM, adding value to a smart card or to a virtual wallet stored on your PC, which can then be used for day-to-day or Internet purchases.

For all these benefits to be made available to people with disabilities, it will be necessary that banks adopt the recommendations for accessible web design as proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C. These recommendations have been formulated by experts working within the Web Access Initiative (WAI) a domain of the W3C.

Unfortunately, this group has not yet had an opportunity to do significant work specifically relating to Internet-based E-Commerce, though in principle, its recommendations can be applied to E-Commerce applications.

A particular challenge to banking and finance websites for people with disabilities, is the tendency to represent data visually and in tabular form. For example lists of account balances, banking statements, stock listings etc. Over time, browsers and screenreaders are expected to communicate more closely in order to offer improved access to tabular information of this kind. Statements are an example of tabular data which is regularly displayed on an Internet banking site.

Some banks allow the user to download statements in a machine-readable format which can be examined in more detail off-line using a financial/accounting package or using a spreadsheet program such as Excel. This facility is of substantial benefit to blind and vision impaired customers because the information is much more accessible and manageable using such applications software than it is in its paper form or online. St.George Bank is one example of a bank that offers statements in downloadable formats, but the site itself is inaccessible.

In the United States, Henter-Joyce has worked with CitiBank to (in their words) offer "unparalleled access" to CitiBank's Internet banking product for users of Henter-Joyce's Jaws for Windows and Magic screenreader and screen enlargement software. CitiBank in the United States now offers an 'accessibility' option from its opening web-page screen, and has also simplified the user interface for that section of the site. Henter-Joyce has assisted by adding extra pronunciation rules to its JAWS exceptions dictionary, for improved speech output, and has been providing technical and user guidance to CitiBank as to the best ways to make the site more accessible.

The researcher attended a presentation by both organizations on this modified service, but unfortunately both the presentation and the summary paper were primarily aimed at cross promoting both companies products, more than offering information and incites into the modifications that were made to the site.

As of March 1999, CitiBank was only offering this service in the United States, but stated that it may be offered in other countries in time.

A brief description of this venture can be read at: http://www.dinf.org/csun_99/session0246.html, titled 'Banking on the Internet: Utilizing JAWS For Windows and MAGic With Citibank On-line Banking'

This site could be a good starting point on which to base accessible banking locally.

The Bank of Brazil has also done some work with Microsoft and another developer of adaptive technology to make their Internet banking service available to people who are blind or vision impaired. This is the first service to make use of newly developed synthetic speech equipment which can speak Portuguese.

3.5 Accessing Financial Information, Statements Etc.

As has been discussed elsewhere in this document, paper-based documents including brochures and statements are difficult to read and difficult to access using optical character recognition software.

When this information is made available online, it can offer opportunities for efficient access to the information. However, as explained in Section 11.2 below, documents made available only in this format can be cumbersome to access for people with disabilities and the accessibility of the documents can be quite variable, depending on the approach adopted to produce the PDF document.

Whenever PDF files are made available, the same information should be available in other more accessible formats such as HTML, XML, RTF and ASCII.

Recently the Australian Federal Reserve Board voted to issue for comment proposals that would permit financial institutions and others to use electronic communication to provide federally mandated disclosures to consumers. Thus the proposals would allow banks to provide pricing schedules online, and (after receiving consent from customers) financial institutions would be able to make available other disclosures in an online format (either via email or via a website).

The Board also voted to issue for comment an interim rule for Regulation DD that would permit depository institutions to provide disclosures electronically on periodic statements of account activity.

The press release from the Federal Reserve Board can be found at www.bog.frb.fed.us/BoardDocs/Press/BoardActs/1999/19990818/DEFAULT.HTM

4 USING THE INTERNET TO GO ONLINE

Most modern discussions of E-Commerce only focus on the Internet aspects of the technology. Although E-Commerce exists outside the Internet domain, it is clear that the ubiquitous nature of the Internet has become the ideal and logical environment for the majority of electronic business interactions, particularly when these involve the public.

Until recently, the lack of security on the Internet, the diversity of browsers in use, limited up-take by the community and the speed of communications from point to point (available band with) all discouraged viable electronic business over the Internet - but this is now changing rapidly.

In this section the role of the Internet will be examined from a variety of perspectives; but its implications for people with disabilities will be covered in particular.

Australia ranks third (behind Finland and the US) in per capita up-take of the Internet. For this reason, and as the ABS statistics summarised below demonstrate, the Internet is fast becoming a vital way of life for many Australians.

It is therefore important to ensure that the Internet that is being developed is an inclusive environment, rather than one which locks out a significant proportion of Australians – people with disabilities.

The following potential access benefits of provision of information and services through the internet are listed in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) paper titled ‘Issues Paper: Accessibility of electronic commerce and other new service delivery technologies for older Australians and people with a disability

§ “The internet can provide an effective means of access for people whose disability or age makes it difficult for them to get to premises where services or information are provided

§ Many people whose disability makes it difficult to handle or read paper pages can use a computer, for example with a modified keyboard or with voice control

§ People who are blind or have vision impairments can use appropriate equipment and software to gain access to documents in electronic form and read them in Braille, audio or large print form

§ Deaf people or people with hearing impairments can be provided with ready access to captioning or transcription of sound material.

§ Deaf people and people with hearing or speech impairments can use e-mail, including recently emerged instant messaging e-mail services, to avoid barriers in communicating by phone or telephone typewriter (TTY). ARPANET, the first Internet, in fact came into being in the United States with the help of Vinton Cerf, who is hard of hearing. Reportedly, his hearing impairment and the fact that his wife is deaf were factors in his role in creating e-mail.

§ Internet based video conferencing technology could be used to provide more convenient and economical access to sign language interpreting services for Deaf people in a manner similar to the Telephone Interpreter Service for spoken languages, as well as access to direct and/or relayed sign language communication in other contexts.

§ Emerging web-based technologies (such as the "babelfish" translation service available from the search site AltaVista) offer the prospect of greater equality and convenience of access and participation for people who are not fluent in English.

By itself, however, provision of a service or a document through the World Wide Web, or other internet facilities including e-mail, does not guarantee accessibility.”

4.1 Internet Usage Statistics

Content in this section was taken from a summary press release published on June 30 1999 by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This information is updated quarterly.

Full Details are in Use of Internet by Householders, Australia, February 1999 (Cat. No. 81 47.0) (available from ABS Bookshops. The main features and the full press release are online at http://www.abs.gov.au )

In February 1999, nearly 1.3 million households (18% of all households) had access to the Internet from home. This is an increase of 50% (423,000) over February 1998.

Nearly 3.2 million households with a home computer at February 1999, an increase of 10% (287,000) over the February 1998 estimate of 2.9 million households.

Almost 90% of Internet households accessed the Internet frequently from home (once a week or more);

§ 40% accessed the Internet daily,

§ 38% two to six times a week, and

§ 10% once a week.

In the 12 months to February 1999, nearly 5 million adults (37% of Australia's total adult population) accessed the Internet compared to 3 million (23% of all adults) in the 12 months to February 1998.

In February 1999 the most frequently reported sites for Internet access were

§ Work (2.5 million people),

§ Home (1.7 million),

§ A neighbour's or friend's house (1.5 million), and

§ TAFE or tertiary institutions (1 million).

Of adults who accessed the Internet at home 86% did so frequently, compared with 68% of adults accessing the Internet at work and only 26% at sites other than home or work.

Proportionally, in February 1999

§ 18-24 year olds still had the highest level of Internet use (65% compared to 42% for February 1998),

§ Males still accessed the Internet more than females (39% and 35'% respectively compared to 26% and 19% for February 1998), and

§ More adults in capital cities accessed the Internet than in other areas (42% and 27% respectively compared to 28% and 14% for February 1998).

E-Commerce findings included:

480,000 adults used the Internet in the 12 months to February 1999 to make an estimated 1.9 million purchases.

The types of goods purchased via the Internet included

§ Books/ magazines (41% of Internet shoppers),

§ Computer software/ equipment (40%),

§ Music (20%),

§ Clothing and shoes (11%),

§ Holidays (8%),

§ Tickets to entertainment events (6%) and

§ Sporting equipment (2%).

By comparison, in the 12 months to February 1998,207,000 adults used the Internet for shopping.

The survey showed that in the three months to February 1999 -

§ 2% of adults used the Internet to pay bills or transfer funds,

§ 2% used an electronic information kiosk to pay bills,

§ 39% used the telephone to pay bills or transfer funds,

§ 64% used EFTPOS, and

§ 71% used an ATM.

In comparison, in the three months to February 1998,

§ Less than 1% of adults used the Internet to pay bills or transfer funds,

§ 29% used a telephone to pay bills or transfer funds,

§ 58% used EFTPOS and

§ 66% used an ATM.

In February 1999, 556,000 adults (7% of all employed adults) were able to access an employer's computer from home through a modem. An estimated 444,000 of these (80%) had an agreement with their employer to work from home compared with 137,000 in February 1998.

4.2 Getting Connected

There aren't really any statistics of how many blind, vision impaired and other disabled people have Internet access. And even if there were, these statistics wouldn’t tell us how many people with disabilities would wish to access the Internet if it were more accessible to them, and if it was easier to learn and use. Although those people with disabilities who do use the internet, probably do so extensively, there are a large proportion of people with disabilities who don't have the finances, technology, skills, training or confidence to do so.

For a good coverage of groups of people who experience barriers to internet access, see a summary of the “Access Issues” section and full transcripts from the “Access Issues” section of the recent UK online thinktank titled ‘Boosting the digital Economy – a Thinktank’. The full thinktank report is available online from http://www.iib.com/reports/iib-vtt.htm the Access Issues summary is at http://www.iib.com/reports/iib-vtt-page3.htm and the full transcripts are at http://www.iib.com/reports/iib-vtt-page7.htm

In the past, blind and vision impaired Internet users had a choice of two connection methods – Shell account access (historically preferred) and PPP accounts which required windows skills and windows-based adaptive technology.

Historically, Shell accounts were the only means of Internet access, predominantly before the Internet became popular to the masses. Because Shell accounts were entirely based on text output (they couldn't display graphics) they lent themselves extremely well to people who were using text-oriented screen-reading technology.

Today, the number of available shell accounts continues to dwindle and the support for Shell accounts is almost impossible to obtain from any Internet service providers (ISPs). Remaining Shell account users are generally die-hard technical users who still predominantly use MSDOS or who have migrated to the Unix variant known as Linux.

