It's been 30 years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law protecting
people with disabilities against discrimination.
Mark Greenfield is an experienced consultant and award-winning speaker who's been helping
colleges and universities improve their websites and digital properties for 30 years, much
of that time committed to web accessibility.
He joins Newspoint today for a look back and a look ahead to what the future holds for
accessibility as we embrace new technologies.
Mark, thank you so much for joining Newspoint today.
Thanks for having me.
What exactly is the Americans with Disability Act?
And why must organizations care about it?
So the American with Disabilities Act, which was signed in 1990, is a really important
piece of a civil rights legislation.
And I think that's what's important to remember that the ADA is about civil rights and human
rights that in the United States impacts over 60 million people and if people want a good
introduction to how the ADA came to be, I would recommend watching a documentary that
came out in March called Crip Camp, it was actually produced by Barack and Michelle Obama.
And it really highlights the struggles that people had to bring the ADA into being and
say, a really wonderful documentary and I recommend everybody watch that.
So in the course of my consulting work, I get asked a lot about why does the American
with Disabilities Act matter?
And there are really four primary reasons that organizations need to think about the
ADA.
The first is legal compliance, it is a law that everybody is required to follow.
And over the past few years, we have seen quite an increase in the amount of litigation
happening around the ADA.
In 2019, there were 11,000 cases brought in federal court related to the ADA.
Of those 11,000 cases, about 2500 were specifically related to web accessibility.
So it is something that legally every organization needs to be thinking about.
Even if there was no legal requirement, there are a lot of other reasons why this matters.
And, you know, first of all it impacts about 20% of the population.
So when we're talking about people with disabilities, it's a variety of disabilities, including
visual disability, such as being blind or having low vision, it's auditory disabilities,
people who are hard of hearing or deaf, it is motor disabilities, where somebody physically
can't get around or in the case of the web, might not be able to use a keyboard and mouse.
And then the final category, which is what a lot of people don't think about, are cognitive
disabilities.
So people with learning disability, so those kinds of things.
So when you take all of that together it impacts about 20% of the population.
And as the population gets older, that number is only going to increase so it really is
important in terms of the people that it impacts.
The third reason is that when you address accessibility issues, especially in the digital
world, you're actually making the user experience for everyone much better.
And a good example of this is with closed captioning.
So all of us are familiar with television, close captioning, you can imagine if you're
deaf or hard of hearing how important that is.
But research has shown that 85% of the people who use closed captioning are not deaf or
hard of hearing.
They're either in a loud, noisy bar where they can't have the TV sound turned up, or
they're in a library where the sound has to be turned off.
So when you address, you know, accessibility issues, you are often also addressing just
the usability and user experience for everyone.
And then the final reason and to me, one of the things that every organization needs to
think about is what I call organizational social responsibility.
When you think about accessibility and the ADA, it really is just the right thing to
do from both a moral and ethical perspective.
And I have seen a lot of organizations who have started to address this even in mission
and vision statements where they are explicitly saying that they want to talk about inclusion.
And one of the things I like about my position at the University of Buffalo is that I work
in the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
So my role really isn't, you know, as a web accessibility officer really isn't about technology.
It's about inclusion.
And I think that really sends the right message.
Well, as of the end of July, we're now 30 years into the ADA, what's the report card
on ADA and what could we be doing better?
So as I thought about this, I would give our response to the ADA a B, I think we have made
really good progress.
But right now, even though it is a legal requirement, I think there's still a lot of change that
has to come in society in terms of how we think about people with disabilities and really
thinking about inclusion.
So while we have made progress, I think there's a lot more work to be done.
There has been a lot of information over the last week about the ADA, given the 30th anniversary.
And one of the quotes I saw, which I think sums this up really well, is that think of
the ADA as before, not as the ceiling.
So it's where you start, but certainly not where we can go.
I think there's a lot more that can be done.
The WebAIM study certainly did point in the direction that there was significant work
still to be done.
Absolutely.
So let me give a little background on the webbing study.
So WebAIM is an organization out of Utah State University.
They're very well known in terms of providing consultation work and tools to work with web
accessibility.
And for the past two years now they've been running an automated test of the top 1 million
home pages on the worldwide web.
And when they just did this in February, they found an average of 60 plus errors per page
for those top 1 million web pages.
Now there's two things to remember.
One is that that's actually an increase from when they did the study the year before.
There's more errors than there were when they did this a year ago.
The second thing is that this was done with automated tools.
And automated tools can only find about 30% of errors.
So that's not the totality of the number of errors, it's actually going to be much greater
than that.
So there are certainly a lot of work that needs to be done.
And I've been involved with accessibility digital accessibility for 20 years now.
And I am a little bit frustrated that we haven't made more progress and been thinking about
why that hasn't happened.
And I think there's a couple of reasons.
One is that the importance of accessibility is not emphasized enough with web designers
and web developers.
And it certainly is a skill set that is really, really important.
