So many of us who have been waiting for the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to get off the dime and issue their long-awaited regulations on airline website and airport kiosk accessibility were excited this week to finally see them published. However, like so much it seems in the technology and civil rights for people with disabilities context, we are given relatively little and expected to gush with gratitude.
That's certainly the case with these new DOT rules. Even though airlines have been repeatedly challenged to improve website accessibility in the courts for years, even though DOT has been working on these new rules for years, and even though everyone has known for years what the technological solutions are that can make websites more accessible, the DOT decided to give airlines yet an additional three years to improve their websites. Why? After all the delays, and when both the problems and the solutions have been in sight for so long, why the hesitancy?
But this tepid move by DOT on website accessibility cannot possibly compete with their preposterous decision to require that airport kiosks need only be accessible 10 years from now and that only a few of them offered in a given location need comply. Now there's progress in disability civil rights. Ten years from now, probably right around the time when airport kiosks themselves will be replaced with some other heretofore unknown technology, a blind air traveler will have the right to try and determine which of the six kiosks she can use and then hope it works.
What is particularly frustrating for me is that many in the disability community (and industry) have said that they are looking to these DOT rules as a bellweather for what the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) might do in its own anticipated rule-making proceedings on website and other technology accessibility. What we've proposed to DOJ here at AFB is that they take a straightforward approach that simply affirms that, no matter what form or modality is employed, from printed paper materials to websites to mobile apps to telephony to smoke signals, when businesses and governments communicate with people with disabilities, that communication must be effective and afford full and equal enjoyment of all goods, services, programs and activities. The DOJ has been flirting with doing something about website and equipment accessibility in their rules for far too long now, and it's not at all clear as of this writing when we might ever see them. What we've got to do is stop allowing people to think of website and technology accessibility as some exotic and novel thing that geniuses are struggling to achieve. It is here, and it has been here, in so many ways, for a fairly long time.
The problem isn't knowledge about how to get it done; the problem is the will to make it happen. And when federal regulations come out that seem to suggest, by their halfheartedness, that expecting accessibility today is a bridge too far, our government is conspiring with those who would have us believe the lie that technology accessibility isn't achievable right now. For my part, I hope the DOT regs won't be a bellweather for anything except the disability community's outrage and determination to have our government do much better.
Online flight booking photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