Another group of people who still need to use shell accounts for basic e-mail and Internet access are those people who have adaptive technology which is not Windows-based. Users of Braille Lites, Braille ‘n Speaks, Keynote Companion and similar products are presently unable to access the internet in any other way than through a shell account. A significant number of these people have information access needs that are met quite adequately by their portable device, and also want to make use of e-mail and the internet. For the reasons explained in this section, this is becoming more difficult.

Newer generations of devices such as these will definitely move to PPP-based internet access, but existing customers are not likely to be able to move over to PPP unless they expend significant funds on product upgrades.

Internet services from America Online (AOL) and CompuServe are alternatives to the shell and PPP-based services offered by conventional ISPs. Because of the very visual and graphic nature of AOL, it is not very accessible to people who are blind or vision impaired. Although many CompuServe features are accessible, users do experience problems with online discussions and other facilities of the service. For this reason, blind and vision impaired Internet users tend to prefer PPP-based or shell-based Internet access services.

A very concerning Internet service provider development in the US was recently reported on the net. In order to ensure that no unauthorised access could be made to accounts, all customers of the ISP were issued with a hand-held screen-only device which displayed a unique number every minute. When the user logged into the ISP, they would be prompted to enter this unique number. If the number didn't match, the login wasn't authorised. Obviously, for customers who cannot read this device, access to the site would be impossible.

This is a good example of how, what may seem to be a simple and harmless security measure, could have profound effects on a user with a disability. If the device manufacturer had been considering access, they could have also inexpensively manufactured a reduced number of the units which could optionally speak the number in a digitised (recorded) voice.

4.3 Selecting a browser

4.3.1 Lynx

The Lynx program (a text-based browser) and Pine (a text-based e‑mail program) are tools commonly employed by Shell account users. Lynx in particular offers excellent access to many websites, but most versions don't incorporate SSL Internet security which is required for almost all Internet E-Commerce transactions including online banking.

Lynx is generally made available without SSL support for people outside the United States, due to the restrictive encryption export laws imposed by the US government. Versions of Lynx containing SSL support are available from Europe, but compilation and installation of Lynx can be a somewhat involved process.

Lynx, because it is a free program which is developed and supported only by voluntary programmers on the Internet, lacks many of the latest facilities and protocols supported by the major windows-based Internet browsers. Additionally, many Internet service providers don't install SSL-based versions of Lynx on their systems, and don't have the most up-to-date version of Lynx, Elm and other popular programs available, making it difficult to benefit from the most up-to-date facilities on the web and, particularly E-Commerce facilities.

4.3.2 Internet Explorer and Netscape

The way of the future is clearly PPP-based Internet access – which lends itself well to the graphical 'look & feel' the web is now characterised by.

Until recently, there wasn't really any high quality speech access to Windows-based browsers such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Netscape Navigator, but recent efforts by Microsoft and screenreader developers have lead to high-quality browsing with speech and Braille output under Windows.

4.3.3 pwWebSpeak

Another browser with considerable uptake by people who are blind or vision impaired is pwWebSpeak, a self-voicing browser developed by The Productivity Works. Unlike Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, this browser does not require installation of a Windows screenreader, and it has been designed specifically to allow non-visual users to navigate and listen to webpages in a very accessible and intuitive manner.

The most recent release of pwWebSpeak includes SSL E-Commerce support, allowing secure Internet connections to be established when using this browser.

One of the activities of this E-Commerce project is to work with The Productivity Works to beta test their latest browser releases which contain SSL technology for Internet E-Commerce sites such as Internet banking, online purchasing and the like.

Future revisions of this document will report on the results of this testing and collaboration.

The Productivity Works have also developed a product called pwPhone. This product enables webpages to be browsed using nothing more than a touchtone telephone.

4.4 Learning to Use Windows and the Web

In this section access to the Windows environment is discussed as well as web access under windows. Understanding of the Windows operating system is usually necessary, prior to going online, because it is difficult for a blind person to learn web access via the leading browsers without a sound understanding of using a Windows-based computer. PwWebSpeak (described in the previous section) is a web browser alternative which doesn’t require intensive knowledge of how Windows works.

Just as computing metaphors moved from text-based operating systems such as MSDOS and Unix, so too webpage design has moved from predominantly textual access to a visual centric environment for visual presentation of information. Recent research has found that whereas most Internet activity was historically text-based, now, more than 60% of net traffic is now to and from websites, and that of this, nearly three quarters is graphic images.

There has also been a shift away from the focus of accessibility predominantly being centred around adding special hardware and software to a computer workstation, to accessibility now being measured by the ways in which information (such as webpages and online documents) being in formats which are clear and accessible.

Historically, It was generally recognised that as computing became ever more visual that the ease of learning and access for a person who isn't visual (for example a person who is blind) became correspondingly more difficult to conceptualise and learn. This was in part due to the way in which the visual systems originally abandoned keyboard access, relied on the mouse, and had little correspondence with text-based models of computer user interaction. Because the screenreading software wasn't very mature, and because Windows and applications offered very few clues about why they were doing various things on the screen, a very good understanding was required by the blind user of the visual layout and underlying philosophy of windows programs.

Fortunately, this trend is slowly changing, and the operating system and the applications are more frequently exposing the intent of their visual presentation in ways that can be understood by screenreader software and better understood by blind users. The problem is still a long way from ideal, but improvement is gradual and steady.

One of the significant advantages of a visual environment like windows (both for sighted and non visual users) is that once the initial principles of operation and navigation have been mastered, subsequent applications are much easier to learn, due to sharing of code and user interface concepts.

4.5 Accessing Websites

An increasing proportion of web-posted material is either impossible to access, or is very difficult to access for people with disabilities. In her recent paper Cynthia Waddell summarises this problem as follows:

“The problem for screen readers is that inaccessible webpage design either hides the text within images, frames, applets or animated GIFs or renders the text unintelligently in table, columnar or Portable Document Format (PDF). Even online forms are [can be] inaccessible especially when designed to prevent keyboard navigation and input. Whether the form is posted for school or event registration or online banking or shopping transactions, people with visual and/or mobility disabilities are [often] faced with a significant barrier to participation.”

Unfortunately, both for native Windows applications, and for Internet websites, it tends to be the most innovative, leading-edge and creative applications that are the most difficult to learn and use for people who are blind or vision impaired. This is because many of these programs break with some of the established conventions, in order to present information in a more visually appealing, effective or impressive visual format. It therefore also follows that since E-Commerce applications and webpages are some of the most leading-edge and innovative services, that these are often some of the most difficult or impossible applications and sites for a blind person to access or use.

At present, the consistency of design and user interface now regularly found in Windows applications, doesn't currently exist in the world of the Web. Industry Standards efforts by the W3C (http://www.w3.org), accessibility recommendations from the WAI (http://www.w3.org/wai), HREOC’s Advisory Note on web accessibility (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/standards/www_3/www_3.html), AusInfo’s online document guidelines (http://www.ausinfo.gov.au/guidelines/index.html ), and input from sighted and non-visual users alike, will all create push for increased consistency and accessibility.

There are corresponding factors, though, which are resisting and working against consistency of the 'look and feel' of websites. These include: marketing departments that require their products and services to be differentiated from the competition, artists and designers who want to add aesthetics to their sites, and leading-edge developers who want to explore new (and potentially more efficient) approaches to user interaction.

In principle, if all features of a webpage are designed using the recommendations published by the Web Access Initiative in May 1999, then all the features of the site should be useable by people with disabilities.

The reality, though, is a little different. For one thing, the WAI guidelines focus on what functionality is needed in a site for it to be accessible, but presently there is less hard information on how to achieve that functionality in some areas. This is because different technologies are at different levels of development, and the current WAI recommendations are working to support the lowest common denominators. Although the WAI is working with web authoring tool developers, most developers to day don’t offer tools to assist the web author to make a page or a site accessible, and often make it cumbersome to make changes where problems are identified. Of the vast array of authoring tools that do exist, most can’t be used effectively by people with a variety of disabilities including people who are blind, vision impaired or who have difficulties using the keyboard or mouse.

In September 1999, the Web Access Initiative published a working draft of guidelines for web authoring tools. Following the guidelines in that document (when formalised) should ensure the following:

1. The authoring tool is accessible;
2. The authoring tool generates accessible content by default; and
3. The authoring tool encourages the creation of accessible content.

All these goals are critical for the future of E-Commerce participation by people with disabilities, since E-Commerce sites are some of the most complex and leading-edge developments on the web.

The W3C Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (working draft) produced by the WAI can be found at: http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-AUTOOLS

And it isn’t only blind and vision impaired Internet users who are experiencing difficulties with developments on the web. Cynthia Waddell reports that people with specific learning disabilities are also finding that they can no longer access webpages audibly with screen readers, people with cognitive disabilities are becoming lost due to the absence of navigation elements at websites, and people with hearing disabilities cannot access the content of audiostreaming and video clips posted on the Internet (due to the absence of captioning).

The problem is a huge one, and one which all of us - Government, industry and individuals - need to work on together to ensure an inclusive future for all Australians and others. Cynthia Waddell eloquently sums up both the problem and the urgency with which action is needed, before its too late.

“Whether the digital barrier is the inaccessible design of Internet/intranet websites, Internet service provider “portals”, incompatible browsers, or inaccessible web‑based platforms for online business, the trend is growing and must be addressed at the infancy of the digital economy. Already, exciting electronic and information technology features are emerging in the areas of information appliances, realtime conference participation, audiostreaming telephone voice browsers, search engines, news groups, chat rooms and 3D imaging. Unless functionality solutions for accessibility are addressed today, the state of the digital divide tomorrow may be impossible to overcome”.

As already stated, many Australian websites (both Government and non Government) are inaccessible either in terms of the site structure or the information provided by the site. In its recently released issues paper on Accessibility of electronic commerce and other new service delivery technologies for older Australians and people with a disability, the Commission notes that

“it would be fair to say that many areas of Commonwealth activity are vulnerable to complaints under the Disability Discrimination Act because basic information is not available in accessible formats”.

