1

Public Hearing held by the 

UNITED STATES ACCESS BOARD

On the

ICT ADVANCE NOTICE OF PROPOSED RULEMAKING (ANPRM). 

May 12, 2010

Washington, DC

NEIL MELICK: Good morning everybody, we are going to start in about one 

minute. So if everybody could please take their seats. Good morning. Again, good 

morning, my name is Neil Melick, and I'm the public member from Florida and the cochair of the Information Communication Technologies ad hoc committee and to my left, 

your right, is Ron Gardner, who is co-chair with me, and he will make some remarks in 

just a minute. Just a couple of housekeeping items; we ask that you mute your phones 

or turn them off. That is also for the board, and I will do mine in a minute because I was 

just reminded so thank you for that.

Also, if anybody wants to do any flash photography, we ask that you refrain from 

doing so. If you have to, at least let us know. We have some people that can be 

affected by the flash so we ask that you be considerate of that as we progress with our 

meeting.

Like I said, I am Neil Melick, and we are grateful for the attendance at the second 

public hearing for the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the ICT process 

here.

We also, as we move forward, want to thank those who did a lot of hard work on 

this. It has taken us a long time. We want to thank the TEITAC, which is the 

Telecommunications Electronic Information Technology Advisory Committee -- that is a 

mouthful....

(Laughter.)
2

NEIL MELICK: ...for their hard work, because they spent a couple of years 

before we started getting working on this. We will go through some of the timetable 

here as part of the presentation, but we want to thank them and there's a few of them 

here today. If they would stand and be recognized...

(Applause.)

NEIL MELICK: ...without their work, it would have been a lot harder for the ad 

hoc committee to progress with their work.

At this time, I would like to recognize the vice chair of the Access Board, Nancy 

Starnes. She is here and I would like to ask her if she would like to make any 

comments.

NANCY STARNES: Thank you, Neil, and good morning to each of you. I want to 

echo the welcome that you have already received here, and hope that you are 

comfortable, and that all of your needs are being met. I also want to underscore the 

enthusiasm with which the Access Board has been approaching the ICT issues, and we 

are excited about the implications to improve the lives of people with disabilities through 

our work. Thanks, Neil.

NEIL MELICK: Thank you. As a blind individual, I have a real interest in the 

work that we have done, and it is going to be an opportunity for us to hear your 

comments. Before we do that, I would like to go down the line, and let all of us up here 

introduce ourselves, starting on my far left.

J.R. HARDING: J. R. Harding, Public Member. Florida.

GARY TALBOT: Gary Talbot, Public Member from Foxboro, Massachusetts.
3

NANCY STARNES: Nancy Starnes, Public member from Virginia.

JOHN BOX: John Box, Public member, California.

JOE CIRILLO: Joe Cirillo, Public member, Rhode Island.

ELIZABETH STEWART: Elizabeth Stewart, Public member, Florida. Good 

morning.

RONALD GARDNER: Ron Gardner, Public member, Salt Lake City, Utah.

TIM CREAGAN: Tim Creagan, Access Board staff.

HANS VAN WINKLE: Hans Van Winkle, Public member, New Jersey.

NEIL MELICK: At this time I will turn it over to my co-chair, and he will have a 

couple of comments.

RONALD GARDNER: Well, here we are at a public hearing here in Washington, 

D.C. to talk about something controversial. Gee, what a surprise.

(Laughter.)

RONALD GARDNER: The wonderful thing is that you have come, you have 

come. This is a public hearing. It is the date and time set to come and give public 

comments about what I believe every single person in this room believes is a very 

important issue. And it is one that will affect our lives. Whether you are a person with a 

disability, or not, this rulemaking will affect your life in one way or another. I'm not going 

to give you a big speech about how many people with disabilities there are, but there 

are a lot of us. And if you don't happen to be a person with a disability, your life is still 

affected by people with disabilities. This rulemaking is one that is going to impact more 
4

people than are just in the room, and so I want to emphasize the importance, 

underscore the importance, reiterate the importance, well, all right, get right down to it, 

and beg you to please contact others that you know are interested in this rulemaking. 

And get them to send in their comments. We have until June 21st on this Advance 

Notice of Public Rulemaking -- Proposed Rulemaking, excuse me. We would like to ask 

you to get the word out further. There's still time. This is a public hearing and it is an 

opportunity for us to hear and visit face-to-face about issues that are important to you, 

or people that you represent. But the written comments are also very critical, and will 

be considered by our staff and by the board members as we move forward.

Now, without a lot of further ado, I really do want to recognize the work of our 

staff. Our staff director is David Capozzi, and he is here with us; quite frankly, he and 

his staff have done a wonderful job in supporting us, and quite frankly all of you, as we 

have moved this rulemaking forward. Please give at least an acknowledging round of 

applause to David Capozzi and his staff.

(Applause.)

RONALD GARDNER: Again, it is nice to be here with you, I hope that if we have 

time after all of those who have signed have spoken that, you will be thinking about 

additional conversation that we can have, and information that can be shared. Again, 

thank you very, very much for being here, and I will turn it back to Neil Melick.

NEIL MELICK: Okay, let me go through the ground rules here. What we are 

going to do today, is, first of all, I will be turning the time over in just a minute to Tim 

Creagan, who has been the lead staff assisting the ad hoc committee in this process. 

We are grateful to him for his diligent work as Ron said about the entire staff.

But he will do a brief presentation. After the presentation, we will go through the 

list of those who have signed up to speak today. We ask you to keep your comments to 

3 to 5 minutes. As you get over 3, and it looks like you are going on, I will probably 
5

interrupt you and ask you to wrap it up so that we give everybody an opportunity that is 

here, to have an opportunity to speak on the subject matter.

Also, you know, we want to announce that what we will be doing is listening up 

here. We are not going to debate, or get into the issues you know, that you raise, but 

we will be taking notes and it is recorded, so we can take the information and we can 

use that to again, enter in the comments to our notice of public rulemaking. This is so 

we can better understand some of the needs that we may not have thought about, or 

the issues that may arise through the discussions. So we can address those as we 

progress further with these rules.

So if there're not any questions related to how we will proceed, I will make one 

more comment. If we get finished with those who have made comments, we will take a 

break about 10:30, a.m., and looks like we will probably have enough comments to run 

through there, and afterwards we will come back and still open up the floor for others 

who may not have signed up, that may want to make comments. Again, we will try to 

limit the time so that everybody gets the chance to speak, so at this time I will turn it 

over to Tim Creagan, who will give us a brief presentation.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is nice to see so many familiar 

faces. What I'm going to do, for the benefit of those persons who may not have been 

involved in the process, is give a very brief overview of the history of this rulemaking,

and where we are today, and as Neil said, the ground rules for today's presentation.

As we indicated, this originated with the work of the TEITAC Advisory 

Committee, which worked for 19 months from 2006 to 2008. We went through many 

hours of face-to-face meetings, telecommunications meetings, e-mails and they 

produced a 119 page report. The TEITAC report which is on the Access Board website, 

as well as 11 minority reports, all of which the staff reviewed. We appreciate your hard 

work. That report was presented on April 3rd, 2008, to the board. The staff then worked 
6

to produce the Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking which was published on 

March 22nd of this year.

As Neil indicated, we have had -- this is the second of our two public hearings. 

We had a public hearing in San Diego on March 25th at the CSUN Conference. The 

transcript of that public hearing is currently posted at the website: www.regulations.gov. 

If you click on the link on our home page, where it says “ICT rulemaking”, and click on 

the link in there for “Regulations.gov”, it will take you directly to the rulemaking for this 

proceeding.

You can read the transcript for the CSUN comments. Currently we have about 40 

comments in total. We are about halfway through the comment period. The comment 

period will end in about 5 weeks, on June 21st. We appreciate any and all comments 

we receive.

To submit comments, the website you can go to, as I indicated is 

“www.regulations.gov”. If you wish to send e-mails, because we are aware that there 

are some accessibility issues with Regulations.gov, and we are on record as noting 

those. However, we were told this is what we have to use. The e-mail address is 

“ICTrule@access-board.gov”, so you can send e-mails to that address and staff will 

make sure that those comments are posted to Regulations.gov. All comments today 

will be posted on Regulations.gov.

You may also fax materials to 202-272-0081. Or you may mail, or hand-deliver 

materials to the Access Board, in care of the Office of Technical and Information 

Services, United States Access Board, 1331 F Street Northwest, suite 1000, 

Washington, D.C. 20004.

After today's hearing, and after the close of the rulemaking on June 21st, the next 

steps in the process will be the analyzing of all of the comments we received. Again, I 

cannot urge all of you strongly enough to put your comments in writing and submit them 
7

into the record. As much as I have had many very interesting conversations with people, 

I remind you that it needs to go in the record to be considered. So we appreciate that.

We will be analyzing the comments and will be developing the next step in the 

rulemaking, which is the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, or NPRM. One of the things 

that we have become aware of is that there are a number of issues which were not 

mentioned in the ANPRM, which would need to be raised in the NPRM, so that they can 

be considered in the final rule. These can include such items as standards currently in 

development, which we were not aware of at the time that we published the ANPRM. So 

again, any comments that you have as to things that we should consider, or add, we 

appreciate that.

We will also develop what is called a “regulatory assessment”, which is a costbenefit analysis of each of the proposed provision. When the package is completed, it 

will include revised text, the regulatory assessment, and a preamble to the rule, which 

will explain the origination of various provisions. The package is then voted on by the 

Board and approved, then that package will be submitted to the Office of Management 

and Budget for their approval, and then eventually published in the Federal Register as 

a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. We will then have a subsequent public comment 

period. And then a final rule. So that is the outline of the steps from the end of this

current comment period.

For today's hearing, as Neil indicated, we ask that the speakers who are 

registered speak for no more than 3 to 5 minutes. We will go through the list. I will call 

each name if the person does not answer, I will move on to the next name on the list. 

When there is time, we will keep calling the names to see if the person has shown up.

Once we go through all of the registered speakers, anybody who wishes to speak 

should come up to the microphone here, and identify yourself, and then you will be 

under the same ground rules of 3 to 5 minutes to speak.
8

A transcript is being kept, and it will be entered into the docket. Our plans are to 

have this hearing from 9:00 a.m. this morning until approximately noon. If you have 

any written remarks, or PowerPoint shows, please give them to the staff at the 

registration desk and they will be entered into the record. We ask that you please 

refrain from reacting publicly to witness presentations or to any statements, thank you. 

Mr. Chairman.

NEIL MELICK: Thanks, Tim. Again, the ground rules are pretty well laid out. 

And again, if you do not have time to complete all of your statements, again, remember 

as Tim said we have plenty of time after June 21st to post your comments and we will 

use all of the information that we can. We are really looking forward for the feedback 

and hope that we can improve on what we have done.

At this time, Tim will call the first witness.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. For the first witness I call Miss 

Preety Kumar. Preety Kumar, Deque Systems. [No response.] All right. Mr. 

Chairman, I will move on. Ms. Jennifer Simpson. AAPD.

JENNIFER SIMPSON: Good morning.

Neil Melick: Good morning.

