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Archive - Edition 4: Accessibility

 To Overview of Edition

Leading Article

• Leading Article from ACC

SAP Accessibility Competence Center

• A Giant Rises to the Challenge of Accessibility
• Evaluating Accessibility
• Policies Relating to Information Technology Accessibility

Around Accessibility

• 508 – Any More Questions? Commented List of Accessibility Resources
• Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines, Take 2
• Information Equivalence and More...
• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a Commented Overview

Assistive and Other Technology

• Assistive Technology – The Bridge Between Computers and Disabled Users
• Making Web Pages Accessible – Questions and HTML Examples
• One Common User Interface for All Users?

Visual Disabilites

• Portal Color Design to Support Visually Challenged Users
• Vision and Visual Disabilities – An Introduction

Projects

• Making the SAP Design Guild More Accessible
• Technology Accessibility at Hewlett Packard

Personal Reports

• Experience Report of a Blind ABAP Developer
• "Seeing" with the Fingers – Technology and Team Spirit Create Jobs for Blind Colleagues

 

Technology Accessibility at Hewlett Packard

By Jacki Downing, Ph.D., Senior Human Factors, Engineer Accessibility Solutions – 02/18/2002

 

History of Accessibility at HP

Hewlett Packard's introduction to accessibility began early in the 90's with a directive from our Corporate Industrial Design Group to move the power switch from the back of the product to the front to assist people with disabilities in operating our products. Fast forward to 1999, one of the HP human factors engineers attended the CSUN conference and became aware of the impending Section 508 legislation. She also made contact with a company who could help us evaluate our products for accessibility and train our engineers to make them aware of the issues people with disabilities have using information technology (IT) equipment. About the same time, HP corporate human factors group began working on accessibility guidelines for the engineering community within HP.

The following year HP formed the HP Accessibility Solutions Program Team (hpas) to coordinate accessibility efforts across HP. The mission of the program team is to ensure that HP products and services are accessible to people with disabilities. HP also has programs centered around employment and employee accommodations, with a strong community support program. HP's Chief Technology Officer, Rich DeMillo, was an executive sponsor of this program and worked with many of the Chief Technology Officers across the businesses to make sure we had accessibility solutions designed into each of the different product groups.

On September 21, 2000, Carly Fiorina, HP's Chairman and CEO, along with 45 other CEOs of leading IT companies sent a letter to the President of the United States, publicly committing their respective companies to making information technology accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. Shortly after the program team was formed, Carly Fiorina published a statement that described HP's commitment to accessibility as follows:

"We are standing at the edge of a new world - it's a world where technology enriches our lives in a way that is empowering all people to participate in society. …From the beginning of our reinvention at HP, we said that all our actions would be aimed at connecting everyone to the power of technology, harnessing it to lift human potential. In keeping with that promise, HP has made a public commitment to provide leadership in designing accessible products and services for people with disabilities." This and other information about accessibility at HP can be found at our website, www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/accessibility.

The HP policy on accessibility was published in 2000, stating that the Hewlett-Packard Company is committed to the following:

• raising the level of awareness of accessibility issues within our company, and providing our employees with the training they need to design, produce, market and deliver accessible products and services;
• developing accessibility guidelines for products and services, and holding product development groups accountable for implementing these guidelines where competitively, technically and economically feasible;
• involving people with disabilities in the development of accessibility guidelines, and in the design and testing of products and services;
• documenting accessibility features, and making information about our products and services publicly available in an accessible form;
• establishing relationships with leading assistive technology and solution providers;
• supporting internal and external research and development that will improve the state-of-the-art of assistive technology relevant to our products and services; and
• supporting and contributing to industry standards and guidelines for accessibility.

 

That was the easy part!

Once the policy was distributed, the real work began to integrate accessibility into product development so we would be able to develop accessible products. Since HP is so large and geographically dispersed, and because we produce so many different types of products, including printers, all-in-ones, plotters, scanners, desktop computers, handheld computers, servers and a myriad of e-services, integrating accessibility into product development was a complex task. Fairly quickly, issues began to emerge which had to be dealt with in order to have a successful program. These included communication, training, making a business case for doing this, integrating processes, product assessment, and reporting to the government.