The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has developed an informative Advisory Note on web accessibility, which can be found online at http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/standards/www_3/www_3.html

Another excellent resource for testing the potential accessibility of webpages is “Bobby” available on line at http://www.cast.org/bobby Bobby is a program developed by CAST (Center on Applied Special Technology) designed to check Webpages for accessibility, report on problem areas and suggest possible improvements. Bobby is available online, or it can be downloaded, which can be useful for testing large numbers of pages off-line. Bobby is updated to keep in line with the latest recommendations of the WAI, and in its more recent versions requires the developer or tester to answer questions before reporting a page as accessible.

Another set of Australian guidelines which make some reference to accessibility and useability of webpages are the ‘Draft Best Practice Guidelines for Legal Web Sites’ prepared by the Law Foundation of New South Wales and the Legal Standards Information Council. At present these guidelines primarily focus on content and attribution issues, more than accessibility from a disability perspective, but are a good starting point. These guidelines are online at http://www.lawfoundation.net.au/lisc/recommend/bpguide.html

4.6 Making Purchases on the Web

There are several factors which determine whether a person with disabilities will be able to purchase goods on the web, based on their skills, and their combination of screenreader and browser.

If the Internet shopping site is accessible, then Internet shopping offers an excellent service to people with disabilities, particularly in view of the difficulties many people with disabilities have in getting to physical shops or carrying goods.

When the site isn’t accessible, some of the problem areas can include:

§ Does the site require specific browsers to function?

§ Is its visual layout too complex to easily understand and navigate?

§ Does it provide text descriptions of graphics and products, or just pictures?

§ Can the catalogue of goods available for purchase be accessed easily and efficiently?

§ Can goods easily be added to a shopping cart, and can the contents of the cart be reviewed?

§ Can order forms including those requesting credit card details be entered with confidence and accuracy?

§ Does the person's browser support SSL security for safe transmission of credit card and other personal data?

§ Can the user carry-out all the stages of the process, or will they find that after spending significant time and energy putting an order together, that they can't complete the transaction?

à If the person can't be assured that they are ordering what they intended to buy, and if they can't be assured that they are paying what they think the goods cost, then it would be unwise to proceed with the transaction.

à The ordering stage of the process may just be inaccessible, requiring the user to abort the transaction after having spent significant time and effort identifying and selecting goods for purchase.

à Alternatively, some websites may decide that the browser in use is not appropriate for secure data transmission, and may therefore halt the ordering process prior to transmission of credit card details.

An important factor for E-Commerce accessibility relates to the way that an E-Commerce site is developed. While the core site might be developed in-house, or by a contractor, it is usual that a third-party E-Commerce module will be employed for all the E-Commerce-specific features of the site. These might include credit card verification, virtual shopping cart facilities, product catalogue modules etc.

Even if a company genuinely wishes to make its site fully accessible, if it is reliant on third-party software for E-Commerce that is not inherently accessible in design, then the E-Commerce components of a website will not be available to people with disabilities. Regrettably, this means that the ability to make a site suitably accessible may be predicated on the E-Commerce strategy and existing contracts which the site owner has with other third-party companies.

An important area for future work is to identify some of the leading online E-Commerce solutions developers, and encourage them to consider accessibility in their design. Unfortunately, E-Commerce is one of the largest growth areas on the web, so this task would be quite substantial indeed.

4.7 Internet Shopping Resources

To better inform Internet shoppers in Australia about their rights and the risks of online shopping, the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (with the Commonwealth Treasury) has produced a series of fact sheets on consumer issues about electronic commerce (available in print, or on line through an index page at http://www.dcita.gov.au/cgi-bin/graphics.pl?path=3815 ) including:

1: What are the benefits and risks of shopping online?

2: What type of information should I look for in a Website?

3: How safe is it to use my credit card?

4: Do I have to pay sales tax or duties on imported goods?

5: What happens to my personal information?

6: What if something goes wrong with my purchase?

7: Banking on the Internet (published 20 August 1999).

Two other Braille resources which have just been released by National Braille Press in the United States at http://www.nbp.org are a book titled ‘Shop Online the Lazy Way’ by Richard Seltzer (a well-known Internet speaker/evangelist), and a companion volume “Musings of an Addicted Internet Shopper” by Barry Scheur and Judy Dixon. The first book is aimed at the general public and is a comprehensive resource for Internet shopping sites, issues and possibilities. The second, briefer volume is a blind person’s perspective on Internet shopping, focusing on a few excellent and accessible shopping sites. As these products have just come to market, their applicability to the Australian context is unknown, but it is likely that much of the material will be applicable globally.

4.8 Emerging Internet Developments

In this section a few emerging internet trends are discussed because they have significant implications for people with disabilities and E-Commerce. This section is general in nature and is not meant to be comprehensive.

A variety of new E-Commerce-related activities can now be undertaken via the web including online voting, buying, selling and reviewing stocks and shares, online auctions, planning and purchasing travel, comparing banking and home loan rates & features, software which finds the best price for goods, and more.

Two interesting and potentially very promising areas of development in relation to the web and consistency/accessibility of information are intelligent agents and front-end web services which perform online actions on the user’s behalf. Examples include a service in the US which allows a person to integrate all his or her banking, even when its across different banking institutions. Using a consistent interface, funds can be transferred, bills paid, loan interest rates compared – essentially a service which integrates all of a person's finances into one consistent interface.

There are now Internet sites which will search the web for the best prices for products one wishes to purchase, and soon there will be agents that help the user choose where to purchase from, based on price, place of manufacture, environmental and social justice preferences, while also maximising the buyer’s points for buyer loyalty schemes etc. Of course for such intelligent software to do its job well, the web itself will need to be more consistent, both in terms of entering the site and finding information, through to the actual means used to mark-up site and product data.

As is discussed further in sections 7.2 and 7.3 below, many devices other than the PC will be connecting to the web and automatically carrying out financial and shopping tasks.

At present, some online CD, grocery and book stores go out of their way to be inconsistent, to avoid price comparison software from determining their pricing. These kinds of efforts will also result in the user being required to accordingly jump through more hoops, in order to directly access the site and its information. It is hoops such as these that often present access barriers and added confusion for people with disabilities. Over time, market pressure is likely to result in these kinds of anti-competitive approaches losing favour, and shoppers and price comparison software will end up discarding sites which won’t allow their prices to be compared.

Already, internet search engines provide a consistent front end to the web, and products such as Web Ferret provide an accessible, consistent and efficient front end to multiple search engines - avoiding the need for a user to learn complex, inconsistent and potentially inaccessible web-based software user interfaces, as well as saving them time.

Over time it is expected that these front ends will become more intelligent, and will work on behalf of the user, not on behalf of the seller, leading to a more simple, more effective and potentially very accessible set of interfaces to the web, tailored to each person’s preferences and abilities. Often termed intelligent agents, such software would be available with a variety of user interface options for the user, including a comprehensive ‘voice in, voice out’ interface, and could be accessible using nothing more than a standard landline or mobile telephone.

As the web becomes more crowded, as advertising and promotions continue to take more and more of online browsing time, as the number of online sellers continues to multiply, the need for intelligent agents – able to select the useful from the irrelevant, the good value from the bad, the quality product evaluation from the marketing hype – will become an essential aspect of internet access. Obviously, any software, person or broker who works on another person’s behalf, is going to put some kind of bias on the information that is accepted and that which is thrown away. Already, search engines are frequently accused of falsely directing people to commercial sites who pay for advertising on the search engine, and of course a vast quantity of supposed information on the web is really just disguised advertising. In the future, it will be the products which genuinely look after the end user’s individual interests that will win out, but these types of products could still be some time in coming.

Generally speaking, people with disabilities are less anonymous than their non-disabled counterparts. For this reason, the considerable privacy implications of web access, online shopping habits, the topics of online searches and the like are particularly relevant. For more information about privacy, and internet issues in general, see Roger Clarke’s excellent online E-Commerce resources at http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/

As with any PC-based or Internet services, accessible design is the key to these and other emerging web-based services being accessible to people with disabilities.

4.9 Security of Information on the Net

Standard Internet information exchange is very insecure. This means that e‑mail and any details that a person transmits to another user or company could be read from one or more points during its travel to the intended destination. This applies both to data sent to and received from standard webpages and electronic mail messages.

Because of fraud and unauthorised credit card use, as well as other personal information that may need to be transacted over the net for E-Commerce purposes, it is important to have secure methods for sending information over the net that can't easily be read or tampered with by unintended parties. Encryption is the term used to describe technologies which scramble data in ways that stop unauthorised persons from reading that data.

The most widely used technology on the Web for this purpose is commonly known as SSL (Secure Socket Layer). New versions of SSL are now being developed to provide enhanced security facilities. A more recent version of SSL is now called TLS(Transport Layer Security) but SSL is the main protocol and name that netscape originally used for its proprietary implementation, and the SSL term has stuck.

If people with disabilities are using text-only browsers such as Lynx, then they may not have access to SSL security, and thus may not be able to access online E-Commerce sites and services.

For several years MasterCard, Visa, IBM and others have been developing and promoting the SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) protocol which was a response to Internet security concerns. More recently, though, its becoming clear that SSL-based solutions are being adopted by most Internet E-Commerce sites and the majority of banks both in Australia and abroad. At present, SET implementations are few and far between.

Credit card security concerns were fuelled by a variety of security breaches involving crackers gaining access to credit card details held online by Internet service providers and other businesses. Recent information published by credit card companies shows that although Internet-based credit card transactions only make up 20% of all transactions, over 50% of complaints about unauthorised use pertained to Internet-based card usage.

For more information about SSL and SET, see 'E-Commerce: A White Paper' at http://www.wisc.edu/arch/teams/ecommerce/white_paper.html

7 SOME EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

Future versions of this report are likely to provide expanded information in this section.

7.1 Information Kiosks (Information and Transaction Machines)

An Information Kiosk is a public terminal which contains a multimedia computer and usually employs a touch-screen for user interaction.

Store directories, product catalogues, ticket selling, information provision, online forms completion, job searching, phone number look-up and a wide variety of other activities can be offered by such devices.

In the three months leading to February 1999, The ABS found that 2% of Australians used an information kiosk to pay bills or transfer funds.

The problem of accessibility for information kiosks is widespread, both in Australia and in other countries. For people who are blind or vision impaired, accessibility of public information kiosks is a particular issue due to the highly visual nature of both the information presented, and the visual feedback methods required to select and enter information e.g. the heavy reliance on touch-screens and the absence of a keyboard or keypad device.