JENNIFER SIMPSON: I'm Jennifer Simpson, Senior Director for Government 

Affairs at the American Association of People with Disabilities, the nation's largest 

disability advocacy organization representing the interests of over 50 million Americans 

with disabilities. I also co-chair and am a founding member of the Coalition of 

Organizations for Accessible Technology, also known as COAT, a 307- affiliate 

membership organization, advocating for accessibility of advanced communications 

technologies. Accessible, usable, and affordable technology is essential and critical in 

supporting the full civil rights of people with disabilities.
9

From nursery schools to classrooms, playgrounds, airports, shopping malls, 

medical settings, homes, workplaces, entertainment arenas, and just about any other 

area of 21st century life, electronic and information technology is inextricably woven into 

the fabric of our lives as a critical component. Technology is also a powerful force of 

social change. It is only right in a civil society for the products, services, applications, 

and electronic interactions and interfaces to be accessible and available to every 

member of our society.

My two main points: History shows us that market forces rarely drive 

accessibility and usability of technology in, for instance, when they are open codes, 

open sources and a general understanding of the need. Furthermore, one size doesn't 

fit all. Disability manifestation is diverse ranging through vision, hearing, motor, 

intellectual, motor, and other functional areas of limitation that other individuals may 

experience. For these reasons the Access Board's ICT rules will play a crucial role in 

staking out what accessibility and usability looks like.

All of us know for instance, that once upon a time, a long time ago, in the last 

century, phone calls were the provisions of plain old telephone service providers and 

phone devices had 3-digit phone numbers, live operators and you had to make a 

reservation for a long distance call. Today, we don't remember those times. It is 

completely transformed from wireless and internet connection to converged devices 

with multiple functions and features and software applications that link me visually with 

anybody almost for free anywhere on planet earth. It is a completely different situation 

that we are in, and this trend is continuing.

Television viewing on a wireless phone, yes; phone call via my game box, yes; 

kiosks telling me I left the change in the machine to pick it up, yes; point-of-sale devices 

wanting my PIN number, yes; health information technology with interfaces, all of these 

must be accessible and usable to people with disabilities. Whether it is person-toperson, person-to-machine, machine-to-person, machine-to-machine, network-to-
10

network, new forms of the human experience with electronic and information technology 

are occurring, and these humans include those of us with disabilities.

Therefore, AAPD encourages and supports the Access Board in a functional 

approach to its rules. And we encourage you to ensure that the rules are broad in 

scope, in terms of the advanced communications and electronic information technology 

equipment and services that you cover. They should not be limited in approach to what 

is currently available but should be mindful that these rules should also cover new 

technology tools, or they will risk being obsolete and act as a brake on innovation at the 

very start. The rules must be brought into scope and we ask you to do that. Thank you 

for this opportunity to comment on our summary and thoughts in regard to the context 

and scope and we do intend to file more detailed comments in the first round. Thank 

you.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Mr. Kevin Maher. American Hotel and Lodging 

Association, Kevin Maher.

KEVIN MAHER: Thank you. On behalf of the American Hotel & Lodging 

Association, I would like to thank the Access Board for the opportunity to comment on 

the proposed ADA Title III guidelines for self-service machines for ticketing, checking in, 

check out, seat selection, boarding passes, and ordering foods in restaurants and 

cafeterias. We are the sole national association representing members from all sectors 

in the lodging industry. Our members consist of individual property owners and are 

operators, as well as hotel companies, that own and/or operate lodging facilities 

throughout the United States. Many of our members are small businesses. We at 

AHLA believe that the accessibility requirements that affect our members should be 

clear and easily understood. To that end, AHLA generally supports the concept of 

having guidelines for self-service equipment so that our members know what types of 

machines they must have in their facilities to ensure that their guests have equal access 

to their goods and services. That said, AHLA does not believe that the proposed 

guidelines for self-service machines accomplish these objectives. The proposed rule 
11

states that: "Where self-service machines other than automatic teller machines and fare 

machines covered by 220.1 must meet the definition of information and communication 

technology at 36 CFR, part 1194, and that they are used for ticketing, check in, or check 

out, seat selection, boarding passes, or ordering food in restaurants and cafeterias. At 

least one of each type provided at each location shall comply with the provisions of 36 

CFR, part 1194, chapters 3 through 9.” The requirements of chapters 3 through 9 span 

more than 56 pages. Those 56 pages of requirements are highly technical and from the 

feedback that we have received from lawyers, who are very familiar with the current 

ADA standards, largely are incomprehensible. The imposing and directing of 

manufacturers and purchasers of these machines to 56 pages of requirements, and 

putting the burden on them to figure out what requirements apply, and what 

requirements do not apply, is unworkable. Our members have neither the resources 

nor the expertise to independently assess whether a piece of self-service equipment 

they are purchasing or leasing complies with 56 pages of potential requirements. But 

this is what they will have to do in order to ensure that the equipment can be used in 

their facility. AHLA believes that this approach is unfair to our members and will not 

result in a shared goal for equal access to individuals with disabilities. The Access 

Board has in the past been able to develop standards for other self-service machines 

that are not unreasonably complex. For example, the requirements for ATMs are only 

three pages long. AHLA urges the Access Board to take a similar approach for other 

types of self-service machines. Each type of self-service equipment, for example, pointof-sale devices, self-check-out machines at stores or self-check-in machines at hotels, 

this is covered and should have its own set of rules, so that our members do not have to 

determine which of the 56 pages of the requirements apply to a particular type of selfservice equipment.

The current approach will cause confusion and significant increase in the 

likelihood of unintended noncompliance. Noncompliance will result in a liability for our 

members because they are the ones who are responsible for complying with Title III of 

the ADA; not the manufacturers.
12

We also urge the Access Board to reach out to specific manufacturers of each 

type of self-service machines to be covered to obtain their comments on the 

requirements and their impact from a cost and technological perspective. Although we 

do not know what involvement, if any, the manufacturers of covered self-service 

machines had in developing this standards, it is our sense that most are not even aware 

that the proposed standards have been issued. Once they become aware of the 

proposed standards, they must analyze which of the 56 pages of standards apply to the 

machine that they manufacture, and must analyze how the proposed standards will 

impact the current machines from a cost and manufacturing perspective.

And a 90-day comment period to answer these questions is inadequate. I would 

like to close by saying in this difficult economic environment self-service machines can 

and do play an important role in delivering greater efficiency for our members and 

guests. However, if the accessibility requirements are not documented our members 

will not be able to meaningfully apply them in selecting self-service equipment.

We urge you to simplify and clarify the approach and to seek input outside the 

constraints of the 90-day public comment period, thank you very much.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Mr. Eduardo Meza-Etienne. TecAccess. Mr. 

Eduardo Meza-Etienne TecAccess. [No Response.] Jim Mueller.

JIM MUELLER: Good morning.

TIM CREAGAN: Good morning.

JIM MUELLER: Thanks for the opportunity to be here, although I have to tell 

you; where I sit it is a little imposing to sit in front of you. I will forge ahead anyway. 

Thank you again for the opportunity to be here and thanks to the board and the TEITAC

for all of this hard work. It is evidence in the guidelines that have been presented to 

date. I'm looking forward to seeing how they are refined. I'm a product designer, one of 
13

the few, I guess, in this room. I have been since 1974. And it is not really important that 

you know too much about what product designers do, but they build pretty much 

everything that we use or try to use in our daily lives. And I should tell you that there's 

really quite a vacuum in guidelines to product designers as to how to design anything to 

include people with a variety of disabilities. Regardless of EIT, there's all of the other 

things that product designers get very little training, and resources in and I should tell 

you that Section 255 and 508 have been used not only by designers of EIT, but other 

products and services that in a vacuum really these guidelines provide some excellent 

direction for designers. I should say they are pretty widely applied.

I'm speaking today on behalf of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center 

for Wireless Technology, in Atlanta. I serve as a project director there and of user 

research and have done so since 2001. Today I would like to specifically address the 

guidelines that address users with cognitive intellectual disabilities. Since 2001, the 

Wireless RERC has been conducting a survey on people with disabilities about their 

use or nonuse of electronic and information technology, specifically wireless.

We have revised the survey periodically, and at the advice of both customers and 

industry, and in its most recent iteration, which is from April 2007, to April of this year, 

we have received about 1,858 responses.

The survey includes a question about any cognitive, physical, or sensory 

disabilities that the Respondents have, and of those 1,858, 300 told us that they have 

some limitation in thinking, remembering, or other kinds of cognitive limitations. This 

survey also asks what would make your wireless devices easier to use. As you might 

imagine we get a great deal of response in that category, and some of the responses do 

reflect the TEITAC's stance that design standards that meet the needs of people with, 

say, sensory and physical disabilities, often also meet the needs of people with 

cognitive disabilities.
14

For example, some of our Respondents have called for larger text on controls, 

larger display, shapes that are easier to grip more securely, voice input and output, 

greater volume capacity and control.

Interestingly, as a sideline, many of these features are already available in the 

devices that they currently have and they are unaware of their presence, which I think is 

important to note. On the other hand, these Respondents also talk about frustrations 

that they face in using the technology. As it becomes more powerful, they feel less 

powerful. Some feel powerless. One respondent actually told us she got so frustrated 

that she now uses a Fire Fly [mobile phone], which she pointedly said, “... Is designed 

for preschoolers.” This was her defense against what she called “future creep”. But 

specifically, they note things like the need for repeated personal instruction on how to 

do simple tasks; frustration with non-intuitive multistep processes in doing relatively 

simple things; confusion over delays in response of the device to their input, or lack of 

feedback at all to their controlled inputs. Or the kinds of things that we all have faced, 

I'm sure from time to time. They are painfully aware that they are already using, even in 

the case of some of the simplest devices, only a fraction of the capabilities of their 

technologies. Last summer we explored usability issues of touch screen devices like 

the iPhone, and Blackberry Storm with a group of our consumer advisors, including 

people with cognitive limitations primarily due to stroke, learning disabilities or acquired 

brain injuries.

Although some of the same frustrations that I have already mentioned surfaced 

in this study, we noticed that the tactile and visual feedback of the Blackberry Storm 

interface for example, was much appreciated by all these people with cognitive 

limitations. The clever graphics of the iPhone and the processes that mapped things 

that they are familiar with, and novice users who were intimidated by something as 

vaunted as the iPhone, they felt they were able to start processing and using that 

technology immediately, which was really heartening to us. It is consumer insights that 

are unique to people with cognitive limitations that move us to make the following three 

recommendations to the board.
15

Number 1, is to amend the organizational approach of the guidelines, to call 

attention to those provisions for people with physical or sensory disabilities, that are 

also deemed to enhance usability for people with cognitive disabilities. So that these 

guidelines will be very visible.

Second, consider, as suggested by some committee members, addressing the 

size and diversity of this user population by establishing more wieldy subsets. In other 

words, for example, “people with memory limitations” as a user group, people with 

“language limitations” as a separate group, “learning limitations” as a separate group 

and establishing guidelines to meet each of those. Finally, continue to promote 

additional research towards those testable criteria that we are all looking for on usability 

by vital people with cognitive limitations. Those are going to be incremental steps 

towards achieving some parity in guidance on designing for people with cognitive 

limitations as well as those with physical and sensory limitations, but even that 

incremental progress we think is vital. It not only stimulates that ongoing dialogue that 

is going to be necessary for further progress, but it helps to focus the attention of 

designers and their clients on this large and growing segment of the population. Thank 

you very much.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Mr. Duff Johnson, APPLIGENT Document 

Solutions, Mr. Duff Johnson. Thank you.

