Accessibility and the Broadcast Flag
Earlier today the FCC held what it labeled a “VoIP Solutions Summit: Focus on Disability Access Issues.” It was a four-hour festival during which no negative notes were struck. The same message came across again and again: we must regulate all ip-enabled services (not just VoIP) in order to ensure that the disabled — the blind, the deaf, the hard of hearing — have access.
The Chairman came in and gave a ringing peroration to close off the meeting [paraphrased]:
I've worked with the disability community over the last seven years, and the same criticism is always made: accessibility is always retrofitted, always being bolted on at the end. . . . We need to work on these issues in these networks from the beginning.. . . This is vital. . . . I hope this isn't an event we'll celebrate having happened on this day in May, but really an inauguration of a relationship — a demonstration as to how to protect core values in a regulatory exercise.
Paul Schroeder, from the American Federation for the Blind, made the point of the summit plain:
We're really talking about something far different from VoIP. IP-enabled services are far more significant. How do we ensure disabled people have reliable access? Through regulations. Voluntary market forces simply don't work. . . . . We need to move beyond the focus on voice and talk about content communication. So many forms of content are of great significance to people like us and are not being made accessible. I'm sure that businesses will create services and find a way to make money, but disabilities will be afterthoughts and retrofits.. . . . Regardless of whether we're describing telephones or something else, we can set standards for IP-enabled services — and require them of PCs, software, ecommerce, electronic services. . . Use your ancillary jurisdiction.
Jim Tobias talked about the difficulty of registering and downloading client applications that don't have keystroke equivalents or for which screen readers don't work. Installation wizards are very hard for the blind to use When you sign up for free email services, bots are avoided by presenting passwords that are pictures; you have to type out the graphic text in order to sign up. Blind users can't do this. Other people talked about the need for adjustable volume controls, simultaneous voice and text display, and the ability to add text to any voice application. Frame rates are a problem. Companies are in fact developing applications and products that are useful for the disabled community (in fact, 10% of Sidekick users are deaf), but “to get more services and better prices,” the disabled need regulations.
Claude Stout said that many disabled people rely on library access that in turn depends on support from universal service funds. “We need to have a fee structure set up that won't rely on phone services only — but will also depend on ip-enabled services fee structures.”
The room was full of members of the disabled community. Many of the speakers used sign language and “spoke” through interpreters. The interpreters were so good and so smooth that it very quickly ceased to be strange to hear a man speak in a woman's voice. Seeing-eye dogs waited patiently.
As I said, no one — not one speaker on any of the three panels — said anything negative about the prospects of FCC regulation in this area, or mentioned any possible unintended consequences of FCC action. Indeed, I can't imagine who would have in this setting.
One of the FCC officials present said, [paraphrasing again]: “In a world of software, where incremental costs of designing functionality in at the very beginning are very low, shouldn't the goal be to identify requirements and design them in from the beginning?”
Does anyone tell magazines that they have to be accessible to the disabled? Or books or photographs or cars?
Net applications are much more like magazines etc. then they are like hotels or libraries. And the internet, unlike the phone system, was designed according to the “principle of good enough” — “the open source tenet that you don't begin a project by over-engineering the end result.” Instead, you go with POGE and let things go their own way. Net applications, including the WWW, are often built in the same fashion, and change all the time. (Yet another reason why net-heads can't understand bell-heads.)
Three questions:
1. The disability community is trying to get through the FCC what it couldn't get through either legislation (the ADA) or litigation (NFB's suit against AOL): a technical mandate for online applications. Let's assume the merit of this quest — as we assumed the merit of the FDA's attempt to regulate tobacco. What would give the FCC the authority to mandate design standards for web sites, email clients, IM applications, and everything else that rides on IP?
2. The premise seems to be that if we don't do something to find additional sources of income, universal service “as we know it” is dead. Having internet applications pay a little something to the FCC in exchange for the privilege of being online sounds fine to the Commission. But, again, who gave the FCC the power to tax the online world?
3. What's the limiting principle on the “core values” the FCC intends to impose on ecommerce? So far, they're focusing on disability access, E911 services, and law enforcement access. (They probably need to make sure law enforcement access is in place so as to get the DOJ to help out with the BrandX case.)
What kinds of content controls are next? Indeed, aren't these disability access demands (keystroke equivalents, screen reader compatibility) a kind of forced speech? A web site is much more a kind of speech than a Burger King: you can require the Burger King to have accessible doors, but can you require a site not to use Flash? Wouldn't it be a short step from there to require that web sites and applications clean up their language, only show flesh behind electronic closed doors, and goodness knows what else? Not to mention the mischief the studios could do at the FCC in the name of “core values.”
The IP-enabled services NPRM is like the broadcast flag in (at least) the following ways:
BF Speech: Broadcast television is America. We need to protect the medium that gave us I Love Lucy. To save it, we should do anything we can (including imposing design mandates on any electronic device that might touch digital television). If you're against doing this, you're against America.
The flag is just the first of many tech mandates that the studios will get out of the FCC. Up next — closing the analog hole and outlawing unauthorized P2P applications.
Even though nothing can save broadcast. It is a wasteland.
IP Speech: Universal service is America. We need to protect the subsidization plan that gave us telephone access. To save it, we should do anything we can (including imposing design mandates on all internet applications). If you're against doing this, you're against disabled people (and America).
This proceeding will implement just the first of many internet mandates that all kinds of people will get out of the FCC. Up next — CALEA access to everything, and consumer protections everywhere (not yet identified).
Even though nothing can save universal service — it is doomed.
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Good survey piece on accessible gaming:
http://www.totalgames.net/pma/19712