The movement for the rights of individuals with disabilities, which was responsible for passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, appealed to the circumstantial conception of disability. The legislation recognizes that handicaps don't result from disabilities alone, but from a combination of disabilities and circumstances, and that changing the circumstances can often eliminate the handicap.
The Americans With Disabilities Act requires that reasonable accommodation be made for people with disabilities in a host of areas, including employment. For example, Title I, Section 102, 5A, says that employers must make
...reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of an otherwise qualified individual with a disability who is an applicant or employee, unless [the employer] can demonstrate that the accommodation would impose an undue hardship on the operation of the business ...
From the point of view of the circumstantial conception of disability and handicap, this requirement is simply the application to individuals with disabilities of the same approach to inability that society takes towards others. Science, engineering, and education in general are devoted to eliminating inabilities: creating knowledge, structures and tools that allow people to accomplish what they want and need to accomplish. These energies are devoted to ``reasonably accommodating'' the needs and aspirations of people, putting the goals they need or want to reach within their accomplishment space, by providing tools and infrastructures that change the circumstances within which they live and work.
This does not yet seem to be the typical way of looking at things.
In discussions of the ADA, the following phenomenon is often observed.
A person hears about the ADA for the first time (or thinks about it
for the first time) and seems puzzled. Eventually, the person makes a
comment about the unlikelihood of a blind race car driver, a
quadriplegic NFL guard, or a deaf trumpet player. The point of such
``joking'' often seems to be that there is a sort of absurdity inherent in
the law and the idea behind it.
This reaction is provoked, we think, by trying to understand the law within an intrinsic conception of disability. The puzzled person thinks of disabilities and handicaps as inseparable, so that there is something simply confusing about the mandate of the ADA. In such a state, the mind is naturally drawn to examples that come closest to supporting the intrinsic conception, examples in which the connection between the disability and the handicap is maximally direct, minimally circumstantial.
This intellectual confusion can lead to practices that create and perpetuate handicaps. We list three.
Inadvertent over-restrictions arise by the following flawed reasoning:
And example of this reasoning is:
The fallacy is in the word ``primary''; things often have important secondary functions that are overlooked in this kind of reasoning. The primary function of a driver's license is to certify that the possessor can drive safely. But in the United States licenses also serve as identity cards. Before the rise of credit cards, a driver's license was the only sort of identification that was widely accepted for cashing checks and similar purposes. So people unqualified to drive (for whatever reason) were not only not permitted to drive, but also had difficulty cashing checks.
This seems like the sort of problem that someone ought to be able to
resolve with the stroke of a pen. But in fact, the problem was not
quickly remedied; it required court action to direct states to provide
ersatz driver's licenses for identification purposes, in spite of the
clear injustice of the situation.
The same sort of reasoning can be used for not making certain buildings or parts of buildings accessible. Why would a person in a wheelchair need access to a skating rink? Or a swimming pool? Reasons are not hard to imagine, once one stops and thinks. For example, persons who use wheelchairs may have ways of swimming or skating or may want to watch their children or grandchildren swim or skate. Indeed this latter reason was the basis of a court decision that resulted in wheelchair accessibility to a bowling alley.
At bottom, the problem is not so much faulty reasoning, as a lack of
foresight. The GUI problem can be seen as an instance of this.
When the first graphical user interfaces were developed in the early
1980's, the question of how a blind person would use these interfaces
was sometimes asked. The answer was that a blind person would not use
these interfaces; they wouldn't want to, because they would provide no
advantage over a command line interface. But of course in time the
graphical user interfaces became so popular that a great deal of
software was not available in any other format.
Stanford has an impressive collection of Rodin sculptures--the largest in the world outside of Paris. Most of these are located in garden next to the Stanford museum, but a few are scattered around campus. Rodin's famous statue ``The Thinker'' is located on a ten foot high pedestal, near the Stanford Library.
Sculpture is a form of visual art that is enjoyed by blind as well as sighted individuals. Blind visitors to Stanford enjoy experiencing Rodin's sculptures, most of which are accessible to them--but not The Thinker.
By putting The Thinker on a high pedestal, Stanford assured it would be a visually prominent landmark on campus, and perhaps be a bit more awe-inspiring than it would be otherwise. But it was also inadvertently restricting the class of those who could enjoy it by touching it.