DUFF JOHNSON: Thank you very much to the board. My name is Duff 

Johnson; I chair the ISO/CD working committee, which is a committee draft of the 

oncoming International standard for accessible PDF. I'm also the vice chair for the US 

committee for ISO 32000, which is the standard -- which is the PDF standard.

Mr. Chairman, members of the US Access Board, it is an honor to be here today 

to discuss the refresh of Section 508 as it pertains specifically to the PDF file format. 

I'm here to offer my support for the adoption of PDF/UA and the revised ICT standards 
16

for accessible PDF. Adobe Systems invented the portable document format known as 

PDF. The technology is widely used in government and business because PDF delivers 

a reliable viewing and printing experience across multiple computing platforms. The 

electronic equivalent of paper, PDF is a final form media for official or formal content. 

That is probably why the very first PDF file was an IRS Form 1040.

(Laughter.)

DUFF JOHNSON: The PDF format is no longer owned or controlled by Adobe 

Systems. It is entirely managed by the ISO 32000. Today PDF is the dominant 

electronic document format with website and servers and individual computers around 

the world replete with PDF files. When it comes to accessibility, PDF has a checkered 

past. Prior to 2000, there was literally no way to make an accessible PDF file. The 

semantic structures necessary to build up words from characters, lines from words, and 

paragraphs from lines, simply did not exist in PDF. When Adobe Systems released 

Acrobat 5, for the first time it became possible to structure and tag PDF files. This was 

an important innovation because tagged PDFs are capable of delivering text and other 

context in correct order. In a tagged PDF, logical structure such as headings, lists, 

tables and form fields are available to assistive technologies. PDF is internally complex,

and the format’s capabilities are both broad and deep. As such, it has been a timeconsuming challenge to set clear standards for making PDF documents and forms 

accessible.

AIIM, the industry association for electronic content management, oversees the 

representation of US interests in international standards for electronic content at the 

ISO level. AIIM began the PDF/Universal Accessibility Standards project in 2004 to 

establish norms for accessible PDF files. PDF/UA is fairly regarded as a PDF-specific 

implementation of WCAG 2.0. PDF files that comply with PDF/UA will also comply with 

WCAG 2.0. PDF/UA committees are open to any interested observers or participants. 

Both Adobe Systems and Microsoft are represented on both the US and international 

PDF/UA committees. A number of the other software developers, nonprofit 
17

organizations, and individuals have participated in these committees over time. 

PDF/UA’s focus is on the PDF file and conforming Reader technologies. As such, the 

bulk of the standard is devoted to technical criteria of interest primarily to application 

developers. The standard details obligations for both the software developer and the 

content author, but in relatively spare, technical language.

Thus, the PDF/UA committees are writing an Implementation Guide for endusers who are producing accessible PDF documents and forms. The Guide will make 

PDF/UA easier to understand and help software developers in creating conforming 

applications. The current schedules should get PDF/UA to a draft international standard 

in late 2010, or early 2011, with formal publication approximately a year thereafter. 

Several national standards bodies have expressed interest in PDF/UA, including the 

British Standards Institution and German DIN. Organizations such as the American 

Foundation for the Blind and the DAISY consortium are also following the committee’s

efforts. I'm here to urge the board to adopt PDF/UA as the standard for accessible 

PDF. The establishment of a normative basis will for accessible PDF will improve 

accessibility of information technology and electronic content, improving access to 

information for all. Thank you for this opportunity to update you on progress towards an 

international standard for accessible PDF.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you very much. Maureen Fitzgerald of the Disability 

Policy Collaboration. Maureen Fitzgerald.

MAUREEN FITZGERALD: Good morning. My name is Maureen Fitzgerald, and 

I work for the Disability Policy Collaboration, which is a partnership between the ARC of 

the United States, and United Cerebral Palsy, both the ARC and United Cerebral Palsy, 

have been representing people with disabilities for over 60 years. Each has affiliates 

and chapters in cities and states across the nation. Just a few comments this morning. 

First of all, you asked about “official communication from the Federal Government”, and 

we believe that any kind of communication from the Federal Government should be 
18

accessible. Whether it is over YouTube, or anything else, that it should all be 

accessible to all individuals with disabilities. 

Given the universe of individuals with disabilities and the unique differences that 

they all have, we believe that the functional accessibility criteria should be applied as 

well as the technical criteria. The guidelines seem to imply that if a piece of equipment

or technology meets the technical standards, it will automatically meet the functional 

criteria. We believe that given the disparities, the differences among people with 

disabilities, and the rapidly emerging field of technology, that there could be instances in 

which something met the technical standards and yet was still not accessible to an 

individual, so we believe that both standards the technical and the functional should be 

met.

We also think that there's a glaring omission in the standards when it comes to 

people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and we notice that the TEITAC

could not come to consensus about developing a standard. We think that some of the 

technical requirements do meet the needs of people with intellectual and developmental 

disabilities, but we think that there should be some mention of the needs of these folks 

in these standards, at least through some giving some examples, referencing some of 

the technical standards, but we believe that that group of individuals is missing, and 

needs to be included in the standards.

We will also be submitting more comments in writing, and I very much appreciate 

this opportunity.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Claude Stout, Telecommunications for the Deaf, 

Inc. Claude Stout, Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc.

CLAUDE STOUT: Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. My 

name is Claude Stout. And I'm the director of Telecommunications for the Deaf and 

Hard of Hearing, a national advocacy organization that provides leadership and 

achievement access to people with disabilities regarding technology. TDI congratulates 
19

the Board for your work and leadership, and facilitating the process of clear distinctions 

between terms, standards, and applications, and guidelines for equal access needs. 

Section 508, and Section 255 are intentionally broad to give the Access Board 

maximum flexibility to implement effective workable guidelines for technology that 

Congress expected to change rapidly, which is happening -- which is exactly what 

happened during the decade since these guidelines were originally implemented. 

Moreover, given that state agencies and private industry often model equal access 

programs after successful programs implemented at the federal level, the Access 

Board's decision to revisit the ICT technology guidelines also enables the Federal 

Government to lead by example on this important issue.

Over the past decade there have been tremendous changes in the way 

individuals use ICT technology to communicate, and access information. Wired, circuitbased telephone infrastructure has given way to flexible internet protocol-based 

networks and applications that seamlessly support voice, video, and data services. IEP 

applications that were novel in 2000, for example, streaming video, are essential tools 

for conducting routine business in 2010. Unlicensed wireless functionality is embedded 

in virtually every laptop computer sold in 2010. Convergence has made previously 

distinct stand-alone applications and technologies function on nonnative platforms. For 

example, the ability to operate word processing software and many other applications 

on a smart phone which we take for granted in 2010 would have been farfetched in 

2000. Generally the above changes have been a boon for productivity and the Federal 

Government worker. Unfortunately, the implementation of secondary technology to 

ensure that Federal Government workers with disabilities have equal access to 

electronic content has not always kept pace. For example, although in many instances 

streaming video is a preferred method for disseminating official government 

communications, not all agencies caption their IP video content. Also, not all 

government web pages allow visually impaired end users browsing the page’s content 

to adjust the font size. Not all government web pages are optimized for screen reader 

software that is used widely by the blind, and visually impaired, to recite HTML text. 
20

Thank you once again for the opportunity to speak to you today on these important 

issues.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Mark Richert. American Foundation for the Blind. 

Mark Richert. Looks like we have Paul Schroeder for the American Foundation for the 

Blind.

PAUL SCHROEDER: Thank you for the opportunity. My name is Paul 

Schroeder. I'm with the American foundation for the Blind. Mark was just mumbling 

back there about growing a beard in about 5 minutes, so --

(Laughter.)

PAUL SCHROEDER: He was struck by the individual talking about the number 

of pages that they are going to have to go through. If they should be so lucky --- at the 

health care folks complained about, what, 2,000 pages they had to go through so, 56 

doesn't seem like such a bad thing. (Laughter.) I want to make comments on behalf of 

the American Foundation for the Blind, an organization that works on behalf of 

individuals with vision loss. We have spent a great deal of time working on technology 

accessibility, and we intend to submit more detailed comments about specific provisions 

in the docket by the comment period. As you will know, we did publish a brief 

explanation, an indication to our community in a publication called Access World, which 

is available on the AFB website and I would certainly invite people to have a look at that 

and we will be providing further guidance to the vision loss and other communities 

through a tele-seminar coming up later this month. I also want to indicate that I am a 

founding member, and one of the leaders of the Coalition of Organizations For 

Accessible Technology, COAT, and I would at least like to hope that the comments that 

I make today somewhat reflect the views of this broader coalition. I do want to applaud 

the Access Board for its work in balancing functional performance requirements and 

extensive specific technical guidelines generally. I think we do believe that this 

document has dramatically improved upon the earlier guidelines for electronic and 

information technology accessibility as well as for the telecommunications guidelines. 
21

The remainder of my comments, while somewhat beyond the scope of the 

Access Board, I do believe are important as you reflect upon finalizing these guidelines, 

because they do indicate how we can make 508, I hope, more successful than it has 

proven to be thus far in transforming accessibility of technology. First I want to 

comment on the need for transparency and consistency across federal agencies. It is of 

critical importance that we see that that occur with Section 508, and we don't believe 

that that has been the case. We think that the specifications of these guidelines will 

help to make that more possible. We also applaud the Access Board for its extensive 

supplemental documentation, which we hope will assist procurement officials also in 

maintaining consistency across the Federal Government. Section 508 guidelines must 

facilitate sharing information about accessible technology and web accessibility 

solutions across federal agencies and the contractors that are covered for work on 

federal agency guidelines. I also want to applaud the fact that the Access Board has 

made clear that posting videos on channels such as YouTube does not excuse a 

federal agency from its requirements of accessibility under Section 508. Your 

guidelines are also important, we hope, as a way of assisting in so-called crowd 

sourcing, encouraging feedback from the covered communities, and that is the disability 

community of course, both federal employees, and members of the general public. We

want to create opportunities for the public, as well as anonymous employee feedback 

when necessary, in order to help federal agencies in implementing Section 508. 

Obviously, there are complaint systems available too, for federal employees, but we 

also think that feedback can be an important tool in obviating the need for a complaint. 

Likewise the disability community, and again, federal employees, and members of the 

general public must be able to provide input into surveys and other ways of measuring 

federal compliance. Assuming that the DOJ is paying attention to this discussion today, 

yes, we are once again encouraging them to move forward with all deliberate speed in 

completing their work required under Section 508, and in fact to report federal agency 

compliance, publish what has been done and get a new survey in the field as soon as 

possible so we know what benchmark we are working against. Finally, compliance with 

Section 508, we believe, would be facilitated by mechanisms that enable feedback from 

the disability community. We don't believe that federal agencies are as well served as 
22

they could be by the closed vendor controlled “Voluntary Product Accessibility 

Template” which seems to be a substitute for full information on accessibility. While 

vendor information is of course critical, and the first way of getting information about the 

accessibility of a product, opportunities for independent evaluations from organizations 

such as mine, or individuals in the disability community, are also a valuable tool and 

must be more forthrightly included in Section 508. I believe that this further validates 

the importance that was spoken to earlier of the functional performance guidelines. 

After all, the stuff has to actually work for real people, and real situations. Last 

comment, we will be spending some time on the “Best Meets”, E 108 Section, because 

we are concerned that that will allow potentially for too much moving away from the 

Section 508 requirements. Thank you very much.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Mr. Eric Bridges. American Council of the Blind. 

