About Raising the Floor (RtF)

People with different backgrounds and disabilities meeting together with computers.

What is RtF?

Raising the Floor is an international consortium of organizations and individuals focused on ensuring that people experiencing disabilities, literacy problems, or the effects of aging are able to access and use all of the information, resources, services, and communities available on or through the Web.  Of particular concern are those with limited or no resources.

What problem is RtF trying to solve?

There are close to a billion people throughout the world with disabilities and a greater number who cannot read due to literacy problems. Many of these people cannot access the Internet and its wealth of resources as their peers can, because they require a special interface accommodation of some type. 

Special assistive technologies have been developed to provide access for people who need such accommodation. And for those who can acquire them these solutions can and do provide access.

However,  

for most people who need assistive technologies, the cost is prohibitive, 

and governments cannot afford to provide them to everyone who needs them. 

The cost of commercial assistive technologies that are good enough to handle today's modern Web pages and applications far exceed the cost that those in lower socioeconomic situations can afford.  (In many countries, the cost for assistive technologies can equal family incomes.) 

Building access into the global information infrastructure

To address these needs, Raising the Floor proposes a radical new approach: building alternate interface features and services directly into the Internet -- so that any user who needs accessibility features can invoke the exact features they need on any computer they encounter, anywhere, anytime.

RtF will also be capitalizing on the prevalence and use of cell phones in developing countries to provide access both to the Internet and to electronic materials such as e-books and e-documents.

Open Source Tools for free public and commercial AT

The Raising the Floor Initiative, through its participants, proposes to create a rich set of open source components that can be used both to create free public access features, and to create better and less expensive commercial assistive technologies.

The proposed components will include

  • Web content interpretation modules to accommodate the wide variety of Web content technologies today and those coming in the future; 
  • Transformation modules and services such as text to speech, color transformations, simplification, sign language translation, and even transformation into simpler language; and
  • Alternate presentation modules to allow users to have content presented in a form that best matches their constraints and abilities (e.g. voice, all visual, simpler layout, highlighted as read, etc.).

Who would benefit from such an approach?

This approach can have widespread benefits across the full spectrum of consumers and stakeholders.

Users

  • People who cannot read could come up to any computer and use it without having to read text or to install anything on the computer.
  • People with a wide range of disabilities will be able to access the Internet though any computer they encounter by invoking, from the Internet, the free public access features (and/or commercial assistive technologies) that they need.
  • Older people who have trouble seeing or understanding these new technologies could have simplified interfaces, visual assistance, and read-aloud features to help them – but only when they need it.
  • A worker who needs special commercial assistive technology (AT) software would be able to purchase it once and use it on any computer, anywhere - at work, at a satellite office, at home, or on the road.
  • People who cannot afford their own computers will be able to access and use any computer in their community, just like their peers without a disability (or literacy problem).
  • People with low incidence disabilities can have access features available that previously would not have been economically practical to develop or disseminate.
  • Users can participate directly in development and/or create their own solutions if they feel that what is available is not right for them or their peers.

Companies

  • Commercial AT vendors can use the components to reduce cost, increase compatibility with new technologies (and with other AT), and free up development funds to innovate. They will also be able to use the RtF distribution system to make their AT available anytime, anywhere to those who purchase it.
  • New AT vendors will be able to get started more easily, by creating new features and new types of AT for different disabilities by building from existing modules rather than having to start from scratch. A new market will also be created for “Micro AT” (individual features or add ons that can be sold the extend the existing free public access features or adapt them for particular disabilities or uses).
  • Mainstream technology companies can participate directly in ways not possible with proprietary assistive technologies. The open source nature of the work allows mainstream companies to better ensure that their new technologies and special products are compatible with free public access features and any commercial AT that is built on these common components.

Governments

  • Governments can better ensure that disability and literacy access features are available for the diversity of languages and cultures in their countries, and they can better afford efforts to ensure that these features are available to people at all economic levels in their countries.

Researchers

  • Researchers can use the open source and modular nature of the RtF software to explore new approaches and to test new ideas. Rather than having to build an entire prototype in order to test an idea, they would be able to easily modify or extend existing software (or even contract with project programmers if they are not themselves programmers) to create a field-testable version of their solution. Those ideas that work can also be transferred much more easily into common publicly available access features or commercial products in ways not possible before. The result is more exploration, more options, and better solutions for a wider range of disabilities, literacy problems, languages and content types.

This approach can also help future-proof all people by creating and advancing "Ubiquitous Accessibility" to address the new accessibility problems that will be (and already are being) presented by ubiquitous and cloud computing.

Is it do-able?

What is proposed will not be not easy. It will take time, talent and money.

But we already have some of the pieces we need for this in place - and those coming together in RtF think it can be done – including leaders and visionaries from both the mainstream technology and accessibility fields.  People like Judy Brewer, Vint Cerf, Jim Fruchterman, Larry Goldberg, Frank Hecker, Chris Hofstader, George Kerscher, Axel Leblois, Rich Schwerdtfeger, Jim Tobias, Jutta Treviranus, Gregg Vanderheiden and many others. The organizations and individuals that make up RtF represent cumulative centuries of experience in accessibility and open-source development. 

The consortium will allow us to work together on accessibility in new ways – and together we can do more for more people than we can ever do separately.

We believe that, like an old-fashioned barn raising, if we work together we can build more, better and faster than we can apart. Together we can build common sharable code and resources, and focus on advancing the field as a whole rather than just individual projects. And in this way we can 

  • create better solutions for less and spend less time in parallel efforts trying to keep up with mainstream technologies
  • allow mainstream technologies to advance more quickly yet not leave accessibility behind
  • facilitate innovation by both researchers and manufacturers

and most importantly,

  • we can address the needs of those people and countries who are not reached today - which is our primary goal.

With the technologies now available to us, we can, for the first time, address Internet and information accessibility in a meaningful way for people with low/no resources.  And with the growing importance of the Internet, and decreasing dollars available for social safety nets, it is important that we do so soon.

The Plan and Timeline

The exact plan and timeline will depend on the resources we are able to assemble to address the problem. However the basic plan is to start with the individual solutions that have been developed by consortium members and work toward the more unified tools and infrastructure. Using this approach we expect to have a variety of cross disability access solutions ready for widespread deployment within the first 18-24 months.

With this base we will then work toward reaching out  adding countries and languages, building user support networks, working to increase awareness of the existence of the solutions, and working on the common public access infrastructure which can provide anyone, anywhere, any time, access and is capable of supporting both free public access features and commercial assistive technologies.

More About Raising the Floor

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