An Enlightened Approach

Danny Wayne Beemer, a media specialist in Terre Haute, IN, isn't like most librarians—he's legally blind. And since many Web sites are graphic, he can only see some of them, making his job at the Wabash Independent Living and Learning Center, a school for the disabled, more difficult.

"I know the information's there but [I] can't retrieve it," says Beemer, who has often had particular trouble navigating Web-based encyclopedias because he can only read large text. "My challenge was reading the text and reading the links. When the mouse cursor made contact with links on the screen, I couldn't tell where the link went."

A 1998 amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which says that any institution receiving federal funds must be accessible to the disabled, now applies to information technology. In other words, software should present as few obstacles—such as graphics without text alternatives—as possible. Because public schools and public libraries are insisting on disabled-accessible digital encyclopedias, three main encyclopedia vendors are working their way toward becoming ADA compliant.

Encyclopedia Britannica's online encyclopedia is already disability-friendly, says Britannica spokesperson Tom Panelas. People with visual disabilities often use Jaws, a program that reads the text of Web pages aloud and tells them when it reaches a link. The online Britannica is designed so that Jaws can read it aloud easily. There are no frames or animated GIF images, and essential instructions and information are always available in text form, Panelas says. Julie Connors, a spokesperson for World Book, says the recently released World Book CD-ROM for the new Macintosh operating system, OS X, is already ADA compliant. Other World Book products, such as the World Book Encyclopedia Online, are being tested for accessibility problems this winter, and those problems will be corrected this year, Connors says.

The vendor that has made the biggest strides, however, is Grolier (go.grolier.com), which is rebuilding all of its Grolier Online encyclopedias to be disability-friendly. A new version of the Encyclopedia Americana was released last fall, along with the New Book of Popular Science, and Grolier Online also plans to make all of its encyclopedias ADA compliant within the next few years. A reworked Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia should be released in May, and the New Book of Knowledge soon after.

Making Encyclopedia Americana ADA compliant was no easy job. The overhaul took 25 technicians and consultants 18 months to complete. The team made sure the resource complied with the 30 standards set down in the Web Accessibility Initiative (www.w3.org/WAI), a set of ADA standards established by the World Wide Web Consortium, an international organization that strives to set standards for the Web, says Mark Cummings, vice president and publisher of Grolier Online. Meeting WAI standards meant providing text alternatives to audio and video files, and designing pages that users could navigate without relying on color buttons or backgrounds to guide them. To meet the standards, the encyclopedia's database, which includes articles and pictures, was reconfigured to produce two versions of Americana's online pages. One version has conventional graphics-intensive pages; the other has ADA-compliant "text-only" pages that may be easily read by using screen-magnifying software or reading machines. In order to create the text-only pages, Grolier's staff worked to summarize the content of every table, graphic, and video file in a text file.

Beemer likes the new Americana. "The links are easy to verbally recognize," he says. "Once you enter a specific link, the text tells you where you're going." Janell Brown, a librarian at the Ohio State School for the Blind, likes it, too. "I think that Encylopedia Americana could easily replace World Book for my middle and High School users," she says. One of her students, 11th-grader Matthew Dyer, who has cerebral palsy and is blind, tested the Americana and says that he found a few problems: the "Enter" key didn't work with Jaws to open the links, for example, the way it's supposed to. On the whole, however, he found it easier to navigate than World Book. "If you keep fiddling with [Americana]," says Dyer, "you'll eventually figure it out. It's a logical site."