Mr. Eric Bridges. [No response.] All right, what we are going to do is go back up the 

list. I understand a person who was signed up to speak earlier is now here, so I call him 

to the table. Mr. Eduardo Meza-Etienne, TecAccess, Mr. Eduardo Meza-Etienne, 

TecAccess.

EDUARDO MEZA-ETIENNE: Thank you. Good morning. I apologize; I was 

supposed to be one of the first testifying here. As Mr. Creagan mentioned, I represent 

TecAccess. We are a leader in the disability consulting industry. We have actually set 

up an internal task force to review the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. One of 

the things that we have done so far is that we created a draft document I would like to 

send out to the US Access Board for review with comments and suggestions. But one 

of the things that I would like to highlight is, we definitely support the idea of 

harmonizing the web standards to the web content accessibility guidelines, Level 

Double A. We definitely support that. As far as the 33 questions we are going over 

those questions. We will be again submitting some information that will be hopefully 

helpful to the Access Board in coming up with a final rule.

So that is really all I have to add. Okay.
23

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Let me call again, persons who were signed in who 

haven't testified. Ms. Preety Kumar, Deque Systems. Preety Kumar, Deque Systems. 

[No response.] All right. Mr. Eric Bridges, American Council of the Blind? [No 

response.] No? All right. The next person on the list is Mary Brooner, on behalf of the 

Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA). 

Mary Brooner: Good morning. I am Mary Brooner, and I am speaking today on 

behalf of the Telecommunications Industry Association. The members of which are 

manufacturers of ICT equipment and manufacturers of ICT software. TIA was a 

member of the TEITAC, and has been involved in the Telecommunications Act activities 

of the Access Board, going back to the guidelines for the development of Section 255 

and the functional standards for 508 originally. Many members of TIA develop VPATS 

to help the government meet Section 508 and many members make products subject to 

Section 255. I appreciate the opportunity to speak today, and I first want to 

acknowledge, before I make any substantive comments, that the industry recognizes 

the significant work that has gone into the Advance Notice. It is truly a huge effort that 

you all have undertaken. It is a challenge to synthesize the information, and seek to 

make sense of technical details in a way that is comprehensive, future directed, and 

useful to the industry and to the 508 coordinators and procurement professionals 

throughout the Federal Government, and the many state and local governments that 

make -- departments and agencies that make use of them. So thank you.

The first comment I wish to make, is a general one, and as background let me 

say that TIA will be filing comments, and detailed comments on some of the functional 

standards, and guidelines chapters. Some TIA members will also be filing comments on 

their own. So I wanted to put these comments in context. The context is this: Quite 

simply, TIA members want the Access Board recommendations and functional 

requirements to be doable, and achievable for commercially available products and 

services. The manufacturers want to build devices and equipment that are accessible 

to users, and allow the manufacturer to write supports next to the various standards that 

are detailed on the VPATs. We want to share thoroughly information, and we don't 
24

want to be in the situation of fearing that we are issuing misleading comments because 

in the end, both customers and users will not be satisfied. That statement that this is 

what we want to do is deceptively simple, because to achieve the goal requires the 

Access Board to write functional requirements in such a way that they are clear, and 

understood; that they are not limiting to just one way of implementation, and that they 

allow for innovation. To stand the test of time, the functional requirements must be 

descriptive without being proscriptive, for example, to a single standard that might be 

revised in a period of years. I will give you an example. Wireless devices have audio 

voice, audio music and audio ring tones. Each one of those audio applications on a 

wireless device is built to a different standard, each one for the specific use. The 

standard for audio voice enhances the human voice range. Ring tones are intended to 

grab your attention, and must meet the consumer safety requirements for audio.

If the Access Board functional requirements are generalized, overly so, for audio,

in the details that are applied across all of audio, the manufacturers in some instances, 

will have to write, “does not support” on the VPAT where different standards are used 

than those that are stated, as if they were required. Yet, the device might be 

accessible. And we feel that that is a loss both for the manufacturer, and for the 508 

coordinators and ultimately for the process to serve the accessibility and those who 

need it. And so similarly, for Section 255 purposes, designation of a single standard to 

meet a particular disability, may unnecessarily suggest a compliance issue where none 

may exist. So I thank you for the Advance Notice. It allows an opportunity for what I 

call a true-up process, and it is extremely helpful for the opportunity to have this interim 

stage so that the goals of the further Notice and of the recommendations can be 

achieved. 

The second comment I would like to make is that the Access Board in some 

instances has conflated the Section 255 and 508 guidelines at this time, leaving it up to 

industry to ascertain which provisions are, or are not applicable to Section 255 in a 

given context. TIA suggests that it would be helpful if the board provided some 

indication as to which of the requirements would apply to Section 255, or 508 under 

today's regulatory -- under today's regulations, but would not apply to both. We can 

make our own assessment, but it would also be useful to have the Access Board's.
25

Thirdly, the Access Board has asked some questions, some 33 questions on its 

own with regard to how it has drafted the guidelines and the functional requirements. 

And if you will permit me I have just a few comments on just a few of them. With regard 

to question 1, it is fine that the organization of the document is by features rather than 

discrete product types. Where it gets complicated, and this goes back to my first 

comment, is that the functional requirements are not so specific to standards and ways 

of implementation that some product types are covered, but others are not simply 

because of the technology that is specifically referenced. A recommendation to the 

Access Board, which TIA will offer, is the importance of suggestive or illustrative 

language that points to the goal to be achieved and the primary purpose rather than 

proscriptive drafting. 

Question 2, which is on implementation time frames, yes, they should not all be 

the same, or yes you should allow a different time frame. This is because in some 

instances, to be commercially available, industry standards do not exist and will have to 

be developed, and only then can new features begin to be the incorporated into 

devices, and that takes time. Also overhanging these proposals, is the National 

Broadband Plan issued by the FCC, the rulemakings that are coming out of that plan 

beginning very quickly, which have the potential to modify further the Access Board 

recommendations and also the legislative proposals that are under discussion in the 

Congress right now. So a request that industry makes is that the Access Board work 

with those bodies to ensure alignment with the FCC, and other agencies where issues 

overlap. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak, and we look forward to 

continuing to work with you.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Mr. Rex Lint, TechAmerica.

REX LINT: Good morning. I would like to thank the Access Board for a chance 

to make some remarks on aspects of the ANPRM that I found particularly important to 

the continued evolution of the technology industry. First, let me introduce myself. My 

name is Rex Lint. I'm here representing TechAmerica. I also chair TechAmerica's 508 

working group. TechAmerica has as its mission the promoting of the interests of the 
26

information technology industry. It is the leading voice for the US technology industry, 

the driving force behind productivity growth and jobs creation in the United States, and 

the foundation of the global innovation economy.

TechAmerica represents 1200 member companies of all sizes, from the public 

and commercial sectors of the economy. It's the industry's largest advocacy 

organization and it is dedicated to helping member’s top and bottom lines. 

TechAmerica is also the technology industry's grassroots to global advocacy network 

with offices in state capitols around the United States, Washington, D.C., with European 

offices in Brussels, and Asian offices in Beijing. TechAmerica was formed by the 

merger of the American Electronics Association, (AeA), The Cyber Security Industry 

Alliance, (CSIA), the Information Technology Association of America, (ITAA), and the 

Government Electronics and Information Technology Association, (GEIA).

I served two years, together with many of today's audience, as a member of the 

TEITAC -- a member of TEITAC. We collaborated to arrive at the recommendations 

that underlie the emerging standard that we are discussing today.

So what is it that I find important in the text of the standard as proposed by the 

Access Board? Let me answer this directly, then I will explain why it's important, and 

what the pressures have been to arrive at this point.

I enthusiastically endorse the Access Board's interpretation of the purpose of the 

functional performance criteria. The functional performance criteria, are the provisions 

in the standards that layout in broad terms the purpose for the technical provisions. An 

example is, 202.2, Without Vision. “At least one mode of operation using nonvisual 

access shall be provided.”

The debate that engaged TEITAC members, stemmed from on the one hand, the 

desire to have this new 508, 255 standard serve as assurance that the product will 

make access assured if a vendor claims conformity with the standard, and on the other 
27

hand, a long and arduous testing process that vendors have to undertake to assure that 

in addition to meeting the technical provisions, the product was indeed accessible to 

people without vision.

The Access Board has addressed this debate. They say, and I quote "E 103.5.1, 

Relation of Functional Performance Criteria to the Technical Provisions. If there are 

applicable provisions in Chapters 3 through 9 that fully address the product or service 

being procured, then the agency need not look at Chapter 2, the Functional 

Permanence Criteria. Acquired products that meet the specified technical provisions 

set forth in Chapters 3 through 9 will also meet the broader functional performance 

criteria in Chapter 2. "

Pretty clearly the Access Board is saying that the technical provisions are the 

vehicle by which the functional performance criteria are met, unless a product or service 

does not meet the technical provision. This is important to IT companies because they 

are not required to prove that the functional performance criteria are met if the technical 

provisions are met.

Second, IT companies argue that the functional performance criteria should be 

used if some new technology, for example, does not meet the technical requirements. 

A method of addressing accessibility appropriate to such a new technology must meet 

the functional performance criteria for users where the technical requirements are 

lacking.

The notion of “equivalent facilitation” in the current 508 has been preserved, and 

it can be used if a technical requirement is not met. But accessibility can be provided, 

that is, the functional performance requirement or requirements can be met with new 

technical methodology.

The Access Board was listening. They said, and I quote, "E 103.5.2, ICT Not 

Addressed by Technical Provisions. If an agency's procurement needs are not fully 
28

addressed by Chapters 3 through 9 then the agency must look to Chapter 2 for 

applicable functional performance criteria.” “103.5.3. Evaluation of Failures Against 

Technical Provision. If any of the technical provision in Chapters 3 through 9 are not 

met, the functional performance criteria in Chapter 2 must be used to evaluate if access 

is provided in another way, through E 106 Equivalent Facilitation."

These provisions are important to protect the most important elements of the IT 

and technology industries intellectual arsenal, that is, innovation. A fact of the rapid 

development of technology, whoever invented the last big thing is not the inventor of the 

next big thing. That means when we insist that accessibility be included in the next 

product at its outset, the inventors of that next product are not the people listening to us.

We as promoters of accessible products will many times have to follow the 

direction of technology development, then repairing and revising products to include 

provisions for accessibility. But we need to be careful not to say, “Stop, don't make any 

new non-accessible products.” To do so would be to shackle the powerhouse of 

technology that keeps our country the leader in innovation. So we applaud the Access 

Board's relationship between technical provisions and the functional performance 

criteria. We look forward to providing comments on the remainder of the issues we 

identify as we review the ANPRM, and our membership is in the process of 

collaborating on comments that we will submit next month. TechAmerica would like to 

thank the Access Board for the opportunity to participate in this hearing and I would like 

to say thank you for your kind attention.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Tony Olivero, National Federation of the Blind. 

Tony Olivero.

TONY OLIVERO: Good morning, my name is Tony OLIVERO and I'm an 

access technology specialist with the National Federation of the Blind. Members of the 

Board, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to bring you the thoughts, excuse me 

of the National Federation of the Blind, the nation's oldest and largest consumer 
29

organization of blind people, regarding the Refresh of Section 508, Section 255, and the 

Americans with Disabilities Act regulations.

