Corporations, the Marketplace, and Consumers with Disabilities - Part 4

By Cheryl Heppner

Editor: Here's Cheryl's coverage of the TDI Keynote address, presented by Deborah Kaplan, the Director of Accessible Technology at the California State University (CSU) system.

This is part four of four parts.

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Here's Part One

Here's Part Two

Here's Part Three

Here's Part Four

What Can TDI Do?

What can TDI do? Number one, I would recommend that TDI, as an organization, begin to conduct its own research on the consumer choices of its members and publicize the results with relevant companies. What features do members want? What prices are they willing to pay? Those are very important types of information, and finding out just about that kind of information on groups that are hundreds of people is still very significant information.

Find companies with products that are attractive to your members and work with them to develop partnerships for marketing and selling. Figure out how to aggregate the deaf and hard of hearing market. Develop partnerships with other deaf and hard of hearing organizations to make it easier for companies to reach the deaf and hard of hearing market.

TDI could also develop a list of desired criteria for products and services for its members based on what members say they want. Offer to evaluate the products of specific companies to see if they meet these criteria and also offer recommendations for improvement. Search the membership for people with expertise who can participate in activities such as web accessibility guidelines and federal accessibility guidelines. You may have done some of these things already. I think they are important things to do.

Continue to join cross-disability coalitions. TDI has also been willing to work collaboratively within, obviously, the deaf and hard of hearing community, which is a very diverse community, as you-all know and have taught me. And TDI has always been very, very good at working collaboratively with organizations of people with other kinds of disabilities. That's always been the way that I've operated. I think it's terribly important to use all of these strategies together in order to have a significant impact.

Comments and Responses

Comment
Not much has changed in the captioning arena. I've been waiting and waiting for video streaming of news channels, and it's just not happening. We have access to the broadband, but I don't see much captioning on the Internet.

Debbie Kaplan
I think that that's an issue where you could use many of those strategies all together. Clearly, this is an area where federal policy and legislation is a good idea, and there are people who are headed in that direction, and I suspect your coalition is probably involved in that. We certainly have been very successful in terms of captioning on regular TV, old-fashioned TV programming, and that's because of federal policy and legislation and regulations. And that's an ongoing process. You have to have the legislation in order to have litigation and laws to litigate about, so litigation is probably not a great strategy yet, but maybe later down the road.

It's an interesting arena to figure out what are the different other approaches, whether it is going to companies and offering to educate them about the market and what that means in terms of the Web and also figuring out ways to find the disability champions and work in concert with them to help influence the companies. It would be interesting to do a little research and see if there are any people within some of those large news organizations who are addressing accessibility or looking at the disability market at all. Just food for thought.

Comment
If the cross-disability communities got together there is really power in numbers. And as you were talking about the amount of money they spend and everything, and if somehow an organization could get together and get the funding to have a web site or something and all of the cross-disabilities get together and actually agree to try to purchase from companies that are pro-disabilities and actually let everyone know that they're doing it. I think there would be enough numbers that they really could have control or a lot more power. I was just wondering if there is an organization that's doing anything like that or if you know of a government agency that would be a good one to look for a grant to do something like that.

Debbie Kaplan
The only organization that I can think of that's doing something sort of like that is the American Association of People with Disabilities that is working with specific companies in a partnership way to provide discounts, sort of like AARP does, to particular products and services. An idea that I think several people have been batting around for a long time is the creation of a web site that people with disabilities can go to to find out about companies that have accessible products or that have favorable policies in responding to the needs of consumers with disabilities. I'm not aware of anything like that, but it's certainly struck me and other people that that would be a good idea, and you would think that companies would also want to have that as a channel to reach customers with disabilities.

Comment
That's really a good idea to get some organizations together and send a product to a company and let them know that people with disabilities, deaf, hard of hearing, are using this particular product or we need a particular product. So thank you.

Debbie Kaplan
One of the things that I learned is that the research that marketers do is not necessarily as rigorous as the research, say, for a federal contract. And I think it would be entirely possible for disability organizations that have significant memberships to start doing their own market research of their members. It's a wonderful vehicle. The members are already there, and in doing disability research, one of the most difficult things is finding research subjects.

Granted, the members of an organization are not necessarily representative of the entire market as people who are from a sample that's from the general population, but I think that those numbers would be taken seriously and be paid attention to.

Comment
You talked about Microsoft's attention to access. Windows XP is very easy to use. I have limited vision, and Vista is just unbelievable. It asks this permission, that permission. I'm missing so many things, and so many pop-ups are coming up, and I can't even take it off. I mean, there's so many things to remove.

Debbie Kaplan
I know that they designed it thinking about accessibility. It sounds like they've got more work to do in terms of how it really works.

Here's Part One

Here's Part Two

Here's Part Three

Here's Part Four