A significant advance
in the independence and privacy of blind people
has come from what many might
think an unlikely source -- the
Internal Revenue Service.
When blind people
complain about their tax return, it is not for the
usual reasons. Until now, most
federal forms and many reports posted
on the Internet -- a growing line of communication
between the government
and its citizens -- have been out of bounds to the
country's 14 million visually
impaired.
A Braille version
doesn't work because the sighted people receiving the
form cannot understand it.
"Screen- reading" software that reads
text out loud cannot cope with forms
and other reports using "PDF" --
Portable Document Format. The
screen-reader can't read PDF because it views the
screen as a picture rather than
words.
This has frustrated
visually impaired people who have wanted to take
advantage of government online
services, from applying for jobs to
researching a homework project.
The new IRS forms,
which the IRS plans to post on its Web site
(www.IRS.gov) next year, use
pioneering software that allows the
standard talking text services to read forms stored in
PDF.
"It may seem like
just a tax form, but we've hit what we believe is a
true breakthrough, important
because blind people want to be
independent," said Michael Moore, chief of alternative
media at the IRS, and
legally blind himself. "What
blind people are striving for is equal
access."
The software was
developed by Plexus Scientific Corp. in conjunction
with the agency. The IRS is
demonstrating the "talking tax form" next
week to other agencies that are also grappling with the
problem of making
their online services accessible to the visually
impaired.
Section 508 of the
Rehabilitation Act, which went into effect in June
last year, requires all federal
agencies to make their systems, Web
sites and documents accessible to those with
disabilities. A recent survey
by San Francisco State
University and PricewaterhouseCoopers
found that 87 percent of federal Web sites still fail to
meet accessibility
standards required by law.
Moore recently showed
how the program works. When he clicks on the
"talking" version of the1040EZ
tax form on the IRS Web site, his
normal screen-reader begins to read the first line in its
electronic monotone.
"First name," it
says, and Moore responds by typing in the box; he also
has the option of speaking his
name and having the computer convert
it into text.
"Some people are
surprised that there isn't already a way for blind
people to use these forms, but
it's finally happened," Moore said.
"We're the first doing this in government; as far as I
know, the first in
the world to be able to make
PDF forms accessible."
Curtis Chong,
director of technology for the National Federation of the
Blind, said PDF has been a pet-hate of
many blind people for years.
"When forms started
to go up online, we got really excited, but when we
went to look at them on places
like the IRS Web site, we found we
couldn't use them," Chong said. "If this does what it
promises then there
is some real groundbreaking
potential here. It's not just about
saving the money for an accountant, but privacy
and independence and getting
access to information."
The problem of
computer accessibility is also important to the IRS,
Moore said, because it has
actively recruited blind workers. The
agency has 1,100 employees who are blind or have low
vision, 1 percent of
its workforce.
Soon after Section
508 came into effect, the IRS asked Plexus Scientific
to try and crack the problem of
PDF. The project cost around $1
million, with much of the funds contributed by Adobe
Systems Inc., the makers of
PDF.
Doug Wakefield, in
charge of Section 508 at the federal Access Board,
said this new software is
"crucial" to making government more
accessible.
"This will have a
very significant impact . . . There have been other
attempts to make PDF forms accessible,
but they haven't been taken up
because they have been too expensive," he said.
The IRS hopes to have
50 of the most common forms in "talking" format
for next tax season. It will
cost the agency a one-time payment of
about $2,000 per form for Plexus to convert them.
Leonard Newman,
project manager at Plexus Scientific, said the problem
with PDF was that even when the
screen-reader was persuaded to read
the text, it read it as a jumble, mixing up text with no
sense of the flow
of the form. By putting special computer tags in the
form, Plexus was able to create a kind
of road map for the screen-reader,
instructing it where to pause to allow
the blind person to fill in his or her
details, and telling it which box
followed next.
"The joke here is
that it is the first time you want the IRS talking to
you," Newman said.