Overall, we are pleased with the direction the Board has taken in updating these 

regulations. In particular, the harmonization with the worldwide web, web content, will 

enable content developers, access technology specialists, and users to work from a 

single set of standards when developing applications and content. This will lead to a 

more positive experience for all involved in the accessibility process, by ensuring there's 

no room for doubt which standards should be developed for and tested against. In 

reviewing the draft -- excuse me. In reviewing the draft guidelines, we do have a few 

recommendations we would like to submit for the Board's consideration. We will be 

submitting written comments as well as what I'm summarizing here. The term, 

“assistive technology” found throughout the document, denotes a custodial attitude 

where it is implied that the technology is doing work for the user. Our recommendation 

is to utilize the term “access technology”, which more readily represents the functionality 

of the technology. That being to allow the user to gain access to material that otherwise 

would be unavailable. An audio interface, for example, merely replaces a visual screen 

as a method whereby I can access a computer. It is not specifically doing something to 

make my job of accessing that any easier.

We would like to see provisions added to the guidelines addressing help desk 

and technical support, wherein in addition to the requirements already identified, require 

some ability to communicate with users -- excuse me, to communicate with users with 

disabilities, utilizing access technology in terms with which they are familiar. Language 

similar to that used in 503.4 Sensory Characteristics, wherein the requirement is set 

forth to not require the understanding of visual elements such as shape, or screen 

placement be included when addressing communication with the user and support -- for 

support purposes.

This is applicable to both technical support, and technical documentation. We 

are pleased that manufacturers will be encouraged to include users with disabilities in 

focus group testing of new products. We would encourage the board to also extend this 
30

inclusion to all phases of the product life cycle. Occasionally products are released that 

meet accessibility guidelines, but when an update is made, accessibility functionality is 

lost and users are no longer able to access those products.

Ensuring that users with disabilities are included in testing during product 

updates will help to eliminate this risk. Information is included in Section 504 -- excuse 

me, 604.5 discussing multiple visual focus on on-screen displays. We would like to see 

this paragraph and guidance expanded to ensure that audio output is available for items 

such as screen crawls, title cards, screen pop-up information, and on-screen displays 

such as electronic programming guides. This information can be disseminated either 

through an audio subchannel, or by transmitting textual data to the end user that can be 

decoded in a text form. We do have a significant concern in the ADA paragraphs 

discussing stand-alone kiosks. Our interpretation of the exemption for closed systems 

to meet the functionality requirements in Section 302, we interpret this to mean that 

closed systems would not have to provide audio output since under the regulations in 

302, the closed system should provide its own output and only require the user to add a 

personal head set for secured listening.

If the equipment is not required to provide its own audio output, then we interpret 

this to mean that stand-alone kiosks do not necessarily have to be accessible. We

encourage the Board to require all kiosk systems used for ticketing, check-in, check-out, 

seat selection, boarding passes, or ordering food to be required to be accessible 

regardless of whether they are considered a closed system. Additionally, we would 

encourage the board to extend the definition of a kiosk to include informational display 

systems such as airline and train arrival and departure screens.

Thank you for your time, and the opportunity to speak to you regarding the 

thoughts of the National Federation of the Blind, and we hope that you will utilize these 

in your deliberations, thank you.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. I would like to call Judy Brewer. Judy Brewer, 

W3C.
31

JUDY BREWER: Thank you for this opportunity to testify with regard to the 

United States Access Board's planned update of Section 508, Section 255, and the 

Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines. My name is Judy Brewer, and I direct the

Web Accessibility Initiative at the Worldwide Web Consortium. As my colleague offered 

in the March hearing, we will make more detailed comments before the end of the 

comment period. First, I would like to express my appreciation to the Access Board for 

its very hard work and care in preparing this ANPRM. I particularly appreciate the 

emphasis in the ANPRM on harmonization with international standards and web 

accessibility. Before I started working in the field of web accessibility, the topic of 

standards harmonization sounded both abstract, and esoteric to me. I suspect that this 

is the way that it may still sound to many people. But I believe it is one of the best 

strategies that we all have for accelerating the pace of implementing accessibility 

solutions across the web and the implementation does need acceleration. 

Standardization is much more than a way to keep recreating the wheel. It is a way to 

ensure that all parties interested in web accessibility are able to work towards a 

common target with regard to accessibility goals. It is a way to ensure that technical 

support materials and training resources can be widely reusable, and expanded on, 

rather than redeveloped separately for each different standard, and that organizations 

can realize the benefits of WCAG2.0, which is a highly flexible framework for supporting 

innovation.

Standards harmonization is also a way to ensure that the US does not fragment 

accessibility standards for the web, restarting a process of cascading derivative 

versions of web accessibility standards that have a negative impact on accessibility 

efforts in other countries around the world. I'm frequently asked by my colleagues in 

other countries what I think the US will do with regard to harmonization with WC3-WAI. 

And I can now say that the intent to harmonize comes strongly in the ANPRM. And I 

encourage it to be stronger if possible. One of the questions that W3C is looking at is 

does this method of harmonization proposed in the ANPRM make it sufficiently clear for 

web developers that they can and should use web content accessibility guidelines, 
32

WCAG 2.0 AA, or even ways to make it even clearer. The clearer the statement of 

harmonization, the more we believe that this will protect against fragmented 

interpretations of the standards in the US Federal Government, in U.S. states, and in 

other countries.

On the topic of harmonization, I would also like to note that at the time of 

completion of the TEITAC report, WCAG2.0 was not quite a completed W3C standard. 

We commend the Access Board for keeping up with developments in the completion of 

the WCAG2.0 consensus standard as part of the regulatory process. The Access 

Board has continued to ensure that this ANPRM reflects the completed WCAG2.0 

standard. This standard was supported by a broad and multi-stakeholder consensus of 

industry, disability, government, and research.

To look at the benefits of standards harmonization from another angle, it is 

important because it enables all parties to leverage what I call “multipliers,” the most of 

important of which are authoring tools. Authoring tools are software applications that 

people use to create and produce all kinds of content on websites. In the context of 

web accessibility, authoring tools can multiply the effort expended on accessibility by 

building support for production of accessible content into the tools themselves, taking 

this beyond a one developer, one website, one guideline approach, to an approach 

where improvements in support for production of accessible content in authoring tools, 

can be built into all mainstream authoring tools, helping raise the accessibility levels of 

hundreds of thousands of websites through individual authoring tools.

Though we are encouraged by recent changes in some authoring tools, progress 

in authoring tools has lagged too far behind the field and people with disabilities have 

lost out as a result. Standards harmonization will help drive these improvements. But 

we also commend the Access Board for incorporating into this ANPRM specific 

provisions regarding support for production of accessible content by authoring tools. 

For instance, provisions regarding inclusion of accessible templates for production of 

accessible websites; since templates are one of the most widely used shortcuts to site
33

creation you might add that help people to build accessible sites. We want to bring to 

the Access Board’s attention that there are further wording improvements in 

accessibility guidelines and updates to the W3C Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 drafts,

which are in progress at W3C, and we will provide more detailed written comments on 

this point in case those can be useful to the Access Board.

Standards harmonization also helps with regard to improved evaluation 

methodologies by providing a common definition of what needs to be evaluated. We

are seeing great interest in this area of evaluation methodologies, in some countries, 

and expect to see growing interest in the US as well.

We encourage harmonization for this reason, as well as for the benefits that will 

be realized on the conformance side, and we encourage the development and 

availability of a variety of conformance approaches to evaluate to a common standard.

We also appreciate attention to user interface issues in particular. We look 

forward to sharing additional progress on the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, a 

draft which has also progressed at W3C during this time, particularly in areas such as 

support for keyboard accessibility. We look forward to improvements in some of these 

areas.

Again, I would like to sincerely thank the US Access Board for this opportunity to 

make preliminary comments on the ANPRM and we will provide more detailed 

comments in writing, thank you.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you.

NEIL MELICK: Okay, at this time, we are going to take a 10 minute break. We

have about 3 more speakers that have signed up. If you still want to speak, you can go 

to the registration desk and sign up. We will start back in 10 minutes.
34

[There was a Brief Break in the proceedings. The Chair called the hearing back into 

session. ]

NEIL MELICK: Start in about 2 minutes.

NEIL MELICK: If everyone would take your seats, we will start in about 1 minute. 

Before we get started, we have some pictures that they need to take for the Board, so if 

you will bear with us for a couple of minutes, as we take care of that we will get right 

started.

Okay, he is taking pictures. Hold on just a minute, over here we are getting 

pictures over to the right, if you will just look that way. 

[Photographer takes pictures]

Okay, we will get right back to the public hearing portion. Tim, will you give us the next 

testifier.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Board would like to call Ms.

Dana Mulvany.

DANA MULVANY: Hello. My name is Dana Mulvany, and I am speaking here 

today as a consumer advocate who is hard of hearing. I also work at the consultant 

specializing in hearing loss issues. My comments today are focused primarily on the 

needs of people who are hard of hearing of which there are more than 30 million in the 

U.S.A.

My name is Dana Mulvany, and I'm speaking here today as a consumer advocate who 

is hard of hearing; I also work as a consultant specializing in hearing loss issues. My 

comments today are focused primarily on the needs of people who are hard of hearing, 

of which there are more than 30 million in the U.S.A. 
35

What I'll be doing here this morning is providing some information about the needs of 

people with hearing loss along with numbered technical points that I would like the 

Access Board to take into consideration.

A. Most hard of hearing people have much stronger hearing in the low frequencies 

compared to their ability to hear high frequencies. Many hard of hearing people 

cannot hear high frequency sounds at all.

1. This means that alerting sounds for the general public should be required to 

contain multiple frequencies, especially low frequency sounds, and should not use 

just high frequency sounds.

2. There needs to be a required option to customize alerting sounds for the need of 

the individual user with respect to the frequencies used by the alerting sound, not 

just the loudness level. 

B. In order to decipher speech at their highest level possible, many hard of hearing 

people need high fidelity reproduction of speech across all speech frequencies with 

as little noise as possible.

3. This means that all audio components need to be capable of high fidelity 

reception, transmission and generation of speech for maximum speech 

comprehension. These include microphones and telephone hardware used by 

people who do not have a disability themselves but who would communicate with 

hard of hearing employees and/or members of the public.

4. Telephone and VoIP services also need to transmit high fidelity audio to the 

maximum extent possible. I thus endorse the Access Board's effort to address Audio 

Clarity for Interconnected VoIP.

5. It would indeed be very helpful if the Board would require that any auditory 

features, where provided, include at least one mode of operation that improves 

clarity, reduces background noise, or allows control of volume, in addition to adding

the other features I mention today. (This is my answer to Question 13.)
36

C. Because of uneven hearing loss in both ears, including single-sided deafness, 

many hard of hearing people need all the audio delivered either to one ear or both 

ears. In other words,

6. Manufacturers need to provide an option to switch stereo sound to mono. (Apple 

has already been doing this for certain models of the iPod Touch and the iPhone 

3GS.)

7. It is often important to be able to use both ears to hear, not just one ear, because 

each ear may hear very differently. Whenever possible, the ability to hear with both 

ears should be provided.

D. Speech comprehension for hard of hearing people can increase enormously by 

being able to speech read and hear at the same time. For many people with severe 

hearing loss, speech reading provides information about consonants that they might 

not otherwise hear.

8. Video communication technology therefore needs to support the simultaneous 

transmission of speech reading and audio at the same time for hard of hearing 

people. The technology should also support the provision of text from relay services 

directly on the video.