Activities such as voting, looking up a name or information in a building or store directory, or finding out tourist information may need to be performed using information kiosks, since this information either isn’t readily available in other ways, or it may need to be obtained immediately.

Over time, the distinction between an Automatic Teller Machine and an information kiosk will continue to blur, making access to cash and financial services potentially more complex. Currently, it is due to the relatively limited range of services and options offered by current ATM units that allows some people with disabilities to perform some ATM transactions with reasonable levels of success. Of course, as discussed in section 3.3 above, this access is still difficult, may result in additional expense, and usually relies heavily on the person’s memory.

It has been argued that much of the information and services offered by current information kiosks either can or will be available from other sources, e.g. the internet and over the telephone. This may well be the case, but nevertheless, the whole purpose of information kiosks is their convenient location, easy access and the provision of information that is relevant to the location and situation at hand. Relevance, convenience, location and ease of use are the goals of most information kiosks; their role is to provide information and services, without relying on the user to have specialist knowledge, experience or internet access.

The Trace Center which is based at the University of Wisconsin has been working for several years now on methods of making information kiosks accessible and effective for most groups of people with disabilities. For example, it has developed a variety of user interface approaches designed to provide information, and accept input from different groups of people with disabilities including people who are blind, people who have reduced vision, people who are deaf, people who are hard of hearing, people who are deaf-blind and people with physical disabilities.

The US Access Board has sponsored the Trace Center to develop a report on the accessibility of information kiosks, which can be found on the Access Board website at http://www.access-board.gov

The Trace Center website at www.trace.wisc.edu contains a wide range of information on accessible design and information kiosk research being conducted by that team and others. Kiosk specific Trace Center information is at http://trace.wisc.edu/world/kiosks/

Dr. John Gill and other European researchers have written several documents discussing accessibility requirements of publicly accessible terminals (such as information kiosks). Their latest report on this subject is titled ‘Access Prohibited? Information for Designers of Public Terminals’ which covers the following topics:

Public access terminals, Design-for-All policy, The numbers of people with disabilities, The problems with public access terminals, Locating and accessing a terminal, Card systems, External features, labels and instructions, Screens and interaction, Operating instructions, Keypads, Touch-screens, Retrieving money, cards and receipts, Typefaces and legibility, Checklist, Publications, Websites, Standards, Pan-European disability organizations and other sources of information.

This comprehensive document is online at http://www.eyecue.co.uk/eyecue/pats/

In 1999 The Productivity Works announced its commercial solution to information kiosk accessibility, for kiosks based on HTML. Working with Quad Media The Productivity Works can now provide cost-effective accessible kiosk solutions which incorporate synthetic speech, recorded speech, large print, touch-screens and which fully implement the Trace Center’s kiosk user interface recommendations. The package allows access by people who are blind, vision impaired, and people with restricted mobility. More information on The Productivity Works kiosk products can be found at http://www.prodworks.com/kiosk/kiosk.html

An alternative approach to information kiosk access for people with disabilities is the use of a personal hand-held device which is optimised for the individual’s particular situation. This one device would be the eyes and ears of the person, when interacting with ATMs, information kiosks, ticketing machines, video machines, set-top-boxes and the like.

Standards and protocols being investigated for access to devices are discussed on the Trace Center web site at http://www.trace.wisc.edu/world/irstds.html

An excellent recent Trace Center document titled ‘EZ Access Strategies for Cross-Disability Access to Kiosks, Telephones, and VCRs’ is online at http://www.trace.wisc.edu/docs/tide98_keynote_ez/keynote.html

7.2 Screen and Web Phones

A newer development in some countries is the use of screen-phones for financial and banking transactions. In addition to audio, such telephones also have a visual display, which is able to present information such as account balances, menus etc. Various trials have been conducted using such phones in Australia, but their uptake is not high at present. With the likely increase in smart card usage, such telephones are expected to become more commonplace. The most common variety of screen phones use the ADSI protocol (Analogue Display Services Interface) which was developed by Bellcore in the United States. Most of the work carried out thus far on making screen phones more accessible relates to this ADSI protocol.

More recently, the once humble telephone has also been extended to a web-browsing and e‑mail access device. Instead of setting up a computer – with all its requisite software and potentially conflicting hardware – a web phone only needs to be connected to the telephone line, and is usually ready to go. Of course, if the user has a visual disability, the chances are that today the device won’t be accessible to him/her.

A recent publication from the Royal National Institute for the Blind (UK) on the design of accessible Screen and Web phones is at http://www.rnib.org.uk/wedo/research/sru/phones.htm

7.3 Smart Appliances

The telephone is just one example of a new generation of ‘smart’ appliances. It is expected that a wide range of what used to just be humble domestic appliances will soon get a lot smarter. Smart refrigerators, smart microwaves, smart toasters, smart televisions, and even smart garbage bins are just a few of the prototypes being trialled by enterprising companies. These appliances might contain touch screens, local area network communications, bar-code readers, voice output and even voice recognition.

Several protocols, compact operating systems, and industry-driven standards are vying for a role in this new generation of smart appliances, but at present these are largely incompatible with one-another, not fully developed, and the accessibility options presently don’t look very promising.

Some of the principles central to smart appliances are: intercommunication between smart appliances, a user interface that is focused on the actual tasks which need to be carried out, a move away from multi-function “do everything” computers to simple and easy-to-use appliances, as well as optional online access to the internet for ordering and price comparison.

A press release discussing NCR’s Microwave Bank, a smart microwave oven is online at http://www3.ncr.com/press_release/pr091098b.html This prototype product developed by NCR’s Knowledge Lab, based in London, England, - NCR's facility for developing the future of banking and electronic commerce - incorporates a computer touch-screen in its door, a barcode scanner, voice recognition and voice verification, finger print identification, iris scanning, password protection and internet connectivity, as well as an intelligent agent that learns your cooking, shopping and banking habits.

Some of the main uses of the Microwave Bank include the following, taken from the press release cited above:

“Need to check your bank balance or pay your bills? By touching a simple symbol on the screen you can find out if you're in the red or black. The NCR Microwave Bank will also let you transfer money from another account, to ensure your balance is healthy. … You can also pay bills, set up direct debits, check credit card balances and access your account 24 hours a day - all from the hub of your home.

Don't have the right ingredients? The NCR Microwave Bank has a bar code reader allowing you to keep track of items that need to be replaced. Just swipe your empty bottle of ketchup across the reader and it will register that you need to buy a new one. Once your 'shopping list' is completed, you can send your Microwave Bank shopping to any of the major supermarkets offering an on-line service. The device will arrange for your shopping to be delivered to your door and it will also find you the best deal amongst all the supermarkets, taking into account discounted products and loyalty reward programs.

Decided to go on a diet? The Microwave Bank will get to know more about your preferences and lifestyle each time you use it, thanks to an intelligent agent which stores and processes all the requests you make. If you've started to buy reduced fat yogurt, the Microwave Bank can suggest that you try skimmed milk too; or, when it knows your holiday is approaching, it can remind you to invest in some sun block - even flagging up reduced rates on particular Web sites.”

But to date, the majority of accessibility efforts by computer and software manufacturers have been directed to PC accessibility. Microsoft, with its huge share of the PC market, has been pressured to ensure that accessibility is part of its strategic product development processes. Java (from Sun Micro Systems), similarly, is an emerging technology for which accessibility has become a major priority. Java is discussed further in the next section. With the development of competing operating systems and protocols for use in smart appliances, accessibility isn’t guaranteed, and the competition between venders may work against accessible design at the outset.

7.4 JAVA

Java is a computer language developed by Sun Micro Systems. Its achieved extraordinary support by the computing industry due to its ability to run on a vast array of computing platforms, from Unix machines to PCs, Macintosh’s, IBM mainframes, hand-held personal organisers, public terminals such as ATMs and even household appliances such as cable TV set-top boxes, microwave ovens etc.

In the world of the web, Java can be in the form of Java Applets (discussed shortly) and Java Script. Java script is common on websites, and doesn’t always pose accessibility problems, depending on what the commands in the Java Script are trying to do. Java script can be run on the user’s computer (client-side) or on the website proper (server-side). For more information about Java Script, see the WAI guidelines and techniques documents.

Of great importance in the medium to long term is the accessibility prospects for the Java language. Because Java can run on a wide range of machines, and because many of these platforms won’t even have accessibility facilities installed on them, it has the potential to create a range of access barriers.

Fortunately, a variety of efforts both within Sun, and within IBM are working to ensure that Java (from the outset) is an environment oriented towards accessibility, so long as Java developers follow some commonsense guidelines, and so long as they use the standard Java tools which are available from Sun and/or IBM. If companies use other custom application development tools, then it is quite possible that their applications will not be accessible.

IBM has developed a product it calls the Java Self Voicing Kit. This is essentially a screen-reader environment which is written in native Java, which can run on a variety of computer platforms. It offers additional features for the user to customise how applications operate – similar to scripts or profiles used in other screen-reading applications. These user-scripts are called Perks in the IBM Self Voicing Kit, and are also written in Java.

Another approach to accessing java for users of PCs is to develop a bridge between the Java environment to the screen reader environment. Demonstrations of a simple bridge being used by both Henter Joyce’s Jaws for Windows and Synthavoice’s Slimware Windows Bridge were demonstrated in March 1999. Up-coming versions of these and other screen readers are expected to provide a bridge to the input and output from a Java Virtual Machine running on the computer.

A full explanation of the Java language and how accessibility is implemented is beyond the scope of this discussion paper, but for readers wishing to read more on this topic, the following three documents contain excellent information on the subject.

A paper by Sun about Java, what it is, how it works, and how accessibility can be implemented - Java Accessibility : A Primer on the Java Platform and Java Accessibility at http://www.dinf.org/csun_99/session0002.html

A paper by IBM describing their Java Self Voicing Kit and Java accessibility approaches - Open Door to Accessibility: IBM's Self Voicing Kit Technology for Java at http://www.dinf.org/csun_99/session0098.html

The most current version of IBM’s Accessible Java guidelines for Java developers are maintained at: http://www.austin.ibm.com/sns/access.html

7.5 Windows CE

Windows CE is an operating system for hand-held computers which was developed by Microsoft. CE stands for Compact Edition – because Windows CE is a cut down version of Windows 95.

A large number of portable computing devices are based on windows CE, and it is fast becoming the default operating system for any portable computer that needs to interact with mainstream windows software.