But when you look at the curriculum on a lot of college campuses, or even with the online
resources that people use to learn about web development, accessibility usually isn't mentioned
and if it is mentioned it’s really just an afterthought.
So I think we need to do a much better job in terms of thinking about the importance
of what I would call inclusive design.
And then the second thing is thinking about design in general.
And one of the books I recommend that everybody reads is called Mismatch by Kat Holmes.
And she's had a lot of experience working with major organizations with inclusion, with
accessibility.
And what her book does is illustrate two very important points.
One is that and I think this is because of the ADA, we've started to think about disability
differently.
Traditionally, disability and if you watch Crip Camp, this is kind of what the frame
of reference was back in the 70s, is that you thought about a disability as a medical
problem.
It was something wrong with somebody and you know, so that that creates a whole paradigm
that I think is an inaccurate and not an appropriate paradigm.
So one of the things that Kat Holmes talks about in her book is the social model of accessibility,
which is really a mismatch between human capability and the environment.
So instead of treating somebody as being sick or being, you know, disabled, no, maybe the
better word is handicapped, but you don't hear that word anymore.
Think about a mismatch between the physical capabilities and what the environment provides.
And related to that, and I think everybody gets taught this, is the idea of an average
person or an average user.
So whether it's in the physical space when you're designing a car, or you know, so I
think there was a study done on crash test dummies where when you put a crash test dummy,
they were all five foot nine and weighed 171 pounds because that is the size of the average
male.
Come to find out that females were being injured in car accidents much more than males, because
of that basic premise that there's an average size.
So as they started to rethink that, the number of you know, fatalities, with women in car
accidents, they actually come way down.
And that's the same thing applies to web development and web design, there is no such thing as
an average user.
So if you take into consideration the whole spectrum of ability and design for that full
spectrum, we're going to have much better success.
Well, accessibility certainly helps us all and with access to technology advancing at
breakneck speed, what does the future hold for people with disabilities?
So one of my favorite books was written back in 1995.
And it was called Being Digital.
It was written by Nicholas Negroponte, who at the time was director of the MIT Media
Lab.
And one of the quotes that has stood out for me in that book over the last 25 years is
that everything that can become digital will become digital.
And he talks about the switch from atoms to bits.
So I think about my college experience back in the 1970s, where if I was going to drop
and add a class, I would actually have to go get a physical piece of paper signed by
the dean.
When I first started working at the University of Buffalo, technology advanced to the point
where when people needed to register for classes, they would camp out overnight in front of
our gymnasium, and then actually walk through the gym to get their classes that they needed.
Much better than what I had to go through much more, you know, quickly, you could get
your schedule put together, but think about how students do it today where they're in
real time registering for classes on their smartphones.
So we certainly are seeing that in education where there is this march from the physical
campus to the digital campus.
And one of the things I think that has happened with the pandemic is that this has been accelerated
tremendously.
All of a sudden in education, whether it was K through 12, or higher ed, everything got
online instantly, the physical world got left behind the online world was really important.
And I think a lot of people were caught off guard about the accessibility requirements
around online learning.
And it's not just with education, you think about retail, whatever it may be, it's really
been an acceleration to move everything online.
So I think there's a huge opportunity for us to really dedicate time and effort to making
the online experience as accessible as possible.
And as that WebAIM study said, on the web piece of things, we certainly have a lot of
work to do.
But I'm also looking in the future where we're going to be doing a lot more with technology.
So I think about things like augmented reality, and virtual reality, think about things like
artificial intelligence, and for me, the technology I'm most interested in is voice technology.
So all of those have the ability to improve the user experience for everybody, particularly
with people with disabilities.
And when you think about how you interact with a computer, my first experience with
computers was back in 1974, without dating myself.
And the way I interacted with a computer was through punch cards.
Even when I was in college in the late 70s, there was no computer on our campus.
So I would type out punch cards, and I would mail them 40 miles down the road to a computer,
and that's how I interacted with a computer.
You get a printout back from that.
Then in the late 70s, early 80s into the 90s, a keyboard and mouse and a computer monitor
became the primary way that we interact with computers.
But for people with disabilities, that basic interaction has limitations, and I think voice
has the potential to completely change how those interactions work, and I'm really excited
about where that technology is going.
I had the opportunity last summer to speak at the VOICE Summit, which was a worldwide
gathering of about 5000 people talking about voice technology, they actually had a track
on accessibility, which I thought was fantastic.
And the one thing I like about the people involved with voice technology is they are
thinking about inclusion and thinking about accessibility right from the start, and are
addressing a lot of issues right from the start, which I think was missing when the
web first launched back in the early 90s.
So I'm really excited about where that might take us.
Well, we've certainly come a long way in the past 30 years and Crip Camp certainly gives
a very good description of the history leading to where we are now, as you say, still a long
way to go.
It'll be exciting to see what the future holds for accessibility.
Mark, thank you so much for taking the time with Newspoint today.
Thanks for having me.