E. The majority of people with hearing loss do not use hearing aids.

9. It would be highly desirable for communication equipment to provide 

customization of the frequencies in the audio signal. Apple has done this for music 

by providing an equalizer function on some of their iPhones and iPods. It would thus 

appear to be technically feasible for manufacturers to provide the same function for 

all audio emanating from their products.

F. Captioning is very important to people with significant hearing loss. Unfortunately, 

many people have significant trouble figuring out how to turn it on and may not even 

realize it is available.

10. Controls for turning on and customizing captioning need to be as easy to use as 

possible.
37

Thank you for your attention to these important issues. 

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Mr. Ken Salaets, ITI.

KEN SALAETS: I had to see if it was still morning, good morning. My name is 

Ken Salaets, director of global policy for the Information Technology Industry Council, or 

ITI. I'm pleased to be here, I appreciate the opportunity to make a few comments just to 

kind of give you an update on where we are in this process, and I sympathize with the 

staff because the ITI effort is comprehensive as is the NPRM comprehensive, and we 

greatly appreciate the amount of time and effort that went into this. We also appreciate 

the Access Board staff which is accessible, responsive, thoughtful, and open minded. I 

deal with a number of government agencies and believe me, this is very refreshing. So 

I appreciate that, and kudos to David Capozzi and the team.

ITI has been engaged in accessibility since, well, we were on the first Advisory 

Committee represented there, and also on the TEITAC committee. We have been 

actively engaged with the Federal Government. We are the developers of the VPAT or 

voluntary product accessibility template. I will give you a quick update on that. We are 

moving to add XML capability to that which will facilitate federal agency market research 

on accessible ICT that conforms to Section 508. We are developing a distinct website 

with the assistance of an intern who comes on board June 1st to work with us in that 

regard, and we are also committing again to the Access Board that when the 508 

standard is revised, that we will update the VPAT to conform to the new standard.

We will probably call it VPAT 2.0 at that time, which is what our industry does. 

Accessibility is critical. Globally, it is a market opportunity. It is essential to enable 

individuals to use the tools and toys that we create. Accessibility is enabler technology 

that as many people have experienced, enables not only the ability to compete 

effectively in the marketplace, but also to take advantage of everything that is rolling out 

through innovation. We are continually committed to working with the Access Board 
38

and also with the Federal Government, state governments and international 

governments to try to promote that. Harmonization is key for us because as I like to 

say, whether you are blind in Brisbane, Brussels, or the Bronx, the technology is 

probably very similar. We as an industry can focus on developing tools that we can sell 

globally. That really reduces the costs, and the investment on the side of administrative 

aspects and legal aspects as opposed to just innovating and improving the technology. 

Again, I would like to complement the Board for the outreach that you have done 

internationally-- actively engaged in Europe and elsewhere, as is ITI. This has been 

extremely helpful, and we are now seeing Europe, for example offering the same 

opportunities back to the US, and that is very important for us.

Our companies are drawn from US, Japan, Europe, China, and Canada. We are 

active in South America on regulatory issues and looking in Africa as a possible market 

and of course, we are directly engaged in Europe and Asia. To the extent that 

harmonization is key, we wanted to address one issue, one thing that you will see in our 

comments when we do file them -- and hopefully in time for the deadline-- that we 

believe harmonization with WCAG 2.0 is essential. It is an effort that a number of our 

companies individually and collectively have invested considerable time and effort in,

and we think that it is critical to have a common infrastructure; a common metric that we 

can pursue globally that will facilitate our ability to, again, market and deliver our 

products globally.

Just to drill down and give you kind of an update of where we are. I have 

received 7 comprehensive comments from member companies on the ANPRM, so I 

sympathize with Tim, because I'm going to be going through a similar process in about 

the next 48 hours to put that together. Yesterday our accessibility committee met for 8 

hours. That was just the beginning. I would like to characterize it as the tip of the 

iceberg, because I know that our companies have spent the last 30 days essentially 

going through all of their product groups, their legal groups, every aspect of their 

company that deals with accessibility and delivering accessibility tools to come together, 

put together these documents on the table. Some of these e-mails are so large that we 
39

are going to actually break them up into 10 pieces so that we can have smaller bites, so 

to speak.

Thus far, just again, to give you a heads up we have identified at least 50 

provisions that we consider “high impact” that will have significant, in some cases 

challenges, but, nevertheless some of the challenges may be to reach consensus 

because we are a highly competitive industry. But we are probably going to spend the 

majority of our time focusing on those 50. We have identified another 40 plus 

provisions that we have termed “medium impact,” medium to high. Some of these will 

go up and down depending on the consensus from the companies.

And lastly, we may even have to take what we consider “low impact,” meaning

that the provisions might not require as many changes in our processes, and actually 

set those aside. This is an incredible effort that you are undertaking. It is significant; it 

is going to have a significant impact on our industry, and our ability to continue to 

successfully deliver 508 conforming products to the marketplace. But nevertheless, 508 

is the leading standard for ICT globally and we commend you for that and are 

committed to helping retain that level of leadership in the marketplace. Thank you.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Mr. Alex Li. Microsoft. Mr. Alex Li.

ALEX LI: Good morning, Access Board, and the members of the public, my 

name is Alex Li, and I'm a PC, and a geek.

(Laughter.)

ALEX LI: I love the IT industry. You know that fresh out of school that is what I 

wanted to do, and I can tell you why I love the IT industry so much. It is that it is moving 

so fast, and so unpredictably. You never know what today will bring. There are new 

technologies, new gadgets, new methods, and new inventions coming up every day. 

Ask the patent office-- you will find many, many innovative IT things coming to the 
40

market today. And each and every one of them will have a chance to change the 

market, and I love that, that is fundamental to me. And some of the things that we have 

in the Microsoft labs being bounced around, you can only describe that as science 

fiction -- some of the things that if they come to the market can really truly change the 

lives of many people and change the technologies. But yet, so many of them do not 

come to fruition. For every thousand ideas, maybe one or two will reach a prototype. 

For every hundred prototypes, maybe 2 or 3 will reach the market. For every thousand 

products out there, one or two will be a market success. For those that are successful, 

they can change the game of industries. It can change the live of many people. But it is 

a very statistically low probability that each one of them would make a particular impact 

until many years down the road through the labs, and through the marketplace.

So that is something that is fundamental in our industry. I find this just absolutely 

fascinating. I like to share that with you. As a fellow geek and I am -- I understand not 

too many of the people are geeks, so just pardon my enthusiasm.

But why is that important to the Board? The fundamental thing is that the IT 

industry moves fast. And it moves very unpredictably. So I use those two terms over 

and over and over again. So why is that relevant to what you are doing? When you put 

out the ANPRM out here, and eventually the final rules pertaining to a particular type of 

fast-moving objects that is moving in a very unpredictable way, you are trying to apply a 

rule on something that changes every day, and it changes unpredictably. So it is a very 

difficult job, I don't envy you on that. To that end, I would like to comment that the 

Access Board has done a marvelous job in representing the reality today. So that is,

you know, hats off to you guys. If you would imagine this conceptually in a horizon, on 

say the X axis, one end is the past and on the other end is the future. Somewhere in 

the middle you have the present, today. So how would you develop the rule that really 

applies, while not to the past, because the past becomes obsolete in the IT industry, 

and not to the future, because you cannot predict the future. I know you don't have a 

crystal ball hidden somewhere back there --and we don't in Microsoft, either.
41

So if you try to guess too much ahead, the future will come back and tell you, that 

you have guessed wrong. So it is a very difficult task for the Access Board to kind of 

stand on their tippy toes to try to set up a set of rules that is relevant today, but yet, 

somehow you know down the road that we have to change the rule because the 

technology will change. That is an incredible challenge that you are facing for the 

rulemaking here.

Now, I have commented that the ANPRM did a marvelous job in representing the 

current reality. There are some cases where the provision actually more reflects that of 

the yesteryears. And Microsoft will make our comments very clear when provisions 

reflect the yesteryears and not today, we will bring you to today's standards. We will 

help you do that. And also, on the other hand, when the Access Board becomes too 

futuristic into its vision, we will also try to bring you guys back to what today's reality 

looks like.

So those are the two things that really I wanted to emphasize to the Board. 

Microsoft has made a very, very comprehensive review of the ANPRM. Our comments 

are extremely comprehensive, and we aim to be extremely constructive and move 

forward for people with accessibility needs and people with disabilities and the 

technology industries. It is -- we will make those comments in Regulations.gov.

But, and like I said, a vast majority of the comments actually will reflect in 

nudging, making minor nudges to your ANPRM, to make it better, but just a little bit of it 

will try to move you from yesteryears to today, and some of them will move you from the 

future back to today.

So those are the things, the two sides that I would like to emphasize that to the 

Board to make that very clear that those are very important to reflect. Now, moving 

down the road, what will happen is that you will go through the NPRM process, and the 

final rulemaking process. I'm sure it will be at least a year from now. During that year 

things will change. Technologies will change. Even a perfect reflection of ANPRM 
42

today will have to be reflected upon in the NPRM process and the final rulemaking 

process to make it contemporary and relevant. Now, what happens after you make a 

final rulemaking? Well, how can this document stay alive and well and relevant in the 

future? Well, we have two pieces of advice. One you have already taken, which is 

reference international standards. That is great. We would like that to happen, but we 

understand that you may reference international standards that are yet to be created. 

So we actually would like to urge the Board to create some sort of fast-tracking process 

so that when international standards become updated, our competing standard 

becomes available and published, and the Access Board can actually find a way to 

reference it quickly.

And number 2, system barring that, perhaps one other way is to be descriptive as 

possible without being proscriptive. The solutions to the problems that you have today 

will not be the solutions that you want tomorrow. So we really want to scrub through all 

of the provisions to make sure that they are descriptive in nature and not proscriptive in 

nature.

So I look forward to submitting the final comments to you via Microsoft and 

through our industry friends and associations. We promise that it will be constructive, 

and they will be helpful to you, and we will pledge to keep working with everybody to 

make sure that the comments are helpful to you guys.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Ms. Dana Marlowe. Accessibility Partners. Ms. 

Dana Marlowe.

DANA MARLOWE: Good morning. I would first like to thank the Access Board 

for the opportunity to comment here. My name is Dana Marlowe, and I'm principal 

partner of Accessibility Partners, an accessibility consulting firm. First off, kudos to a 

job well done for a huge feat of synthesizing years of discussions, data, and 

communications into this ANPRM. My brief remarks also focus on the emphasis for 

global harmonization, as we have also heard this morning, and in San Diego. The 
43

disintegration of accessibility ICT legislation and regulatory standards is prevalent 

across geographic regions countries and states. The risks associated with fragmented 

legislation and regulations could result in restricted innovation, increased costs, and 

delayed time to market. Fragmentation drives up costs, and potentially longer lead 

times for industry and consumers, therefore, creating a need for global standards 

harmonization. The ICT refresh initiative and ANPRM to promote harmonization is a 

huge step in the right direction. We appreciate the consideration of harmonizing 

requirements such as with web standards and E 107. The synchronization of standards 

is crucial for achieving more rapid progress in making the web more accessible for 

people with disabilities all over.

With regard to the Advance Notice, the only suggestion we would like to offer, is 

that since we are working with a very moving target, which is the advancement of 

technology, the quicker we can have this process completed and comprehensive, while 

allowing for innovation, the faster people can benefit.