There are a variety of other operating systems which are vying for market share, but WindowsCE and Java-based platforms seem to be in the majority for now.

Several adaptive technology developers are working on Windows CE-based accessible systems, but these are still in development.

Compaq (the second most recent owner of the DECTalk synthetic speech product, has now ported the DECTalk to Windows CE offering some interesting possibilities.

8 AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT INFORMATION AND TRANSACTIONS

This section focuses on those aspects of access to Government services that have an E-Commerce component. It should be noted, however, that the Government's approach to this area is in the wider context of the 'Information Economy' not just E-Commerce specifically.

For a comprehensive coverage of the broader topic of information access in Australia, the reader is encouraged to consult a separate Blind Citizens Australia project report 'Everybody's Business' which was prepared by Gunela Astbrink of GSA and Associates. This report can be found at: http://www.bca.org.au/ebdybus.htm

In the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) paper titled ‘Issues Paper: Accessibility of electronic commerce and other new service delivery technologies for older Australians and people with a disability’ at www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/current_inquiries/ecom/ecommerce_issues_paper.htm David Mason discusses the vital need for Government information to be accessible to all Australians (including people with disabilities) as follows:

“The philosophy underlying the Disability Discrimination Act is that people with disabilities have the same rights to participate as does the whole of the community. As many people with disabilities point out, this entails responsibility to be an effective citizen. Access to Commonwealth information is vital to the exercise of those rights and responsibilities.

The Disability Discrimination Act provides at section 29 that there shall be no discrimination on the grounds of disability in the administration of Commonwealth laws and programs. One of the most important ways to eliminate discrimination is to provide accessible information. Although efforts are being made in many quarters it would be fair to say that many areas of Commonwealth activity are vulnerable to complaints under the Disability Discrimination Act because basic information is not available in accessible formats.

The development of electronic formats is not the only way to improve accessibility of Commonwealth information but it is an important opportunity. Many barriers to access are entrenched in physical infrastructure that is the legacy of history and expensive and slow to change. This need not be the case in developing accessible on-line services because new and open standards are emerging. It should be the Commonwealth's aim to present as much information as possible in electronic formats that take advantage of these open standards.”

However, access to information is predominantly a one-way process. For people with disabilities to really be a part of Australian society they need to be able to interact with Government with equivalent effectiveness as their non-disabled counterparts. This topic is discussed further in section 8.6 below.

There are a wide variety of Commonwealth and State Government initiatives designed to provide online access to government services, provide government information online and promote wider up-take of E-Commerce and participation in the Information Economy.

A good summary of these (current up to late 1998) can be found in an Australian E-Commerce briefing paper prepared by NOIE for the 1998 OECD E-Commerce conference and can be accessed at http://www.noie.gov.au/oecd/overview4.html

A more recent NOIE report titled ‘Australias E-Commerce report card – report’ on Australia’s E-Commerce progress through until April 1999, can be found at http://www.dcita.gov.au/cgi-text/webdriver?MIval=dca_dispdoc&ID=3789

The most recent coverage of this issue, with a specific E-Commerce and disability perspective is the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) paper titled ‘Issues Paper: Accessibility of electronic commerce and other new service delivery technologies for older Australians and people with a disability’ at www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/current_inquiries/ecom/ecommerce_issues_paper.htm

8.1 Stated Government Commitments

The following fragments were extracted from a background paper prepared for the OECD ministerial conference on E-Commerce held in late 1998. Accordingly, the timeframes and the scope of the stated commitments may have changed since the preparation of that document.

The full document can be found at http://www.noie.gov.au/oecd/overview4.html

Australia is committed to the following undertakings.

* Delivering all appropriate Commonwealth services electronically on the Internet by 2001. This will complement - not replace - existing written, telephone, fax and counter services.

* Establishing a Government Information Centre through OGIT [now OGO] as a single point of access to information about government services, with the first stage to be completed by the third quarter of 1998. The Government Information Centre will complement existing initiatives from agencies, including the Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink and the Business Information Service, to provide services to Australians through call centres. In consultation with State governments, the centre will facilitate single window access to government information and services. The centre will be developed in partnership with the private sector.

* Establishing electronic payment as the normal means for Commonwealth payments by the year 2000. By 2000 the Commonwealth will move, in partnership with banks, to full implementation of Financial Electronic Data Interchange as the normal means for paying suppliers.

* Establishing a government-wide intranet for secure online communication by the end of 1998. This will facilitate the more timely exchange of information between government agencies, the Parliament and Ministerial Offices. It is expected to provide a full multimedia capability to agencies to communicate and secure access to external networks. Australia will work with industry in developing innovative solutions.

8.2 Stated Government Strategic Directions

In December 1998, the Australian Prime Minister announced the Government's strategic directions for the Information Economy – containing ten key priorities for action. The Commonwealth is working to develop action plans against each of these priority areas in consultation with the States and Territories. It will direct its efforts to achieve these priorities with assistance from Australian industry.

Of most relevance to people with disabilities is priority 1, but priorities 9 and 10 also have indirect and long-term implications for increased access. Priority 1 states:

1. Maximise opportunities for all Australians to benefit from the Information Economy.

In section 2.1 of the report the Government says the following about the first priority:

Australians will be able to use the Information Economy to make social and business contacts; gain knowledge, education and training, assistance and income; access government services; and go about their everyday business with much more speed and convenience. These benefits will be profound for Australians whose disabilities or disadvantage make such transactions difficult, for example people with disabilities, senior citizens, and people from a non-English speaking background.

The government is committed to ensuring that all Australians have open and equitable access to information available online, and that, through education and training, they are able to contribute creatively to that stock of information. This commitment must include the most vulnerable in Australian society-entailing a national approach to infrastructure, to ensure there are no pockets of disadvantage among different categories of regional and rural users. This will play an important part in securing a strong democratic, informed and inclusive society.

Of course the intent of this priority is extremely clear and positive, but what is not at all clear, or stated in this document is actually "how" the Government will achieve these outcomes.

In July 1999, the National Office for the Information Economy released an updated document titled ‘A Strategic Framework for the Information Economy’ found at http://www.noie.gov.au/strategy/strategic_summaries.htm In this document one of the actions against this first priority is to conduct more research into the benefits of widespread online participation, possible barriers to segments of the community, and some solutions.

Until very recently, with the exception of the 'AccessAbility Grants Program’ funding, there wasn’t any concerted or coordinated effort by the Government to identify the difficulties in achieving the accessibility requirements of the first priority, or a strategy in place to ensure that the priority could be fully met. As can be seen in section 8.3 below, the recently announced HREOC E-Commerce Reference is a very positive and welcome development.

In reading the paragraphs quoted above from the Prime Minister’s Strategic Directions report, it still seems that the real focus is regional access, and that although disabilities are listed, it is mostly assumed that this group will automatically benefit from Government moving online. Clearly, this will not be the case without accessibility being made a key priority and requirement for all online Government efforts.

The Government’s clearly stated ‘light touch’ approach to the Information Economy – a technology-neutral policy, and leaving most of the implementation decisions to industry – lends further weight to the fear that various sectors of the Government don’t have a clear handle on accessibility and the Strategic Directions reports clearly demonstrate that accessibility generally isn’t a priority for the E-Commerce Industry or NOIE – which in more recent times seems to almost exclusively be focusing on promoting E-Commerce to business and industry.

On a daily basis new Government websites are appearing, and the majority of these are not designed with accessibility in mind.

Several of the key Government documents which can be found on the website of the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) are completely inaccessible. Firstly, many of them are only provided in PDF (Portable Document Format) (a format that is cumbersome and difficult to access for people who are blind and vision impaired) and secondly, the PDF files are prepared in such a way that they can't be converted into an accessible form.

The website itself has a very confusing layout and is extraordinarily difficult to navigate using a screen-reader.

If the websites of NOIE, (the body charged with bringing Australia into the new information age) and DCITA (the Government Department we would hope is demonstrating 'best IT practice') are not designed with consideration of accessibility, then we are only left to speculate on how industry and other Government bodies will fare in this regard.

Following is a summary of the ten priorities taken from Section 1.6 of the report which is titled "A strategic framework for the Information Economy :identifying priorities for action" December 1998

1. Maximise opportunities for all Australians to benefit from the Information Economy.

2. Deliver the education and skills Australians need to participate in the Information Economy.

3. Advance the growth of a world class infrastructure for the Information Economy.

4. Increase significantly the use of electronic commerce by Australian business.

5. Develop a legal and regulatory framework to facilitate electronic commerce.

6. Promote the integrity and growth of Australian content and culture in the Information Economy.

7. Develop the Australian information industries.

8. Unlock the potential of the health sector.

9. Influence the emerging international rules and conventions for electronic commerce.

10. Implement a world class model for delivery of all appropriate government services online.

8.3 Recent Developments and Documents

The Commonwealth has developed two excellent documents which promote and advise in relation to the accessibility of online documents and webpage accessibility. These are:

§ AusInfo’s Guidelines for Commonwealth Information in Electronic Formats, at http://www.ausinfo.gov.au/guidelines/index.html and

§ The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Advisory Note on web accessibility at http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/standards/www_3/www_3.html

8.4 Telstra and the Government

Until recently, Telstra was working with the Australian Government to offer an electronic payments system for use by Government departments and suppliers named Transigo. In January 1999 this contract, which was to continue until June 2001, was cancelled by both parties.

Telstra is also developing a new generation product originally called the multimedia payphone. These phones will in effect be multimedia information kiosks incorporating a touch-screen, a smart card reader, and, as the name suggests, regular public telephone facilities.

Initially, Telstra’s focus on people with vision impairments did not appear to be forefront in the trial and development of the product. More recently, subsequent to significant lobbying by Blind Citizens Australia and others, Telstra appears to be working more concertedly to make at least some of the services accessible to people who are blind and vision impaired. Telstra did carry out significant consultation with accessibility specialists internationally to address the needs of people with low vision and other physical disabilities.

The challenge of developing a product which is accessible to a broad cross-section of people is significant, but in view of Telstra’s plans for widespread deployment of the product, it is important that people who are blind and vision impaired are not locked out from access. This is particularly important considering that this group is unable to access information in paper from, and considering that information provision is the key purpose of these kiosks.

Based on the information that Telstra is a major player in the International Chip Cards Alliance, (it hosted this body's convention in 1997), its utilisation of the Chipper smart card platform and more recently its sign-up with the Mondex electronic purse platform, Telstra is clearly working to place itself at the forefront of widespread smart card utilisation in Australia.

