COAT recommendation: Extend Section 255-type disability protections to Internet Protocol (IP) technologies with improved accountability and enforcement measures.

Who will benefit? Millions of persons with disabilities benefit when IP technologies are designed to ensure more accessibility, usability and interoperability for all persons with disabilities, including persons who are aging. Specifically, 51.2 million people (18.1 percent of the population) have some level of disability and 32.5 million (11.5 percent of the population) have a severe disability. The U.S. Census Bureau further notes that about 7.9 million people 15 and older report difficulty seeing words and letters in ordinary newspaper print, and an estimated 7.8 million people 15 and older have difficulty hearing a conversation partially or at all. Disability rates increase with age so that people who are 45-54 years old (19.4%) are more than twice as likely to have a disability as people under 15, and half as likely as people who are 65 to 69 (38.4 %).[1]

Current law: Section 255 of the Communications Act, 47 U.S.C. §225, requires telecommunications providers and manufacturers to make their services and equipment accessible to and usable by people with disabilities if readily achievable.

Why it is not enough: In recent years, judicial and regulatory decisions have classified VoIP and other IP-based technologies as information services rather than telecommunications services, potentially removing these technologies from the protections guaranteed by Section 255. To prevent rolling back years of legislative efforts to achieve equal communications access, and to ensure that people with disabilities are not afforded second class status as our nation migrates to the next generation of electronic communications, new requirements are needed to ensure that disability access to Internet-based and digital technologies will be fully safeguarded. The need for these safeguards will intensify in the coming years, as the nation’s growing senior citizen population swells the number of Americans with vision, hearing, cognitive and mobility disabilities. Internet technologies can provide people with disabilities with various options for conversing, the ability to perform several functions through a single device, video communications, and software solutions for redundant interfaces and operational controls, but only if accessible design is incorporated into these new technologies now, when the costs and efforts associated with providing this access are still a mere fraction of the costs of producing these mainstream products and services.[2]

Technical and Economic Feasibility: Because new digital and Internet-based technologies largely rely on software, incorporating disability access is easier and less expensive now than ever before. In addition, various technological advances, including increased processing power, memory capacity, disk storage and longer battery lives, can facilitate accessibility in new generations of products where this once was not feasible.[3]

[1] Erika Steinmetz, “Americans with Disabilities: 2002, Household Economic Studies,” Current Population Reports, pp.70-107, 2002, available at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/disability/sipp/disab02/awd02.html.

[2] National Council on Disability, “The Need for Federal Legislation and Regulation Prohibiting Telecommunications and Information Services Discrimination” (December 19, 2006), available at http://www.ncd.gov/newsroom/publications/2006/discrimination.htm.

[3] Id.