Again, I want to compliment everybody on their very hard work and thank you 

very much for your time, and consideration.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Mr. Ned Monroe, National Automatic 

Merchandising Association, NAMA, Mr. Ned Monroe.

>>: NED Monroe: Good morning. Thanks for the opportunity to be here. I 

appreciate all of the hard work of the group, and I will be submitting more formal 

comments as we go forward. My name is Ned Monroe, the senior vice president of 

government affairs for the National Automatic Merchandising Organization. We 

represent the food and beverage vending industry, the operators, the suppliers, the 

machine manufacturers.

For your information, there are about 7 million vending machines, food and 

beverage vending machines that generally have the life span of about 10 years. We 
44

don't represent kiosks, or gaming industry to the bulk vendors, but the food and 

beverage, and I'm here on a very narrow comment, specifically, at the request of some 

questions that we received based on the material that the group has put out. And so I'm 

here to seek clarification and present our point of view on the very narrow point. And 

that is that food and beverage vending machines should not be included in ITC rules for 

several reasons.

First, food and beverage vending machines do not communicate with, nor do 

federal agencies communicate with, vending machines using electronic content as 

defined in E103.3.1.

2. Electronics in food and beverage vending machines are not the principal 

function of ICT, nor are we electronic and information technology E&IT under 36 CFR 

part 1194.4. And I would refer the group to Advisory E 103.3.2, which says in part, 

“...electronics used in the operation of a vehicle, for example, are not ICT. An example 

of electronics that are not covered is the dashboard of a car.” Food and beverage 

vending machines have electronics, for example, to validate coin and currency. We 

also have electronic devices that guarantee that temperature controls for milk products, 

dairy products, are maintained for the life cycle. Those are not part of ICT systems.

3. Our manufacturers don't manufacture telecommunication products under 

C102.1.

My fourth point is that food and beverage vending machines don't fall under 

220.2. That section relates to specific areas including ordering food in restaurants and 

cafeterias. These are food and beverage machine, snacks, soft drink machines but not 

necessarily in ordering food in restaurants. There's a distinction between food and 

beverage vending machines and kiosks.

And I would just like to remind everyone, we will be glad to submit further 

comments. We are very involved and we do want to partnership. We fully support the 
45

ADA and the Access Board goals. For example, our machines fully comply with reach 

and height requirements. We have tactile features on our machines; our manufacturers 

are constantly looking for solutions in from our customers. We are retailers and looking 

for solutions. And as a food and beverage vending machine organization, we partner

repeatedly and constantly with the Randolph-Sheppard Act of vendors. And so we are 

very aware of the concerns of this group and we appreciate it. We also will be putting 

formal comments into the records related to specifics addressing question 30, as if we 

are included in this. We don't think we are, but if we are, it would have a significant 

impact to our industry, and to the businesses which are small mom and pop people that 

are handling the machines. Thank you very much.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Mr. Emmanuel Coutoulakis, Accessible Tech.

EMMANUEL COUTOULAKIS : I'm Emmanuel Coutoulakis with Accessible 

Tech. I am an accessibility consultant. Thank you for the opportunity to comment on 

this important work.

We really applaud all of the efforts of the last four years, actually, and we believe 

that we are at the cross roads of technology and development. This is because 

innovative products can be accessible. My colleagues in the labs of the universities 

throughout the country, and throughout the world, they come up with some brilliant 

adaptations to the provisions of accessibility, even for the most advanced technologies. 

So brilliant are the innovations as brilliant adaptations as well. There's a problem, 

however, that we are facing all the time, and with the opportunity of this draft, that is 

coming out, is about to become law, we will have some implementation questions. Most 

of the vendors who deal with the Federal Government do not understand accessibility. 

This is because it is deceptive. It might look easy at the beginning, and we are, most of 

the time, faced with an issue at the end, that this product is not accessible. In this case, 

everybody is losing, the agency doesn't have an accessible product, the vendor might 

lose or waste a lot of money to make it accessible, the engineers might be frustrated, 

and of course, accessibility suffers at the end. So, a way out for this is a 
46

communication, a clear communication on the requirements at the conception, in the 

RFP, how serious an agency is, and how clear the requirement for accessibility is. So, 

a lot of times vendors might use “undue burden” as a way out. In fact, it is used way too 

frequently. So what can be done about this? Communicate clearly to the agency 

having implementation plans on how this draft, this law will be applied, how it will be 

implemented, and at the end, everybody will gain, and of course, innovative products 

will be accessible. So we are at the cross roads to create good innovative products, 

good technology that will be accessible to anybody. So two things I will appeal to the 

Board to communicate: The clarity of the 508 requirements; and the seriousness to the 

vendor and the end users, from the conception, up to completion. Thank you.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Ms. Moira Shea.

MOIRA SHEA: Thank you. My name is MOIRA SHEA and I'm here to represent 

myself today as a consumer of assistive technology. I want to thank the Access Board 

and all of you folks in the room for all of the hard work that you have done to ensure that 

electronic information technology is accessible. Due to that, I am able to maintain a job, 

and work, and also this afternoon, I will get my first accessible Blackberry, which will 

help me a lot in doing my job.

I'm here, I came not prepared for a statement, but listening, I just want to ensure 

that the people who are deaf blind like myself are also fully represented within the 

context of the new framework. I have a condition known as Ushers Syndrome, the 

leading cause of deaf blindness in this country. It manifests itself in three general ways. 

A child can be born profoundly deaf, and then, when in the teen or early 20s learn that 

they are losing their vision. Also, a child can be born hard of hearing and again, the 

hearing will remain the same throughout their life, but then they lose their vision. And 

the third scenario is that a child can be born, and throughout his or her life, continue to 

lose sight and hearing and become profoundly deaf and blind.
47

So I just want to make sure that the technology is available for those changes. 

Myself personally, I used to be able to see a flat screen computer, and then I went into 

the Microsoft accessibility use high contrast and in the last year I really had to learn 

Jaws, and learn more about web accessibility, and with my vision loss, also, I lost the 

ability to read lips. So technology for deaf-blind is becoming more and more important 

to me, and I just hope that in the consideration of the 508 Refresh that that constituency 

is also well represented. Thank you very much.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden, TRACE Research 

Center. Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden.

GREGG VANDERHEIDEN: Hi, thank you very much. First, I want to say that 

the Access Board is to be commended for the tremendous amount of work translating 

the existing 508 guidelines, the 255 guidelines, and the TEITAC into the draft document 

that you have. It has done some very good wording in places and in some places, it is 

quite innovative in trying to make these very complex provisions easier to understand 

and use. I would like to mention four places; however, where I think there's a little bit 

more work needed. They are pretty important areas. 

First, functional performance criteria play a key role in both evaluating the overall 

products accessibility of people with disabilities and allowing the guidelines to work for 

future technologies, and we have been talking about them. In the current, the original 

508 guidelines, the performance criteria were cited as a way to do the final test, once 

the technical provision had been met. In the new one, however it specifically states that 

if the technical provisions fully address a product, then the functional performance 

criteria don't even need to be looked at, or examined. The key here, is, the phrase, “the 

technical provisions fully address.” This sounds like a really good approach, except 

how do we determine if the technical provisions actually “fully address” a product? 

Now, in two years of searching, including talking with industry, I have not been able to 

find any way to determine how the technical provisions “fully address” accessibility. We 

want to try the functional performance criteria, and see whether or not they uncover 

things that the technical provisions did not. In other words, we have a situation where 
48

you don't have to look at the functional performance criteria, if they “fully meet”, but 

there's really no way to determine that they “fully meet” unless you look at them. Now, 

in one case, we had where somebody was looking at it, and they said “Well every part 

of my product, I found a technical provision that related to it.” But in one case, a 

technical provision related for blindness to one part, and to another part of the product, 

it was for a different disability. And so what you had was a product where one disability 

could use some parts, and other people could use other parts, but can anybody use the 

whole product? As for the technical provisions, there's no way of looking at them and 

determining that without looking at them more holistically.

So the FPC are needed, alongside of the technical provisions, since it is way too 

easy to meet all of the technical provisions and not have a product that is accessible. 

More importantly, it is easy to do it and not know that you don't have one that is 

accessible unless you look at the performance.

Secondly, there're two key technical provisions that are missing. One says that 

audio information needs to be available in a non-audio form, and this is clear for people 

who are deaf, and the other says that information presented visually needs to be 

available in a non-visual form. Now, on computers this is covered because it always 

talks about the information being exposed to the AT-- that would be on the computer. 

But there're many other types of E&IT and we are seeing newer ones coming out every 

day. Some of the comments that you heard earlier about people saying ‘I don't 

understand how the guidelines can be here and yet this is going to be inaccessible,’ is 

because of these missing two provisions. These are two access needs that are not 

covered elsewhere in the provisions. They were in the TEITAC report, though one was 

not finished in the report. There's a model for it in the existing 255 guidelines for how to 

do that. Without them, it is possible to design specific types of products that meet all of 

the technical provisions but are not accessible. So they are really critical. They are 

clear, objective, and very critical components, and they are actually two of the most 

important provisions for accessible guidelines, especially for any products other than 

personal computers.
49

The third area is closed products, and we are seeing more products appearing 

that have closed functionality. Yet key aspects of making closed functionality products 

accessible didn't make it into the ANPRM draft. First were the two mentioned that we 

mentioned just above. The second is an interesting one, in that some of the exceptions,

where it says the closed products don't have to work with AT, were lost. So actually 

products that can't work with AT are required to work with AT. And so this just needs to 

be cleaned up.

But what also needs to be done, is that those AT compatibility provisions were 

there to allow accessibility, and if the closed products don't have to be compatible with 

AT, to provide that functionality, there has to be something in there to make sure that 

they in fact provide that themselves.

In other words, if you don't work with AT, then you can't rely on AT to provide the 

accessibility you need to make sure that you provide the accessibility.

The ANPRM language is not far off but there are some key pieces missing. And 

lastly, in a number of places the provisions talk about interoperability and in particular a 

couple of places deal with it around with telecommunications, telecommunications from 

one end to the other of a system. Now, the intent of all of the ANPRM interoperability 

provisions is to ensure that products made by one manufacturer will work with other 

manufacturer's products when that is necessary for a communication. For example, 

when you have a phone call, then you can't just say “Well, my phone works for me.” It 

has got to work all the way to the other end.

The Access Board, in general with your interoperability, in other places it is very 

careful to say, “You can do whatever you want in your own places, but where you 

interconnect, you have to use a standard and we will tell you what that is so that 

everybody knows,” because a manufacturer cannot make a product that will work with 

everybody else's, if they don't know in advance what the other companies are going to 
50

be using, where they need to join. So they don't have to have all of the standards be 

the same. But where they connect to each other, that is key, and you did that every 

place, but there's a couple of places you didn't. Those places need to be specified or 

else you can just say well, you need to be compatible, but you don't say what the other 

people would do.

In closing, I want to compliment the Access Board and the staff on their 

Herculean efforts so far. All of the issues above can be resolved with careful 

consideration and modification of existing structure using the same care that has been 

exhibited so far. Although the guidelines seem daunting in their length, once you get 

used to them, they are far less complicated than most industry standards and 

specification documents. Technology is complex. You don't want to know the number 

of parts that are in all of the things you use every day, or the volumes of documentation 

it takes to do them. So the fact that the rules are long can be attributed to the fact that 

they are more specific and clear. The goal of these guidelines is to take that complexity 

and to make it accessible and usable by all of us. Good luck and good heart in the rest 

of your work.

