Washington - Blind and deaf consumers, who have fought to make home phones and television more accessible, say they are being left behind on the web and many mobile devices.
Touch-based smartphone screens confound blind people who rely on buttons and raised type. Web video means little to the deaf without captioning.
But new legislation is in the works to put the same pressure on consumer electronics companies that revolutionised an earlier generation of technology for the vision- and hearing-impaired.
"Whether it's a Braille reader or a broadband connection, access to technology is not a political issue - it's a participation issue," said Democrat Edward Markey, the author of a House bill aimed at making the Internet more accessible to people with disabilities.
"We've moved from Braille to broadcast, from broadband to the BlackBerry. We've moved from spelling letters in someone's palm to the Palm Pilot. We must make all of these devices accessible."
The consumer electronics, entertainment and communications industries have been slow to include the disabled, some lawmakers and advocates complain. Big companies have fought against government regulators' dictating new technical requirements, saying the industry is better equipped to make its own engineering decisions.
Apple's iPhone has built-in speech software for the blind, but other smartphones require users to buy costly programs for the same functions. Some broadcasters put videos on the Internet with captions, but not all. That can make inaccessible everything from the political videos that are now common on the web to pop culture clips that turn viral if they don't have closed-captioning for the deaf or hard-of-hearing. Closed captioning is a display of text - not automatically visible - coinciding with the audio portion of a TV broadcast.
Markey's bill, and one in the senate, would make mandatory some of the changes in technology that industry is slow to adopt on its own. It would let blind consumers choose from a broader selection of cellphones with speech software that calls out numbers and cues users on how to surf the Internet.
Legislation would make new television shows that are captioned available online with closed-captioning. Remote controls would have a button that makes it easier to get closed captioning on TV sets.
But gaps would remain. Videos made and shared by users on YouTube and Facebook wouldn't require captioning. Vision-impaired cellphone users will in many cases have to download speech software at an extra cost.
"This is simply about inclusion. You have an industry known for innovation, but they don't have a cultural understanding of what universal design truly means," said Rosaline Crawford, a director at the National Association of the Deaf.
The Consumer Electronics Association was at first opposed to legislation that would create blanket requirements for cellphones, set- top boxes and other electronics. But the trade group has agreed on some points, and now supports a case-by-case analysis of how individual technologies can be more inclusive. Captioning for a television on your wrist, for instance, would be hard to achieve. - Washington Post-Bloomberg