Article

Kiosk access made EZ

Do kiosks have to be accessible to people with disabilities? Yes, they do. But the extent to which laws and rules require accessibility varies.

March 27, 2002

While the ATM market has been dealing with accessibility issues for a long time, the kiosk industry has only recently begun to recognize its importance.

Soon, changes in federal rules specifically aimed at kiosks will make it imperative for kiosk designers to build in accessibility features for government projects.

Back when the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990, kiosks were weren't on the radar screens of legislators. When the rules defining how the law was to be applied came out in 1991, ATMs, but not kiosks, were cited. One section of the ADA Accessibility Guidelines for Buildings and Facilities, 4.34, is headed "Automated Teller Machines." The rules of this section specify general requirements for reach ranges, controls, and accessibility for persons with visual impairments.

Chris Law, a human factors engineer at the Trace Research and Development Center, said that just because kiosks are not mentioned in the rules doesn't make them exempt. Legally, Title III of the ADA requires that people with disabilities should be granted access to public accommodations.

Because the rule emphasized access for those with visual impairments, that is where most of the lawsuit activity has centered. Here's a partial list of lawsuits arising from ADA regulations and ATMs.

• In 1999, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) charged Rite Aid Corporation and Diebold, a leading manufacturer of ATMs, with violating the ADA, contending that their machines used screen text prompts that are inaccessible to the blind.
• In May 2000, the NFB and several blind individuals filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. against Chevy Chase Bank, noting that its ATMs were inaccessible to blind people because they use computer text screen prompts to guide customers through transactions.
• In June 2000 Mellon Bank and PNC Bank were sued by the NFB in Pennsylvania, to force the banks to provide voice-equipped ATMs to comply with federal disabilities law for visually impaired customers.

As a response to these cases, which were settled outside the courtroom, financial institutions began retrofitting ATM machines and redesigning new machines to provide features such as voice prompting. Several banks are now experimenting with "Talking ATM" pilots.

It's the rules that prompt legal actions. Since the rules let kiosks off the hook, and since they further restrict themselves to matters of wheelchair access and visual impairment, does that leave kiosk designers free to either ignore the ADA or to meet only those minimal rules? Not when it comes to government projects.

New rules

Starting soon, government projects will require kiosk projects to be designed with full accessibility for users with disabilities

On June 21, 2001, an amended Section 508 of the Federal Acquisition Regulations, not to be confused with the ADA, seeks to address the issue of access for people with disabilities. The rule rewrite mandates that federal departments and agencies make their electronic and information technology accessible to individuals with disabilities. Section 508 lays out the standards that must apply.

In its definition of information technology, Section 508 specifically names kiosks. And in case, years from now, kiosks and other electronic gizmos metamorphose into something as yet unknown, to cover future developments, the standard is not limited to these definitions of electronic and information technology.

Clearly, the federal government is using the power of the purse to get information technology up to the legal requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Hedges

There are limitations. The regulations do not apply to the private sector, and Section 508 contains an "undue burden" clause.

This clause allows for exceptions when providing access would result in a "significant difficulty or expense" for the government agency in charge of the IT project. The concept applies to public sector ADA concerns as well as the new Section 508 rules.

"You don't have to put a ramp on your door if it's so expensive it will put you out of business," Law said.

The government won't allow the undue burden clause to be applied without proof. It has set up reporting guidelines so that agencies can justify ahead of time why undue burden will be a factor. Kiosk manufacturers designing government projects for employees and the public at large will be required to follow the guidelines. This applies not only to federal agencies, but state and local government agencies receiving federal funds for their IT projects.

What's a disability?

The final Section 508 standards are a lot less specific than the proposals drafted by the Access Board, as the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board is known. This federal agency develops accessibility requirements for electronic and information technology.

Originally, the Access Board drafted specific definitions of what types of disabilities would be included in public access. The disabilities were defined broadly, as:

• visual disabilities (e.g., blindness, low vision and lack of color perception) 
• hearing disabilities (e.g., hard of hearing, deafness) 
• physical disabilities (e.g., limited strength, reach or manipulation, tremor, lack of sensation)
• speech disabilities 
• language, learning or cognitive disabilities (e.g., reading disabilities, thinking, remembering, sequencing disabilities) 
• other disabilities (e.g., epilepsy, short stature) and 
• individuals with any combination of these disabling conditions (e.g., deaf-blindness).