 

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!

A critical part of this task was to be sure everyone was getting the word. It was clear that we had strong support from the top of our management chain, but a key issue became how to communicate throughout the rest of HP. We found that it was necessary to communicate to all levels, almost simultaneously. If we communicated from the bottom up, training the engineers to be aware of the issues, they were ready to change products immediately. This could become a problem because if the management was not also aware of the issues, needs, and requirements, as well as the direction their management wanted to go, it was difficult to make design decisions. If we communicated from the top down, there was often a lag between when top management got the message and when the individual engineers received the message to begin working on accessibility.

One tool we've used to make information available to the entire company is our internal website. We have one central source of information for our staff with content such as company policy, links to relevant information (e.g., Section 508/1194), links to sources of design guidelines (e.g., Trace Center, W3C, Microsoft accessibility pages) and contacts within the company to help with questions about designing for accessibility. Having one place for everyone to go is critical for success. The web site was "advertised" throughout the company so employees knew of its existence. Another important tool was to have communication sessions in which upper management gave support to developing accessible products. Employees need to know that their management is on board. We have so much information overload these days that we tend to address something, then push it to the back burner. Consequently, periodic reminders that accessibility is still important are critical to the success of this program. Accessibility needs to be viewed as a long-term commitment because product development is a long-term process, even with the shorter and shorter life cycles with which we are all faced.

 

Train Everyone!

Early in our efforts, a consulting firm specializing in accessibility helped us evaluate products for accessibility and train our engineers. The training was very effective, particularly because the training team included an expert on accessibility who was blind and could demonstrate the use of our software with her system using JAWS and a refreshable Braille display. It was extremely effective for the engineers to see her try to use the products they had developed. After viewing any problems, the engineers were ready to run back to their desks and start modifying designs. This was not possible since the products are so complex and require coordinated effort. It was necessary for the entire development team, including management, to receive the training for it to have the maximum effect.

Training turned out to be a critical component of this program. Training was effective for helping engineers understand the needs of people with disabilities, but it was also valuable to help all of us understand how to interact with people with disabilities and what terminology is acceptable. All groups needed what we called "awareness training," in which the types of disabilities were discussed and related to the issues each group had using IT equipment. Section 508 and the requirements of 1194 were also discussed. The Microsoft film "Enable" was made available, which was effective in demonstrating the views of people with a number of different disabilities. However, teams of engineers, the sales force, support teams, and others needed additional, specific training. For example, engineers in hardware, software, documentation, web development, etc., needed specific, technical training. The sales and support force needed to know how to interact with people with disabilities, including how to interact with TTY and relay calls. The accessibility issues for each of these groups were different and required different training solutions.

Other awareness activities were also useful in helping HP personnel understand the needs of people with disabilities. These included attendance at the CSUN conference and involvement in the October Disability Awareness Month activities. HP employees at a number of HP sites participated in "Mentoring Day," in which they were paired with students with disabilities to show them their work environment and discuss what it was like to work in a company like HP.

One of our divisions invited groups from the community to come set up information booths in the cafeteria and interact with HP employees. Attendees included representatives from Henter-Joyce, Veritest, Washington State School for the Blind, Canine Companions for Independence, Oregon Disability Sports, and an HP employee demonstrated of American Sign Language, just to name a few. What we have learned from these activities is that awareness "training" does not have to be formal.

 

Make a strong business case!

The fundamental task of any company is to make money in order to survive. Consequently, making design decisions for products must be based on good business requirements. Over the past year, this has clearly been shown to be the case time and time again. The product teams need a business case for prioritizing accessibility above other issues. It is not because they don't think it is a good thing to do, they just have too many competing issues screaming for attention at the same time. The issues that are good for business tend to get that attention. Even though there are large numbers of people with disabilities, there are not necessarily good data that help to build a strong business case for particular products. This has been a real challenge for us and other companies trying to integrate accessibility into their products.