It is quite likely that Telstra is hoping to have in place an infrastructure which allows it to offer a widespread electronic cash implementation which will use its planned ubiquitous multimedia payphone network to add electronic cash value to its smart cards. If this is the case, then its very important that people with disabilities can independently access electronic cash through use of the payphones. In view of the reticence with which the banks have encouraged up-take of smartcard-based electronic purses, Telstra may indeed be well placed to achieve success in this endeavour.

It is also expected that Telstra will sign up a variety of government and non-government information providers who will provide content which can be accessed via Telstra’s multimedia payphone network.

8.5 Centrelink Developments

On several occasions over the last few years, Centrelink (formerly the Department of Social Security) has considered the use of smart cards to improve the delivery of funds and more efficient records access. Issues including privacy and more recent uncertainties about which smart card technologies should be considered have lead to inaction until very recently.

Recently it was announced that Centrelink was working in cooperation with the majority of States and Territories to agree on the most suitable smart card platform to provide a single card to meet their diverse needs.

A recent trial by Centrelink in Western Australia now allows a person to use their telephone to obtain information about their Centrelink records through use of an interactive voice response facility. This same information is quite possibly also going to be available via the Telstra multimedia payphones in the future.

The Internet is another format that Centrelink customers can use to access (and eventually update) their information.

At present all these means of information access are read-only. It will not be possible to allow people to update their details unless there are reliable and efficient means for them to remotely identify themselves e.g. through a Centrelink smart card or equivalent, which authenticates that the person is who they claim to be.

If Centrelink did use Telstra's multimedia payphones to make information and services available to their clients, then it is conceivable that Centrelink payments could be transferred directly to a Centrelink-issued smart card which also contained an electronic purse. It is unclear whether the termination of the Transigo electronic payments system between Telstra and the Commonwealth would hinder such a service.

Smart cards and electronic payment systems are discussed in detail in a companion ‘Smartcard Accessibility’ document which can be found at http://www.bca.org.au/smartcard.htm

8.6 Government Transactions and Completing Forms

In addition to a range of Government information being made available online, the Government will also be providing a variety of services online for Australians.

Both the Australian Tax Office (ATO) and the Commonwealth's Office of Government Online (OGO) are currently implementing digital signature technologies which are designed to ensure 1) a system for authenticating that people are who they say they are when transacting electronically (authentication), and 2) that the information they send cannot be tampered with (data security). If this electronic signature technology doesn't have an accessible user interface, then many Australians with disabilities will be barred from engaging in such transactions. For example, the Australian Taxation Office expects over 100,000 Australians to lodge their returns electronically during the 1999/2000 financial year involving this digital signature technology.

The Government has embarked on Project Gatekeeper – an effort to enable all government departments to communicate securely within the next few years. Interestingly, New South Wales has recently commenced using a rival (and incompatible) digital signature system.

Possible online services involving interaction between citizens and Government might include: online registration for services, online access to personal information, online requests for information, online registrations, online Government bill and fines payment, completion of tax returns, voting and the like.

These services will only be accessible to people with disabilities if a variety of issues are considered, tested and addressed by those departments and contractors responsible for implementing these new online services.

For example:

§ Will it be possible for people who are blind or vision impaired to complete online forms with confidence and convenience? (The current offerings from Adobe for online forms completion are not accessible.

§ Will it be possible for blind and vision impaired people to independently carry-out searches of Government databases for relevant information, and effectively access the resulting documents that are found? Some Government documents which are online at present are in formats that are difficult or even impossible to access by this group.

§ Will the Government-approved methods for individuals to identify themselves online be accessible and useable by all groups of people with disabilities? What aspects of Project Gatekeeper impact on user interface design, which could help or hinder accessibility?

§ Will the methods adopted by the Australian Government for online electronic payments and funds transfers be accessible to people with disabilities?

11 BARRIERS AND OPPORTUNITIES OFFERED BY ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

We are moving into an era of electronic publishing, electronic and online books and in the future an era of paperless libraries.

At present books and documents printed on paper present significant problems to people who are blind because this group is unable to “read” the wealth of information available in print. People with some physical disabilities are unable to handle, manipulate and use printed books (for example may have difficulties turning pages and selecting books from a shelf, desk etc.)

The digital age offers many possibilities for increasing access to information in accessible formats – information which was once only available in hard-copy print. In principle, any document prepared using word processing software, any information stored in a database or spreadsheet, any information stored online in machine-readable format – can now be made available in any mix of high-quality synthetic speech, reasonably accurate Braille, or large-font print.

As is discussed in the next section, copyright and protection of authors’ and publishers’ rights is a key concern leading out of the move to digital production and the potential for perfect replication of digital materials.

We are also starting to see a move towards small units of information, such as poems, articles, short stories, commentaries etc being made available to an audience for a very small (or not so small) fee. The processes being developed to manage the licensing, access and reading rights for digital information are generally known as Digital Rights Management.

Combining digital information and the Internet and digital rights Management offers potential models for selling units of information to an Internet customer for single-use or rights to access the material long-term.

Just as there is in the software industry,so too in the publishing industry there is a distinction between physical products which a customer can buy and digital information which a customer is able to license. Such information is not generally owned by the customer, but the customer has rights to access and use the information in specific ways.

Because the paper-based libraries that currently exist are generally inaccessible to people who are blind or vision impaired, the online alternatives potentially have good accessibility for independent searching and access to information. This may mean, however, that this group pays more to access information which sighted counterparts could less expensively buy in paper form or legitimately borrow on paper from a library. This assumes that the Digital Rights Management System and the E-Commerce payment system for an information resource on the Internet are accessible. Also, it is necessary that the information itself be stored in an accessible format. This is discussed in more detail below.

Just as many sighted people prefer to print all or part of an online document in hardcopy form, so too, Braille readers need the ability to produce Braille transcriptions of all or part of documents they gain access to. Blind and vision impaired readers who do not use Braille may similarly wish to store all or some of the information into a portable reading device, such as a RoadRunner, Braille Bookworm, or one of the several speech and Braille output personal organiser/note-taker devices.

While a lot of effort is going into online access systems and page-perfect printing options for sighted readers, most online reading software tends to be designed in such a way that the material cannot be exported for reading within a portable access device or in a form facilitating braille or large print production.

In February 1999 the Texas Education Agency issued a comprehensive document titled “Report on the Computer Study Project” which made a variety of recommendations relating to accessibility of education materials. Amongst its recommendations were the development of both a CD-ROM-based demonstration text book and an Internet-based online text book which can independently be accessed by people with disabilities without the need for assistive technology. It requires that by 2003 all CD ROM-based textbooks or materials adopted by the Board of Education comply with all the minimum accessibility requirements of the World Wide Web consortium.

Similarly, three recent Bills in the State of California require that many text books for educational use be made available to the State in a form which can be made available in Braille and other alternative formats.

As is discussed in Cynthia Waddell’s ‘the Growing Digital Divide’ report, distance education technologies and materials also are at high risk of being inaccessible to people with disabilities. The California Community Colleges - pursuant to the compliance requirements of the US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights - have now published guidelines for the accessibility of long-distance learning resources which are online at http://www.HTCTU.FHDA.EDU/dlguidelines/final%20dl%20guidelines.htm The California Community Colleges is the largest higher education system in the US serving a population of over 4.1 million students.

Closer to home, the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind and Deakin University are collaborating on a project titled “Electronic Provision of Information Resources to Students who have a Print Disability”. This project will look at ways and means by which library information can be made more accessible to the 60 students registered with the university who have a print disability.

Although moves such as these are promising, as already discussed, recent electronic publishing developments may be withdrawing some of those possibilities as digital systems for ensuring copyright and copy protection explicitly limit the ways and means by which a person with a print disability can access multimedia electronic books and online information.

A very positive development has been the publication by AusInfo of a guidelines document titled ‘Guidelines for Commonwealth information published in electronic formats’ at http://www.AusInfo.gov.au/guidelines/index.html containing recommendations and information about producing Commonwealth documents for online delivery. AusInfo was formerly the Australian Government Printing Service. Blind Citizens Australia provided input to this document, and the document contains several references to print disabled readers. It is expected that, in time, this document will become a companion volume to the next edition of the AusInfo style guide, which is expected to be available at the end of the year 2000.

11.1 Copyright Law and Standards Efforts

Some of the latest developments in copyright law make it illegal to try and access an electronic document other than through the provided viewing software. This means that attempts to decrypt or convert the information into text or Braille may actually be against the law in some countries, and probably Australia. This could result in enormous wastage of time and effort required for re-keying or scanning print texts.

In recognition of this important issue, Sacramento - Governor Gray Davis has signed legislation, AB 422 by Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), requiring publishers of instructional materials to provide the University of California, the California State University or the California Community Colleges with an unencrypted electronic format of any printed instructional material requested for use by disabled students. The electronic format must be provided in a timely manner and at no additional cost.

The drive for these extreme copy protection approaches and associated legislation is predominantly coming from WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and is believed to be orchestrated by influential for-profit publishing groups such as major record companies, Hollywood film producers and publishing houses. Whereas the concept of Copyright was originally developed to protect the rights of individuals and to add to the social community of information, most of the influential players now direct their pressure at increasing revenues and restricting the access rights for individuals, whether disabled or not.

Recent copyright law changes in the US have lead to a wide range of titles due to enter the public domain, now having their copyright further extended into the future.

Many of the recently developed software and hardware viewing solutions offered for modern electronic publications aren't at all accessible to people with disabilities, and others are very cumbersome. Most assume that the person has a PC (or sometimes a Macintosh) or a proprietary electronic book reader. These assumptions don't always apply to people with disabilities. A large proportion of blind and vision impaired people use portable note-taking devices which contain storage memory for electronic text and information. Similar in concept to PDAs (personal Data Assistants) these devices also act as mobile book readers, using synthetic speech and Braille output to present information stored in them.

