Blind expert wants web access for all

By Yoon Ja-young

Wearing dark sunglasses, T. V. Raman, a research scientist at Google, said “Seoul weather.” The keyword immediately appeared in the search box of the Google Chrome browser, and then came a voice saying “Weather for Seoul: 29 degrees Celsius….”

Raman lost his sight at the age of 14 from glaucoma. His family gave him their full support believing he could do anything he wanted and helping him build up self-confidence.

However, the boy who loved mathematics had one big problem ― accessing the materials he needed to study. His brother would read him math books, but he had to continuously ponder over how to access knowledge and information. “That’s how I ended up doing research on accessibility,” Raman said in a meeting with the media in Seoul, Tuesday.

Raman received a Ph.D. from Cornell University with a dissertation entitled “Audio System for Technical Reading,” which won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1994. He has been developing technologies to enhance Web accessibility since joining Google in 2005, building up user interfaces to adapt to conditions in which one can’t depend on visual capability.

He pointed out that computers and the Internet have greatly changed how people exchange and share information. The shift to a digital world is more meaningful for those with impaired hearing or visual abilities, as information can be transferred into other forms to be accessed by those individuals. Information can be read aloud by computers, and speech can be automatically turned into documents, offering people with disabilities better access to the Internet and other information.

There were programs helping people with disabilities, but they weren’t widely available. “Paying $200 for a phone and having to pay an additional $500 for the software has been an obstacle for people,” he said. These programs should be built-in, he added.

Google has been one of the leaders in such efforts. It supports accessibility tools in its services such as Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Books or Google Maps. YouTube, a video channel run by Google, offers captions on videos so that people with hearing problems can enjoy the content. Some books registered at Google Books can be offered in various languages, audio format or even in Braille.

With such programs, manufacturers of Android smartphones are going through compatibility tests to see if functions for people with disabilities work well on mobile devices. LG Electronics supplied dozens of Ally, its Android smartphone for Verizon users, to organizations for the blind in Silicon Valley to test applications and get feedback for improvements.

Raman said efforts to improve Web accessibility for people with disabilities end up offering benefits to an increasing proportion of users. The automotive captions for people with hearing problems can help those watching videos in a noisy bar.

Google aims at enabling everybody to access all information, but Raman said it puts top priority on education. “Making textbooks available online and improving accessibility would be the first step,” he said, adding that education is the key to making crucial information available to all.

Statistics show that people with disabilities in Korea have less access to the Web. According to the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs, there are 2.5 million people with disabilities registered with the government. However, they have little accessibility to the Web, and consequently to information.

According to a survey by the National Information Society Agency, the ratio of households with computers and disabled family members stood at 71.6 percent, 10.2 percentage points lower than that for all households. The ratio of Internet use among people with disabilities recorded 53.5 percent, which is 24.8 percentage points less than that for the whole population.