 

Find out how accessible your products are!

One of the first things we had to do within HP was to figure out where we stood in terms of accessibility. First, we needed to know how accessible our products were, then we could determine what work needed to be done. We went through the process of assessing our products with respect to Section 508 requirements, then we reported this to the government by posting the information on our website (www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/accessibility). We also found it important to set metrics for each product and conduct testing based on those metrics. Finally, it was important to prioritize defects for the engineering teams so they were able to determine which issues had to be resolved quickly and which could wait. Engineering resources are always finite and have to be managed. Prioritizing is a management tool that is used for this. Telling an engineering team that you have a number of defects to work on, all with the same priority, increases the probability that none of them will be addressed.

One of the areas that we see as critical for the future is to include people with disabilities in the design and evaluation processes. This will enable us to understand the needs of people with disabilities and integrate these into product design. We currently include users in our usability testing and have begun to include people with disabilities in this process. We hope to expand this work in the future.

 

Integrate accessibility into product development!

Integrating accessibility into product development processes is fundamental to making sure we can produce accessible products. We found a number of things that were important to successful integration. These include:

• Integrate into current processes when possible. Communication is difficult in a large corporation. If the current processes that people are familiar with can simply add this information, it increases the likelihood of success. Adding additional, unfamiliar processes increases the likelihood of failure.
• Integrate accessibility into future products at the beginning of their development cycles. Trying to retrofit current product design can be difficult and expensive. Designing accessibility into the product from day one, increases the probability that it will happen and reduces cost. Causing too much pain at the beginning of this process reduces the probability of developing an ongoing, successful accessibility program.
• Integrate accessibility into the main product. Try to stay away from designing special "accessible" products. Maintaining two products instead of one is more complicated and the "accessible" product will probably not get as much attention as the main product. Designing accessibility into a product may be easier than designing a whole different product, but again, requires that accessibility be designed in from the beginning.
• Determine who your customers are. The population of people with disabilities is a diverse group. It is necessary to determine who your customers are, then determine which requirements apply to them. The Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards (1194), distributed by the Access Board have done a good job of listing the requirements across these groups. However, they are not specific enough to easily apply them to individual products within larger groupings. Each product developer must interpret the requirements to fit their customers and their products. This is not something an engineer has the time or, in many cases, the knowledge to do. This is an ongoing challenge for us. We are working with the government to clarify requirements, but this will take years. It requires companies to go ahead and make design decisions based on the requirements and hope the government purchasing agents agree with our interpretation. This is not how we like to do business.

 

Conclusions

The things that we have found to be critical for success are:

• Obtain strong upper management support.
• Develop a strong business case for designing accessible products.
• Customize training for groups, including sales force, support, engineers, documentation staff, and management-all management, up and down the chain.
• Dedicate people to this program. A dedicated team that can influence across the company, as well as representatives within each division. Dedicating only 5% or 10% of someone's time is not enough. Until the program is sustaining itself and products are being developed that are accessible, this program needs dedicated resources.
• Assess your products. Determine a baseline for how accessible each product is. This information feeds into training and product development for future products. This information will also be communicated to the GSA for products that are sold to the federal government. Then determine metrics for accessibility for future products and evaluate these products using these metrics.
• Include people with disabilities in the design and evaluation of products.

This has been an interesting journey for us, and it has only just begun. What some of us originally thought would be a fairly short-term project has become more defined and is, clearly, a program that requires long- term commitment. Integrating accessibility into a company the size of HP is a complex task. To be successful, it requires massive communication, modifying current processes that touch almost every part of the company and requires dedicated resources. As a human factors engineer I have been trying to influence engineers to design usability into our products for over a decade. I have never had the support I do from engineers to design in accessibility. Once they become aware of the issues, they want to make the required changes, they want their products to be accessible. Unfortunately, this is not enough. To be successful, the whole company has to be aware and involved.

 

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