As a final example, consider the question of elevators in student dormitories. It has been argued that the ADA does not require that wheelchair-using students have access to the upper floors of a dorm, so long as accessible rooms that are equivalent in size and comfort are available on the first floor. But this position--whatever its merits in the courts--uses a definition of equivalence that is too narrow. The social life of dorms often varies in predictable ways from floor to floor. At Stanford, a typical four-class dorm has three stories. The top story rooms are sought after by upperclass males, presumably because of their remoteness from the faculty resident fellow cottages. The parties on the top story tend to be best, at least as measured by prevailing undergraduate values. The faculty and staff committees who plan the dorms might consider the accessibility of such parties of no real value to the serious student--but why should disabled students be more serious on average than any others? Doubtless, one can find successful alumni of Stanford who count such parties as among their most valuable college experiences.
The next two practices have to do with conceptualizing things at the wrong level of abstraction.
The only way to walk is to move one's legs. But, as Roosevelt found out, there are many ways to propel oneself around a room, or get from one floor to another--as long as the tools and infrastructure are provided. The only way to type is to move keys on a keyboard. But there are many ways to enter data without typing. For example, one can use speech or an eye-tracker. When a task is confused with a particular way of doing it, designers make decisions that have to do with that particular method, not the essential nature of the task.
The exact nature of information is subject to philosophical debate, but on any reasonable conception, information is distinguished from the particular forms in which it is expressed, carried or stored in various situations. Consider, for example, the information that the wildflowers are blooming at Stanford. Someone might notice this while driving to work; remember it later in the morning and send an email message about it. That message might be read by Stanford alums in Germany, Korea and Japan, and conveyed to colleagues in those countries in the local languages. It might be printed out in Braille, or read by a screen-reader of a Program Officer at the NSF in Washington D.C. A Stanford researcher may read it on her home computer, and sign the information to her husband in American Sign Language before leaving for work. The same information, that the wildflowers are blooming at Stanford, is first carried by the visual system, then stored in the brain, then expressed electronically in one language. The same information is expressed in other languages, and in various ways, voice, Braille, print and sign.
The multimedia capacities of modern computers and the World Wide Web make it more possible than ever to provide information in various forms, but more tempting than ever to not do so. Suppose someone is designing a web page for a chain of motels. Much of the basic information, such as the name, address, phone numbers and rates of the various motels is naturally conveyed in text. But the web page might also contain pictures of the various motels, and maps on how to get to them from the nearest large highway. Perhaps next to the picture of a seaside motel might be a button that allows one to hear the sound of the surf.
One could argue whether or not it is theoretically possible to convey in text all and only the information that is conveyed in a picture; clearly, as a practical matter, it is not. Nevertheless, it is usually fairly easy to convey the salient information: ``this picture shows a one story motel with a parking lot and swimming pool located in front of a large construction site,'' ``This recording allows one to hear the sound of the surf from a room in the motel; the slightly fainter sounds of the nearby freeway are audible when the surf is quiet.''
The rights of deaf individuals to serve on juries (with the institution providing ASL interpreters as needed) have been upheld as have the rights of blind individuals. One can conceive of cases in which direct inspection of evidence in a particular form--e.g., visual form or auditory form--by jurors would be expected to play a crucial and central role in the decision making process. That is, one can conceive of cases in which, because of our incomplete understanding of what makes different forms of information equivalent, a blind or deaf juror might reasonably be excused because of his or her impairment. But, in the case of a blind juror that was argued in court, such an argument was not made. In this case the juror was excused very early in the selection process, before being assigned to any particular case, simply for being blind.
Even if everyone agrees that an accommodation is reasonable, there is still the question of who makes the accommodation and who pays.
On issues of mobility, the division of
responsibility is clear legally and intuitively:
people don't have to supply their own
ramps and don't usually expect employers, stores, and
other public facilities to supply
wheelchairs.
But in the cases involving computers and other technological equipment, things are not always so clear. We believe the ``divide and conquer'' strategy exemplified by the TAS system has the potential to lower and distribute the costs of accommodations that provide access to computers. At a first pass we would suggest the following guidelines:
To sum up. Philosophically and theoretically, modern technology in general and cyberspace in particular diminish the differences between disabled and non-disabled individuals. We all live in a hugely extended accomplishment space; we all depend on technology to bring us information and augment our action.
Individuals who are not agents in cyberspace have an accomplishment space that is diminished compared to others. Such a person is handicapped. The handicap may be caused by not having the right tool (e.g., an accessible computer) or by not having the infrastructure (e.g., an available phone line) to support the tool. If the individual has a disability, then there may be an additional problem: the right tool may be difficult to find or may be non-existent. The inability is the same whether the individual can't afford the right tool or can't find it; in either case in today's information-oriented society, the inability is a handicapping condition that affects an individual's opportunity to reach life's goals.
Equality of opportunity and equality before the law are recognized as basic American principles; the embodiment of these principles in the concept of equality of access and workplace accommodations is legislated by the Americans with Disabilities Act. In the information age, all of these principles entail another: equal access to information which includes equal access to cyberspace.