When I was the young parent of a savagely damaged child due to a botched operation in a jungle hospital, I was desperate for appropriate educational facilities for my son. None existed in the 1960s for my first-born's problems in those years in Canada.
Desperate for help, I sought out other parents, and together we tried to force public schools to accommodate our children's special needs in special classes.
It did not take me long to realize that our pain was used by people who discovered that they had an avenue to enhance their own agendas. A destructive and unwieldy system was set up and unleashed within an already cumbersome bureaucracy - ostensibly to 'aid the handicapped' - that soon permeated every facet of public education.
For years I thought the purpose of that unconscionable impairment of pedagogy was merely to safeguard the jobs of some people who were munching at the public trough on the backs of handicapped children. These days I see a much larger, more sinister picture - and I am partly blaming myself that it took me so long to see what was really going on.
Largely thanks to federal and state mandates that require elaborate accommodation of handicapped youngsters, today there is no facet of public education that has not been bent out of shape - if not wrecked. Special Ed, as it is known, is in my opinion criminally impeding and stunting the learning process for healthy, smart children by using the mentally impaired, crippled and ill children to slow and retard education. It is an abominable result of dociety permitting the tragedies of life to be pitted against those children gifted by the gods.
Just recently I heard of a teacher who will be required to catheterize a handicapped child as part of her "pedagogical duties". It means that child is seriously paralyzed. I can tell you from first-hand experience as a one-time nurse's aide and later school psychologist that such a child is a handful at home that will demand the attention of an entire family 24 hours a day. How can a teacher give meaningful instruction to a classful of youngsters - 30 or more in elementary school and up to 150 students in junior and high school! - when burdened with that kind of a "medical" problem?
That teacher won't because she can't - and that is by design!
Most people do not see the Hidden Hand that has just scored a point for systematic, agenda-driven institutional destruction of Western civilization. I have grown to be resentful of the way my tragedy - and other parents' tragedies - were used and manipulated so callously to do such havoc in one of America's most important institutions. But scales have fallen from my eyes!
Why am I telling you all this - and what does that have to do with Freedom on the Internet, which is the focus of my current struggle? Read on.
The article below was distributed through the fight-censorship group and is, hence, in the public domain and should be widely redistributed. It comes with a little paragraph supplied by Declan McCullagh, one of America's most respected reporters specializing in computer industry news.
Declan writes:
"This is one of the most important stories to come along in a while. Adam's article is very much worth reading. How will news organizations -- or any site -- handle government-manded (sic) restrictions on multiple languages on one web page and restrictions on animated graphics? Of course any reasonable person wants to be as considerate as possible of folks with disabilities, but this would seem to go much too far."
To: declan@well.com
From: Adam Powell <apowell@freedomforum.org Subject: DOJ crackdown on Web site content -- http://www.freedomforum.org/technology/1999/4/30handicapaccess.asp
New U.S. law requires Web sites to become 'handicapped accessible'
By Adam Clayton Powell III
World Center
4.30.99
What do you think? Have your say in The Forum.
Webmasters, Uncle Sam wants you to change your Web site to make it more accessible to those who are blind, deaf and otherwise disabled. And for some, it's not a suggestion: it's the law.
The new rules are mandated by a little-known provision, Section 508 of the Workforce Investment Act enacted by Congress last year.
The new rules will apply within a few months to all Web sites operated by government agencies and by anyone who does any business with the federal government and possibly soon afterward to every Web site posted in the U.S., the government announced.
Members of the federal Web site commission told ZDNet yesterday that for non-government-related sites in the U.S., the guidelines would be voluntary, but those who do not adopt them could soon face new federal rules for all online publishing.
Under the new law, Web sites will be required to restructure their content, design and underlying technologies to allow "individuals with disabilities who are members of the public seeking information or services from a Federal department or agency to have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to the access to and use of the information and data by such members of the public who are not individuals with disabilities."
Exactly what that means will be spelled out by the,government next month, when the commission established by the U.S. Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board publishes the new rules for online publishing.
Provisions are expected to include a ban on any audio without simultaneous text and restrictions on animated graphics.
One preview of what the barrier board may publish next month is contained in its own notices, which state that, in addition to conventional html and pdf versions available online, all online information must also be available from the agency via audio text and TTY, as well as "cassette tape, Braille, large print, or computer disk."