In the final standard, instead of defining disabilities, the rules spell out the types of access that must be built into the systems. Kiosks fall under the section headed "Self contained, closed products" (Section 1194.25). You can read the specification here. The rules include these highlights:

• The end-user shouldn't have to attach assistive technology - not including personal headsets, which are now being used in voice assisted ATMs.
• Users have to be alerted to timed responses and given some way to indicate they need more time.
• Alternate ways to gather identification are needed for systems using biometrics, such as fingerprint or retinal scans.
• Products providing audio output need to use a standard connector that will allow for private listening. The product must provide the ability to interrupt, pause and restart the audio at anytime.
• Color coding can't be the only means of conveying information in the user interface.
• Products need to avoid causing screen flicker by using a monitor frequency greater than 2 Hz and lower than 55 Hz.

And so on. As these rules make clear, a broad spectrum of disabilities is being accounted for in technical guidelines.

No rush to comply

If it weren't for the new rules, there probably wouldn't be a stampede of kiosk companies rushing to conform to accessibility guidelines. Gerhard Kschwendt, senior consultant, financial services group, Dove Consulting Inc., put it this way:

"Do deployers in general want to deploy those features? Probably not, because of cost issues, and because it will affect such a small amount of the user base."

Kschwednt said that in unregulated areas, people with disabilities would get less access to kiosks. Chris Law pointed out that in his experience, most people who say they are compliant are referring to reach, leaving out many other types of compliance.

Law said that there are good reasons to make kiosks accessible. Because 10 to 15 percent of the population has some difficulty interacting with a kiosk or ATM, due to problems seeing, hearing, manipulating or reading, building accessibility into kiosks also increases the potential size of the customer base. Law said that the cost hit is negligible.

"You can have all the recommended features for less than one percent of the cost of a kiosk," said Law, who did admit that the actual costs depended on the type of kiosk, and on the project.

EZ Access

To help the kiosk industry, the Trace Research and Development Center, part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's College of Engineering, has developed guidelines it calls EZ Access. The Center specializes in accessibility. During its 30 years of activity, the non-profit research group, consisting of seven researchers, has invented augmentative communication, performed research and worked with manufacturers in industry.

Trace's EZ Access is a set of standard techniques to make electronic products accessible for individuals who have low vision or are blind, are hard of hearing or deaf, have poor reach and motor control, difficulty reading and difficulty remembering. Extensions to the technology help those who are paralyzed or deaf and blind.

According to a Trace report, EZ is now being used in more than 30 kiosks, including two employment kiosks in the Mall of America and kiosks at Knight-Ridder newspapers. The solution is also being developed for voting machines.

EZ Access consists of three features, an EZ Button, a 3-Button-List feature, and ShowSounds. When users hold down the EZ Button, preferably a dedicated, easy to recognize button, by also pressing any other button they can hear its name spoken aloud and also see it displayed on the screen.

The 3-Button-List feature lets users access all labels, displays and controls of a device by placing them in a list that can be navigated using up and down buttons on the device.

The purpose of ShowSounds, also a dedicated button, is to give a visual representation of all sounds made by the device.

These three features provide accessibility to many persons with impairments in one set of standard tools. Contact Chris Law for more information about EZ Access.

Follow the rules

The government has made it clear that future trends in electronic and information technology will be to increase access for people with disabilities. At the moment, kiosks are free from being bound by rules in the public sector. However, beginning in June, government projects will require access. It could be, as the line is blurred between ATM's and kiosks in the financial services sector, that kiosks become vulnerable to the same types of lawsuits faced by ATM's.

Resources

• The Federal Information Technology Accessibility Initiative (FITA) is a Federal government interagency effort to offer information and technical assistance to assist in the successful implementation of Section 508.  
• The Access Board (Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board) is an independent Federal agency devoted to accessibility for people with disabilities.
• Read the rules as they apply to ATM's
• Trace Research and Development Center 
• Section 508 FAQ

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