An excellent source of information relating to e-book (electronic book) developments is the E-Book-list mailing list. To subscribe to E-Book-list, send an e‑mail message to majordomo@exemplary.net, and place the following line in the body of the message
info E-Book-list

Fortunately, several significant standards efforts are underway to improve accessibility of electronic book materials. These include the 'Open E-Book' standard (an industry standard being driven by Microsoft and the key electronic book reader developers, Open E-book is XML-based; DAISY (Digital Audio System) www.daisy.org; and the efforts of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), www.w3.org and its Web Access Initiative (WAI) domain www.w3.org/wai

Because of the fear by publishers that they may lose intellectual property rights (such as copyright) by making electronic documents available to people with disabilities, researchers in Europe are developing a system that combines two key technologies – an Electronic Copyright Management System (ECMS) and accessible document design. The concept behind this project is that publishers can licence the required information to people with disabilities who can't access it in its primary formats, and that this package will enable those people to also access the document in an effective manner.

Unfortunately, one of the big disadvantages of this approach is that it imposes greater restrictions on blind and vision impaired readers than equivalent sighted readers of print books are subjected to. Those limitations are primarily imposed because of the significant encryption and security software components of this very complex system that is PC-bound.

In an era of open standards and data exchange, this technology seems excessively proprietary and publisher-oriented, even though it purports to be enabling blind and vision impaired readers.

11.2 Australian Copyright Law Reform

The content in this section has been taken from the recently released issues paper prepared by David Mason of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. It is an excellent explanation and summary of the recently proposed changes to Australian copyright.

“The Attorney-General and the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts announced on 26 February 1999 the release for public comment of a draft Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Bill 1999.

The central aim of the reforms is to ensure that copyright law continues to promote creative endeavour and, at the same time, allow reasonable access to copyright material on the Internet and through new communications technology. : Daryl Williams AM QC MP, "Copyright reform: into the digital future" 12 February 1999, available at http://law.gov.au/ministers/attorney-general/articles/Futures.html

As noted by the commentary released with the exposure draft of this Bill,

Digital technology and the growth of computer networks, particularly the Internet, have posed challenges to the protection and enforcement of copyright throughout the world. Creators and owners of copyright material are concerned to be able to protect their copyright on the Internet. Users of copyright material, such as libraries, archives and educational institutions, are concerned about being able to obtain reasonable access to copyright material on the Internet. http://law.gov.au/publications/copyright_enews/digital_agenda/commentary.rtf

The Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Bill was introduced into the Parliament on 31 August 1999. The Attorney-General's second reading speech of 2 September 1999 is available on line by searching the Australian Parliament House site http://www.aph.gov.au . Some extracts are included here for convenience.

The reforms will update Australia's copyright standards to meet the challenges posed by rapid developments in communications technology, in particular the huge expansion of the Internet. This extraordinary pace of development threatens the delicate balance which has existed between the rights of copyright owners and the rights of copyright users. The central aim of the bill, therefore, is to ensure that copyright law continues to promote creative endeavour and, at the same time, allows reasonable access to copyright material in the digital environment.

This bill and the recently passed Copyright Amendment (Computer Programs) Act 1999 are integral components in the government's strategy to develop a legal framework that encourages online activity and promotes the growth of the Information Economy. The Information Economy is developing from the revolutionary new opportunities for the use, storage and transmission of information being made possible by digital technology.

... The centrepiece is a new broadly based technology-neutral right of communication to the public. The new right will subsist as an exclusive right in literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, and in sound recordings, films and broadcasts.

To complement the introduction of the new right of communication to the public, the bill will introduce an important package of exceptions to that right. As far as possible, the proposed exceptions replicate the balance that has been struck in the print environment between the rights of owners of copyright and the rights of users. The extension of this balance into the digital environment was one of the fundamental principles underlying the 1996 WIPO [World Intellectual Property Organization] treaties.

The existing exceptions for fair dealing will apply to the new right of communication to the public. The fair dealing exceptions permit the use of copyright material for purposes including research or study, criticism or review, and reporting news.

The new legislation also extends the existing exceptions for libraries and archives to the reproduction and communication of copyright material in electronic form. The library and archives provisions have been carefully reviewed to ensure that an appropriate balance is achieved between the rights of copyright owners and users. The definition of `archives' has been clarified to include museums and galleries which satisfy certain requirements currently specified in the act. This will allow such bodies to take advantage of the exceptions applying to archives. The extended exceptions in the bill will enable libraries and archives to undertake a vital role in providing reasonable access to copyright material in electronic form, whilst at the same time protecting new commercial markets for such material online.

The reforms also extend the existing statutory licences in the Copyright Act for copying by educational institutions to the reproduction and communication of copyright material in electronic form. The new statutory scheme for the electronic use of copyright material by such institutions has been drafted in broad terms to enable it to adapt to future technological developments. The key to the new scheme is flexibility based on agreement between educational institutions, such as universities and schools, and the relevant collecting societies. I strongly urge, in the interests of both copyright owners and users, that the parties work together to reach agreement on issues such as process and the rate of equitable remuneration under the new scheme. However, the bill provides that, where agreement is not possible, the Copyright Tribunal has new jurisdiction to determine these matters.

The bill establishes a similar statutory licence for the electronic use of copyright material by institutions assisting persons with print and intellectual disabilities.

This Bill, if passed and implemented, would appear to address a number of difficulties which educational institutions and students, in particular, have experienced in securing equal access through digital technology to materials available in other forms, but it is unclear whether the exemptions for accessing password-protected documents include institutions providing services to people with print or intellectual disabilities”.

11.3 Portable Document Format (PDF)

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular file format developed by Adobe which is particularly well suited to presenting information on a variety of computer platforms, and with excellent replication of visual layout. PDF replicates the paper page on screen.

Unfortunately, PDF files frequently present significant difficulties to the reader who has a print disability, as well as requiring extra processing steps by the user before the information can be read. Depending on the visual layout and complexity of the PDF document, these additional processing steps often don’t provide an adequate representation of the information. For example many mobile phone and other software and equipment manuals can “technically“ be converted into ASCII, however, most symbols are omitted and the layout is often confused.

More recent versions of the PDF file format have facilities for presenting on-line forms which can be filled in by the person reading the form. Unfortunately, current versions of the Adobe software for producing and completing PDF-based forms are not accessible to people who are blind or vision impaired. Many jobs and electronic commerce transactions involve completion of online forms, for example in the past the US IRS (Internal Revenue Service) provided all its tax forms in PDF format – but these were not easy, and in many cases were impossible to access for many print disabled Americans.

Adobe's latest PDF file specification also allows PDF documents to contain digital signatures and to be digitally signed. Unless such signed documents can be directly read by blind and vision impaired users of the Adobe Acrobat software, then many jobs involving reading and validating such electronic forms would be denied to these people.

There is currently debate in Adobe regarding how it should handle protected or locked adobe documents. Adobe's file format supports the concept of locking a document from being saved – viewing only. People with disabilities have difficulty accessing the Adobe software, and at present some of the publicly available PDF to text converters ignore this lock flag. Non-disabled Adobe customers have strongly complained to Adobe that this circumvention of the in-built PDF security features is unacceptable to them. This means that future access modules from Adobe are likely to lock out accessibility in such cases where the author/publisher wants to lock access to the file to read-only.

Several companies are publishing electronic books using the PDF format. Some of these books are being produced with the lock flag set to protect copyright, resulting in restricted access to this information for disabled readers.

Many websites and electronic publishers are only making their documents available online in PDF format. Alternative versions of these documents need to be provided online along-side the PDF versions to facilitate equivalent access for people who are blind or vision impaired, and for anyone who doesn’t have access to a PDF browser. These alternative formats include ASCII, HTML, XML and RTF.

The web guidelines for the City of San Jose require that if PDF files are made available on a site, that alternative versions in ASCII or HTML are also made available.

The issue is not that PDF files should not be employed by publishers of information, but that the extracted text from such PDF documents is often inadequate for the reading needs of people with disabilities, so alternative formats of the information also need to be available, without the need for extra effort or searching.

A positive move on the PDF front is the recent inclusion of structural facilities in the latest PDF specification (version 1.3). This new functionality will (in time) enable a PDF document to contain both the particulars required to visually represent the document aesthetically, and the internal structural information about the document so that converters and future PDF viewers can present the document in more reliably accessible formats. The improved specification also allows alternative text descriptions to be added to graphics contained in a PDF document.

At present there are few tools for producing structurally-rich PDF documents, but a tool called PDF Baker is available from Adobe which converts style-based word documents in to structured PDF versions. At this stage, there are no publicly available PDF tools to enable such structured PDF documents to be converted into structurally rich formats for use by people who are blind or vision impaired. It is also important to keep in mind that these enhancements to the PDF format will have no positive impact what-so-ever for the huge base of existing PDF documents, and that it will be some time until an increasing number of documents are available which include structural mark-up.

A variety of tools exist to convert existing PDF documents to ASCII or HTML, and their results vary depending on the way in which the PDF document was created.

If a document has only been scanned into a PDF file, then it will be completely inaccessible to a person who is blind or vision impaired. Unfortunately, there is no means of establishing ahead of time, whether the document is accessible or not.

A free product assembled by Jamal Mazrui which can do bulk conversions from PDF to ASCII that runs in a Windows 95 or Windows 98 DOS Box can be found at: http://www.empowermentzone.com/pdf2txt.zip

An email service is also offered by the Trace center which can convert PDF documents to text and HTML. E-mail containing PDF files as attachments can be sent to the following addresses:

pdf2txt@sun.trace.wisc.edu and pdf2html@sun.trace.wisc.edu

Another service that offers a range of web-based file conversions including PDF can be found at http://www.gohtm.com/ however, This service will not convert protected PDF documents, for copyright reasons as discussed earlier in this section.

It is reported that Adobe are becoming more involved in the area of XML, as well as being members of Microsoft’s Open E-Book standard. Hopefully these developments will lead to quality access options for Adobe file formats in the future? XML is discussed in the next section.

11.4 XML

XML is the latest buzz word in the world of electronic publishing. A standard developed by the W3C, XML takes the best features of SGML and its small cousin HTML, to provide a powerful language with which to mark-up any electronic documents. XML is rich, powerful and is expected to be the primary standard for marking up text for books, Internet webpages, online documents, manuals and catalogues.

XML stands for extensible Mark-up Language. It is based on the 15-year-old text mark-up language SGML. It is gaining strong support due to its ability to be extended, allowing virtually any document to be described.

XML is the heart of Microsoft’s Office 2000 suite, and is the key to Office’s increased ability to prepare documents for, and directly access and operate on documents from the Internet.

