[Athen] EDUCAUSE and the TEACH Act

Lissner, L S. (Scott ) lissner.2 at osu.edu
Fri Sep 19 08:23:16 PDT 2014


I don't post in this space often but I felt that sharing my agreement and disagreement with the statement below might be useful

I agree; the TEACH Act falls short in a number of ways. as pointed out, one, is that it voices the broad civil rights mandate - equally effective access to the same interactions, the same services, in an integrated fashion and with substantially equivalent ease of use - that we see in recent resolutions from the Department's of Justice and Education without addressing content that challenges the limits to current programming, accessibility tools and technologies.

It is in the nature of statutes to set broad national policy while agency regulations focus on the pragmatics of implementation. I know I would rather the staff at the Access Board write technology standards than Congress. Think about the legislative process for a moment . . . it would rely on vendors and special interest groups to draft technical standards. One of the things NFB did unusually well in proposing the TEACH Act was to point to the goal and point to a transparent process for developing standards rather than simply including their own version in the Proposed legislation.

Finally I want to review a bit of history. Days shy of forty-one years ago, on September 23, 1973, President Nixon signed a reauthorization of the Rehabilitation Act that included the newly minted Section 504 which contained a broad mandate "provide equal access to all federally funded programs, services and benefits to otherwise qualified handicapped persons". 504 was 37 words long and if anything broader than what has been proposed in the TEACH Act. It was the regulations that addressed the competing equities and established the pragmatic balance points of "reasonable", "fundamental alteration", "undue administrative burden" and "undue financial burden".



Where the NFB TEACH Act falls short is in the scope of what this
applies to. First, let me start by saying that the vast majority of
electronic content is stuff we know how to make quite accessible, and
it should be accessible - no questions asked. However, there are still
aspects of electronic content that there are not good answers for how
to make accessible.

For example, how about an electronic chemistry textbook where there is
an interactive 3D model of a compound? Can we make that fully
accessible to a blind student? The language in the TEACH Act requires
the content, or any alternative content we provide, to be "equally
effective and equally integrated" and have the "substantially
equivalent ease of use". Further, the TEACH Act requires that any
accommodation we provide to access that content to also be "equally
effective and equally integrated" and have the "substantially
equivalent ease of use".
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