Modem Man's Mission With Vision
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday February 18, 2000
Mr Dennis Hayes, the man who brought the Internet to personal computers, is facing an unexpected challenge.
Mr Hayes, who invented modems for personal computers in 1977, now finds himself barred from accessing much of the World Wide Web.
As one of a growing number of people with a vision impairment, Hayes finds reading text on Internet sites near impossible without using some form of magnification.
He claims that up to 30 per cent of the population in the US suffer some form of disability, visual or otherwise, which makes accessing the Net difficult a percentage which, he says, translates to a market too large to ignore.
Mr Hayes's rise to prominence began when, at his kitchen table in Atlanta more than 20 years ago, with $5,000 to spend, he built the first production models of the Hayes asynchronous modulator/demodulator. (Modulator/demodulator became, simply, ``modem").
That device was to make communication between PCs possible, allowing online services such as CompuServe and America Online, and set the groundwork for Internet access today.
Soon after he founded DC Hayes Associates, which is now known as Hayes Corporation. The company went public and enjoyed success selling the modems favoured by PC users around the world.
But when modems began being included in almost all PCs, the company hit hard times, filed for bankruptcy and has since focused on reinventing itself as a communications manufacturer with product suites that target network servers in the small business market.
Mr Hayes retired from modem making two years ago and now, as chairman of the US Internet Industry Association, talks to industry and government about the Internet and its challenges.
In Sydney this week to speak on major Internet issues in 2000, Mr Hayes nominated improving Internet accessibility for people with disabilities people as one of his biggest concerns.
Other important issues include developing better privacy policies and coming to some agreement on the taxation of commerce on the Internet.
Mr Hayes said yesterday that there were moves afoot in Washington to have the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires ramps as well as stairs in buildings, apply to the Internet.
Recently, nine visually-impaired US citizens joined the American Federation of the Blind in suing AOL because its software made its online service impossible for them to use.
But Mr Hayes said, partly because similar cases had not had much success in the past, the solution to making the Internet easier for disabled people to use lay not in litigation but in education.
He said the World Wide Web Consortium had established a set of simple guidelines, such as having an ``Alt" tag on all images (allowing speaking browsers to describe an image to blind computer users) which, if followed, could make a huge difference. Adhering to such guidelines was a cheap, easy and fast method of making web pages more accessible.
He also said Webmasters ignored the guidelines at their own peril.
``As the population ages, eyesight deteriorates in almost everyone and there's a very high participation of retired people on the Internet now," Hayes said.
``They've got the money and they're going to buy things, so if you're in business and you recognise a market segment which is affluent, why would you forget about it?
``And if they are people, like myself, who can't drive a car anymore, they are the ones likely to buy online because, sure, I can get friends to take me to the store but a lot I can do on the Internet and get it delivered to me."
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald
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