(Laughter.)

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. All right, Mr. Michael Paciello. Mr. Michael Paciello, 

The Paciello Group.

MICHAEL PACIELLO: Well, good morning, close to a good afternoon. It is good 

to see everybody again. It’s close to two years since my colleague Jim TOBIAS and I 

presented the TEITAC guidelines to you.

I notice just a couple of good points between the conversations and the 

observations that were made from those that met with us in San Diego at the CSUN

conference, and today, some select points were made across the board by a number of 
51

constituencies, so we encourage the Access Board, and the Access Board staff, to take 

them seriously, as well as the comments that you will receive in written form.

The ANPRM public hearings were an important forum for stimulating the kind of 

discussion and listening that we really needed. Particularly in advance of the NPRM, 

which is actually the final process there for public comments. So what we get today,

really kind of gives us a feel for what the future should look like.

And it is also important to recognize, as has been stated by a number of 

individuals today, that what we are looking at is essentially landmark rulemaking. Not 

just for at the federal level, but certainly on a national level for states. We have 

become, the Section 508, Section 255 refresh has become a model standard. And a 

key aspect of that, is, again, as you have heard echoed throughout the day, the notion 

of harmonization has been an important theme, and has been carried through. So it is 

good to see that.

I think it is also important to realize that we are being watched very closely by the 

international market, the international industry standards space. We have had some 

representatives today, from international standards organizations. And again, what we 

do lays the groundwork for the future of harmonized standards. I'm particularly 

concerned about those that are on the table, so to speak. In Europe the 376 

procurement mandates-- what we do here will likely establish a very strong basis there. 

We have already seen some of what we have done modeled in the Ontarian’s

Accessibility Act of Canada. The Japanese standards organizations are looking at us,

as well as other organizations throughout the world, so it is important that we take these 

comments from our colleagues here, and our constituencies, very critically. I have four 

areas of recommendation, maybe, observations, that I would like to put forward to you.

The first is something that we heard, interestingly enough, in San Diego. I didn't 

quite hear it as much today, so I'm going to reiterate that. The refresh process needs to 

be streamlined. And it needs to be dynamic in nature. It needs to move kind of like 

what we have heard from some of our members here today, to move along with the 
52

technology. And the problem, the real problem there, is that technology is moving at 

breakneck speeds and the internet speed, so to speak, but unfortunately, issues around 

interoperability and assistive technology, and accessibility are not able to keep up with 

that speed. And so the gap that we think is getting closer is actually getting larger. So I 

really want to encourage the Access Board to look at ways for streamlining this process.

It took us 19 months as the TEITAC committee to put together two statutes and 

standards which was at that time, you know, was a new attempt at pulling together 

combined standards. It has taken the Access Board and its staff almost two years, 23 

months to be exact, to get to this point of an ANPRM. We are frankly speaking, 

probably at least 15, or 18 months away before we might see this as law, which is the 

standard that we really want. That is just too slow. It is absolutely unacceptable at that 

point. 

The second observation: The federal agencies and the employees that work for 

the Federal Government need tools. They need training. They need quality assurance 

reports in order to do their jobs well, in order to procure technology that is truly 

accessible and usable by individuals with disabilities, whether they work for the Federal 

Government, or whether they are a member of the public and citizens of this country, 

and of this nation. So that means that you need to look at new paper tools beyond, for 

example, the notion of a voluntary product accessible template. The VPAT is a good 

starter document, kind of an overview more or less, but it doesn't provide the profound 

quality assurance, technical descriptions of what in fact is the state of the technology 

that I as an agency am procuring. We need to train the contract officers and the 

purchasing agencies and not just a one-time deal. This has got to be a continual thread 

because of the constant turnover in personnel. Provide them with the paper tools, 

provide them with software tools that they can use, and that they can rely on. And I 

suspect that we need better enforcement goals. For example with the current Section 

508, the Department of Justice is supposed to be having reports sent to them every 

other year. I have seen one. I haven't seen another since the first report after the first 

Section 508, or the Section 508 that was ratified in 2001. So we need better 

enforcement controls within the agencies.
53

Third: ICT companies, and corporations and businesses, need better incentives 

than what we are giving them. To say that product features are a great thing, and that 

is a competitive advantage, that's true. But it's not enough, and I constantly wondered 

how it is that over the last five years alone, we have seen the growth in businesses, and 

the green corporations, and the alternative energy companies evolving at, again,

breakneck speeds that we can't possibly compete with. Why are they able to do that? 

Because they have incentives that have been given to them by this Federal 

Government. They have tax breaks. They have research and development funds, they 

have stimulus funds that have been given to them. They are rewarded, small 

businesses investigate some incentives. These are all of the things that need to go into 

that cost marketing report that we need to pull together. Provide businesses with 

business incentives, that is, in plain language, money, will drive them not only to 

innovation, but drive them to building and developing accessible and usable 

technologies for people with disabilities.

The last point: I thought it was quite interesting this notion of self-service 

systems being carried into the guidelines, and into the ANPRM. I think that this gives us 

something to really think about because the motivation appears to be more holistic. Not 

just about 508 technology. It is about where are we going with disability laws and 

mandates for the future. We are talking about the Americans with Disabilities Act, and 

frankly, from my perspective, that's great, because technology has become a 

fundamental staple in our lives. We need to address this issue and there are a lot of 

good comments stated and there will be many more forthcoming. We want to take that 

notion of self-service systems and give them the equal time and equal opportunity to lay 

the groundwork for the future of new mandates like the Communications Act, ADA, and 

the Air Carrier Access Act. Thank you.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you.
54

NEIL MELICK: Okay, that was our last registered speaker. Is there anybody 

else that would like to come up and speak? If you will just come up, state your name, 

and who you represent.

KAREN PELTZ-STRAUSS: Hi, my name is Karen Peltz-Strauss, Deputy Bureau 

Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau at the Federal 

Communications Commission. My statement is very brief. I just wanted to thank you all 

for your extraordinary work in putting this together, and say that we look forward to 

working with you. Because at least one half of what you are doing will affect our work 

as well, in terms of updating the guidelines for Section 255 of the Communications act. 

And so, we look forward to working with you. As you know, we also have a national 

broadband plan that we will be implementing over the next few years, not only the next 

year, but the next few years, and we look forward to being able to collaborate with you 

very closely as we go about both updating our Section 255 rules, and implementing the 

broadband plan. Thank you.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you.

NEIL MELICK: Thank you.

MARK REW: Hello. My name is Mark Rew. I’m with the Computer Electronics 

Accommodations Program. I would like to thank the Access Board, and the ad hoc 

committee for hosting this, and the hard work that you have done so far, in taking input 

from the various stakeholders. A couple of points: the CAP program is the centralized 

funding source for assistive technology in the Federal Government. We help promote 

and provide an open opportunity for employment for people with disabilities in the 

Federal Government. There're a couple of areas where this Refresh significantly 

impacts our goals and objectives. Our objective is being able to provide the assistive 

technology to allow someone to perform their job, to do the work that they need, to meet 

their performance requirements on their job. We do that through purchase of assistive 

technology and purchase of training. There are a couple of areas... One, for us, it's 
55

more important that the information and communication technology functions for the 

individual using assistive technology, than it is just meeting a set of technical guidelines. 

The technical guidelines are critical. They are important. But the end result for us is, 

does that IT environment, or ICT environment function well enough for the person to 

perform their job if they are qualified for the job.

The other issue on opening opportunities for employment is that we have had a 

set of standards, so far, in the Federal Government since 2001. The implementation of 

those standards has been extremely lacking. After nearly 8, coming up on 9 years, it's 

still a majority of IT environments are weak in the full implementation of 508. So the 

areas that would be helpful to address would be for the agency's guidance on what is 

necessary for RFPs, what needs to be in statements of work, how testing and quality 

controls are implemented, and particularly, and I want to -- it was mentioned earlier, 

refreshes, and updates to technology, particularly, modifications to IT, or ICT contracts.

This area of ensuring that the agencies do follow the standards and do follow the 

law and implement Section 508 and 255, is critical. And this is probably today the 

weakest link we have in ensuring that the access to the information technology 

environment and opportunities in the Federal Government are available. Thank you.

NEIL MELICK: Thank you.

TIM CREAGAN: Thank you. Is there anybody else?

NEIL MELICK: Is there anybody else? We, both the board and the staff, want to 

thank you for your participation today, and hopefully, your continued review and 

comments as we move forward through the public comment period.

As you can tell, this is a very technical and complicated standard and guideline. 

We need everybody's input. That was one of the reasons we went through the Advance 

Notice of Public Rulemaking so that we could get some early comments. We
56

understand the process is long, so we ask that you make those comments as soon as 

possible. I understand that sometimes it's the last minute these comments get in and 

we would sure love staff to get on these comments so that we can get back to work on 

finishing the Notice of Public Rulemaking. At this time, if there is any other Board 

member that would like to make comments I open it up to them at this time.

RON GARDNER: It has been said that I never met a microphone that I didn't 

like.

(Laughter.)

RON GARDNER: My name is Ron Gardner and I co-chair with Neil. I would like 

to thank all of you for coming, and I would like to thank those of you who prepared their 

comments and want to send in written comments. I don't know, I might be strung up for 

this, but you know, there are a lot more people in this room. I just sense that there's 

more interest. Neil asked for any other comments. We are scheduled until noon; I 

know nobody doesn't mind getting out early.

(Laughter.)

RON GARDNER: I know nobody probably -- that wasn't good English. Probably 

won't mind getting out early, but if there are others who want to make a comment, I 

really do appreciate these oral comments here in the public meeting. I think we all do.

So if there's anybody, now is the time. Make your way up here to the front. 

Again, we would like to thank you very, very much. Do we have somebody coming up?

ELIZABETH STEWART: No.

RON GARDNER: Good.
57

ELIZABETH STEWART: No, I said no.

RON GARDNER: No. Rats.

(Laughter.)

RON GARDNER: Again, thank you very much. And I have to say that we have 

heard several times today about the length of the process. Believe me; it is something 

that we as Board members struggle with, because we are appointed, you know, by the 

President to serve a defined term. We come, we are gone. The staff is here. The staff 

began this process with an advisory group, and then the TEITAC committee. They 

have been working with this process for months, and years. Well, so have we now. But 

as many of you know, this process is probably going to still be alive and well after some 

of us on the Board are gone. Don't lose your interest. Don't lose your patience. I can 

tell you that the staff is working very, very diligently, and again, David Capozzi and the 

staff, David Capozzi and his staff really needs to be complimented because we dance 

into town once in a while and work a little bit between meetings. The staff is really 

carrying the weight on this, and so please, send your comments in, give them the 

opportunity, quite frankly to interpret it for us who are not geeks.

(Laughter.)

RON GARDNER: But please don't give up on the process. It is the process that 

we have, and I really do think it will work. We just, you know, we do need to make it 

fast. So thank you very much for coming today and I will turn it back to Neil.

NEIL MELICK: Are there any other comments from the board?

(No response.)
58

NEIL MELICK: Hearing none, I guess Ron was the only one that likes the mike. 

Okay, if there are no other comments we will close this public hearing, thank you.

(Applause.)

END OF PUBLIC HEARING