The federal guidelines follow publication in the Federal Register last summer of the barrier board's intention to develop the new rules. And in September, the board announced that a new federal committee had been appointed to help draft the new requirements and that the committee would begin meeting the following month.
Most of the committee members were representatives of people with disabilities, including such groups as the American Council of the Blind, the American Foundation for the Blind, Easter Seals, the National Association of the Deaf, the National Federation of the Blind and United Cerebral Palsy Association. Also included were three members from the computer industry, representing IBM, Microsoft and NCR.
The announcement also disclosed that the barrier board would draft the guidelines with a "less formal, but certainly no less important, ad hoc committee," whose members were not disclosed.
Members of the committee asserted that the federal government has power to regulate the form and content of online information -- as opposed to print, where the government does not have such power -- because the federal government paid for the development of the Internet.
"The Internet is subject to market forces, but it didn't start through market forces, it was started by the federal government," said Jenifer Simpson, a committee member and manager of technology initiatives at the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, in an interview with Ziff Davis. Simpson added that the rights of the disabled must prevail over other considerations.
"This is really a civil rights issue," she said.
And if online publishers decline to adopt the committee's new guidelines voluntarily, the guidelines could become mandatory under federal law for all Web sites, according to Simpson and to Judy Brewer, another committee member who is also director of the Web Access Initiative.
The new law applies to a broad range of Web, Internet and electronic storage, transmission and retrieval hardware and software technologies, specifically "any equipment or interconnected system or subsystem of equipment, that is used in the automatic acquisition, storage, manipulation, management, movement, control, display, switching, interchange, transmission, or reception of data or information."
U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, in her memorandum on the new law, included in the definition of covered technologies "computers (such as hardware, software, and accessible data such as web pages), facsimile machines, copiers, telephones, and other equipment used for transmitting, receiving, using, or storing information."
The attorney general also announced the creation of a federal Web site, www.508.org, accessible only from government computers, to help Webmasters ascertain whether they are in compliance with the new law. From outside of a .gov or .mil domain, users were today greeted by a 403 error code, reading "Forbidden. You don't have permission to access on this server."
Last month, the WAI published its own set of proposed guidelines that could be adopted into federal law.
The first guideline requires Web sites to supply text alternatives for all images and graphics.
"Thus, a text equivalent for an image of an upward arrow that links to a table of contents could be 'Go to table of contents'," the provision reads.
A second provision bars the use of color to convey information, because "people who cannot differentiate between certain colors and users with devices that have non-color or non-visual displays will not receive the information."
Other requirements prescribe punctuation and prohibit using multiple languages on the same page, because that can hinder translation by Braille readers, discourage the "use (or misuse)" of tables and other formatting that "makes it difficult for users with specialized software to understand the organization of the page or to navigate through it."
Another provision requires Webmasters to "ensure that moving, blinking, scrolling, or auto-updating objects or pages may be paused or stopped" and to design all pages so they can be operated without a mouse or other pointing device.
"Interaction with a document must not depend on a particular input device such as a mouse," reads the start of this provision.
Another Web site lets online publishers test their sites using some of the suggested guidelines that soon may have the force of federal law behind them. The Center for Applied Special Technology has posted free software it calls Bobby, illustrated with an image of a jovial waving policeman. That cheerful logo doubles as a seal of approval that can be downloaded and used by Web sites that meet Bobby's accessibility guidelines.
Bobby flunked a number of widely used Web sites, including the White House, where the software identified "13 accessibility problems that should be fixed in order to make this page accessible to people with disabilities." The software also identified additional "accessibility questions" regarding which the Webmaster should "check each item carefully."
Unless those problems were fixed, warned the software message, the White House Web site "will not be approved by Bobby."
Bobby may be waving with his right hand, but in his left hand, not visible in the logo, may be a billy club -- Section 508.
So, White House, be forewarned: Starting next year, any individual anywhere in the U.S. will be able bring suit under Section 508 against offending Web sites operated by a government agency or by anyone who does business with the government.
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Thought for the Day:
"Liberty had one brief, shining moment. We were on the threshold of establishing it as the norm. And then it was muddled by WWII events. And thus we are headed back down the road of ethnic courts and group based laws.
(Letter to the Zundelsite)
Back to Table of Contents of the May 1999 ZGrams