Although, at present, XML appears complex and involved to publishers and others, a huge number of editing and publishing tools are under development which will completely hide XML’s complexity from the user. XML ensure that documents are described in terms of their structure e.g. headings and the kinds of information they contain. XML doesn’t describe the way the document will look, this role is handled by style sheets – documents that define how various components in a document will look on paper, on a computer screen, when produced in audio etc. XML therefore fully separates a documents content from the way it looks when printed – the key to reliable transcription into a range of formats, and essential for reliable computer interpretation of documents.

The move towards XML will result in increased opportunities for accessibility of documents in a variety of formats, including high-quality synthetic speech.

XML allows a document to be formatted once, and then made available on a variety of platforms and formats including a PC computer, Macintosh, portable hand-held personal data assistant, a webpage, a next-generation talking book machine, sent to a Braille translation system, and more.

15 TERMINOLOGY, ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

This section is not meant to be comprehensive, but it should serve as a quick guide to some of the acronyms, abbreviations and terms which are used throughout this document. Where possible, one or more URLs are provided to allow the reader to obtain more information on the term.

If you find a term used in the document which you think should be added to these definitions, please send any additional or corrected terms to the author at tnoonan@softspeak.com.au

Some good E-Commerce terms are explained by Roger Clarke in his webpage titled 'Roger Clarke's EC Definitions' at: http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/ECDefns.html

ABS – Australian Bureau of Statistics
the ABS website is at http://www.abs.gov.au

ACB – American Council of the Blind
One of the two national US consumer organizations representing people who are blind and vision impaired. ACB’s website is at http://www.acb.org

AccessAbility Grants Program
A Commonwealth Government program set up to fund and administer innovative research and development projects in the disability field and the area of online information access.
This report and project are being funded out of AccessAbility.

ADA – Americans with Disabilities Act

API – Application Programming Interface.
Contrasting with 'user interface' an API is a specified set of commands and formats describing how one computer program can communicate and exchange information with another program;

ATM – Automatic Teller Machine
Machines used by banks to issue cash to customers.

AusInfo (Formerly the Australian Government Printing Service)
AusInfo ensures Commonwealth Government information is readily available to the Australian Community. The Commonwealth has a responsibility to share information with the people of Australia. AusInfo assists Commonwealth agencies in fulfilling their obligations to disseminate information. AusInfo develops, sources and shares best practice in the production and dissemination of government information. AusInfo's administrative responsibilities relate to electronic and printed publishing, direction to government functions and Commonwealth employees, administrating Commonwealth copyright and the library deposit and free distribution schemes. AusInfo has recently published guidelines for the preparation of online Commonwealth documents.

BCA—Blind Citizens Australia
Australia’s national organization of people who are blind and vision impaired. BCA’s major activities are advocacy, information dissemination, peer support and advising the wider community. BCA also carries out projects such as this Accessible E-Commerce study. BCA's Website is found at: http://www.bca.org.au

Biometrics
The use of technologies which can 'read' and match a person's physical characteristics in order to reliably establish a person’s identity. Examples include retinal scans, finger and thumb print scans, voice print registration and (more recently) facial recognition;

Chip card
see "Smartcard" below;

CSIRO – Commonwealth Scientific and industrial Research Organization;

Digital Cash
One of several terms used to describe a variety of digitally-based payment systems that can act as a partial substitute for cash. Alternative terms include E-Cash and Electronic Cash. A broader term is Electronic Payment Systems. Most have been developed as a means of payment over the Internet, but digital cash isn't limited to Internet applications, and is also commonly stored on smart-card electronic purses. DigiCash and MiliCent are examples of Internet-based digital cash systems. A very good and concise article titled 'The Future of Digital Cash on the Internet' can be found at http://www.arraydev.com/commerce/jibc/9703-02.htm

DDA – Disability Discrimination Act
Australian legislation designed to reduce barriers to people with disabilities in Australia.

E-Banking – Electronic Banking.
In most cases forms of banking that don't involve face-to-face or over-the-counter transactions. (includes EFTPOS, ATMs, Internet Banking etc.);

E-Business – Electronic Business
A term which is often used in place of E-Commerce to describe the whole set of processes involved in conducting business electronically (such as over the Internet). IBM is a strong proponent of the E-Business term to replace E-Commerce. E-Business implies examining all the inter-linked business processes and models to provide an integrated and effective E-Commerce process;

E-Cash – Electronic Cash
see Digital Cash

E-Commerce – Electronic Commerce
”The conduct of commerce in goods and services, with the assistance of telecommunications and telecommunications-based tools.” – Roger Clarke.

EFTPOS – Electronic Funds Transfer at Point Of Sale
EFTPOS is now in very common usage in supermarkets, service stations and increasingly in taxis. It allows funds to directly be transferred from one's bank account to the vendor. Another term used for this process is debit card transactions. EFTPOS in Australia requires a telecommunications connection between the vendor and the banking system. In order to conduct an EFTPOS transaction one's magnetic stripe card is swiped and one's PIN is entered into the EFTPOS terminal.

HREOC – Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission administers federal legislation in the area of human rights, anti-discrimination, social justice and privacy. This includes complaint-handling, public inquiries, policy development and education and training. Cooperative agreements have been made with some state governments to provide for joint administration of state and federal anti-discrimination legislation. HREOC has recently announced a Reference into the impacts of E-Commerce on people with disabilities and older Australians. HREOC has also published an application note on accessible Web design. The HREOC website is at http://www.hreoc.gov.au Commission recently published

Information Kiosk
This is a term used to describe publicly available terminals which are commonly found in shopping centres, airports, public transport ticketing locations etc. Information kiosks are usually based on a multimedia computer, a touch-screen and employ audio and video to interact with the user. Information Kiosks are also termed Information Transaction machines (ITMs). Information kiosks are renowned for their inaccessibility to people with disabilities, particularly blind and vision impaired people.

Internet Banking, Online Banking
Performing account enquiries and banking transactions over the Internet. Usually this involves connecting to a bank's webpage, or running custom Internet banking software on your PC.

IVR – Interactive Voice Response
the term used to describe automated telephone-based information services, such as phone banking and automated telephone bill payment services.

Magstripe card – Magnetic Stripe Card
The credit and debit cards which are in common use in Australia are magnetic stripe cards. Because the magnetic stripe on such cards has very limited storage capabilities, there is little if any space available to store information in addition to the card owner's id and pin information. In contrast, one of the advantages of smartcards is their ability to store hundreds or thousands times the amount of data as can be held on a magnetic stripe card, including special requirements and preferences of the card owner.

Mondex
A company based in England which is 51% owned by Mastercard. Mondex is one of the more popular and talked-about smartcard electronic purses. Mondex has been selected by most Australian banks (and now Telstra) as the primary electronic purse platform. For a comprehensive discussion and independent analysis of the Mondex E-Cash electronic purse implementation, see 'Exploring Policy Issues of Electronic Cash' at http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/research/iprp/dipcii/workpap8.htm

NFB – National Federation of the Blind
One of the two national US consumer organisations representing people who are blind and vision impaired. NFB’s website is at http://www.nfb.org

NOIE – National Office for the Information Economy
[Taken from: http://203.9.218.13/aboutnoi.html and may not be entirely current]
NOIE is the National Office for the Information Economy, and comes within the ambit of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts
NOIE will develop, coordinate and overview broad policy relating to:
* the regulatory, legal and physical infrastructure environment for online services, including facilitating electronic commerce;
* ensuring consistency of Commonwealth positions for international form; and
* overseeing policies for applying new technology to government administration and information and service provision.
NOIE will help ensure an integrated approach to delivery of online policy.
As well as these aims, NOIE will have direct responsibility for developing strategies and policies to address the convergence of the Information Economy, information technology and telecommunications issues driven by the digital revolution.

OCR – Optical Character Recognition
The term used to describe software that can “recognise” printed letters and words and convert them into machine-readable form. Such software is usually used in conjunction with an optical scanner, allowing print information to be “read” from paper and then converted into other formats such as synthetic speech, large print or braille.

Screenreader
The term used to describe software designed to “read out” (or present in braille) the contents of a computer screen for use by a person who is blind, vision impaired or who has a reading disability. Screenreaders are available for MSDOS, Microsoft Windows, the Macintosh and some Unix platforms. Screenreaders usually work hand-in-hand with a speech synthesiser or braille display device in order to present computer information in an accessible format. One of the challenges for screenreading software is that they often have to “guess” what the meaning of visual information sent to the computer screen actually means, and try and convert this into a verbal format for the blind or vision impaired computer user;

SET - Secure Electronic Transactions
A set of protocols developed by the major credit card companies and IBM to facilitate safe transfer of credit card particulars over the Internet and other platforms. Unlike SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Internet connections, SET is a system involving all stages of the credit-card purchase process. However, the uptake of SET has been extremely slow and some analysts believe that SSL may well become the de facto security standard.

Smartcard
A credit-card sized plastic card with an embedded electronic circuit. Similar to a conventional magnetic stripe card, a smartcard contains an in-built micro-processor and memory. Most smartcards communicate with a smartcard reader by means of gold contacts on the card (contacted) though some (contactless) smartcards use radio frequencies to communicate with a card reader that is up to 15 cm away. Contactless cards have specific applications in transport, but also lend themselves well to users with disabilities.

SSL – Secure Socket Layer
A standard method for providing secure Internet connections for transmission of credit card details and other sensitive information. SSL is actually now changed to STL (Secure Transport Layer), but the name SSL has stuck.

URL – Universal Resource Locator
A defined format for specifying the location of a web resource, such as a webpage, or a document on the web. The newer term is URI (Universal Resource Identifier).

User Interface
The term used to describe the methods by which people and computers interact. User interface includes the output and input formats that programs generate and recognise. Depending on the user interface design of a program, computer software can be easy, difficult or even impossible for various groups of people with disabilities to access.

W3C – World Wide Web Consortium
The leading industry body responsible for developing guidelines and standards for the world wide web. The W3C has member companies including Microsoft, netscape, IBM, universities and other computer companies. The W3C website is at http://www.w3.org

WAI Recommendations
The web design recommendations published by the W3C and developed by its Web Access Initiative domain. The first public recommendation was published in May 1999.

WAI – Web Access Initiative
A domain of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) charged with developing recommendations for accessible web design. It has several sub-committees which are looking at guidelines for web authors, browser manufacturers, web design and testing tools etc.

Prepared By

On Behalf of

With Funding from

1.5 Project Scope – People with Disabilities

11.1 Copyright Law and Standards Efforts