AT advocates across the country should be aware of significant recent technology developments designed to guarantee access to financial information and services for persons who are blind or have other vision impairments, or who for other reasons have difficulty reading standard print. Please share this information with your staff, clients and community. If you haven’t tried a Talking ATM, try one before you go home: there are four Bank of America Talking ATMs in the Austin airport (including ones at baggage claim and one each at Gates 6 and 13) and there are two Talking ATMs within a mile of this conference at the Wells Fargo at 111 Congress Ave or the Washington Mutual at 600 Congress Ave. All the machines work with a standard Walkman-type headset.
Talking ATMs
On October 1, 1999, the very first Talking ATM in the country was installed in San Francisco City Hall. Today, at best count, there are over 30,000 Talking ATMs spread out across the country, with at least some Talking ATMs in every state. These Talking ATMs are the cornerstone of the blind community’s comprehensive advocacy effort designed to increase access to information in the financial industry. (The two other principal components of this effort are access to print information and accessible websites, discussed below). While the blind community has spearheaded the advocacy effort, Talking ATMs and other accessible financial services benefit people with various disabilities.
Nationwide, both Bank of America and Wells Fargo have each already installed over 3,000 Talking ATMs, and more are being installed each month. Fleet Bank, headquartered in Boston and recently purchased by Bank of America, has over 1,000 Talking ATMs. Other banks with hundreds of the accessible machines include Washington Mutual, Sovereign Bank, Union Bank of California, Chicago-based Bank One, and Wachovia. The goal of the Talking ATM advocacy effort has been installation of a Talking ATM at every location with ATMs. The most significant advances toward this goal have been made in California, where all of the Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Union Bank of California and Citibank locations in the state have at least one Talking ATM.
You can now find Talking ATMs from North Pole, Alaska (the Wells Fargo on Santa Claus Lane (no kidding!)), to the Tijuana border. There are talking ATMs in National Parks (Yosemite’s Bank of America Talking ATMs and Bank One’s Grand Canyon Talking ATM) and amusement parks (Disneyland and Disney World). They are in zoos (San Diego, LA, and Indianapolis), sports venues (Pac Bell Park, Charlotte North Carolina’s Erickson Stadium, Daytona Speedway) and resort towns (Aspen and Santa Fe). And, more and more Talking ATMs are cropping up in airports around the country, enabling those who do not yet have a machine locally to experience the technology and get cash while traveling. Airports with Talking ATMs in addition to Austin Bergstrom Airport include San Francisco International, Logan Airport in Boson, and Houston Intercontinental, as well as smaller airports in Fresno and Monterey California, Gwinn,
Michigan and Rochester, Minnesota.
For students and professors with vision impairments, there are now Talking ATMs at over 250 on college campuses across the country, in states ranging from West Virginia (Mountain State University) and Texas (including Texas A&M and Baylor) to Rhode Island (Brown University), New Mexico ( University of New Mexico and New Mexico State), Maine (University of Maine), Massachusetts (including U. Mass and Harvard Law School) and states in between. In California alone there are over fifty college locations with Talking ATMs.
There is still much work to do in publicizing these locations, and persons with disabilities and their advocates can participate in the on-going advocacy efforts by using Talking ATMs, requesting them in locations where they are not yet installed, and informing friends and organizations about their availability. Talking ATM addresses can be found on many bank ATM locators, or by calling a bank’s toll free number. A full list of both the college, airport, and travel destination locations can be obtained by contacting the author at the address below.
Alternative Format Highlights
Many financial institutions now have formal programs in place to ensure that customers with vision impairments have full access to banking information. While not typically thought of as a "technology" issue, a program ensuring that statements from a national institution are available on request in a timely fashion to persons across the country in varying formats involves significant technology as well as customer service expertise. A national vendor with experience in producing alternative formats on a large scale with an automated program should be consulted. An ideal program is tailored to ensure that all information is effectively communicated to all persons who cannot read standard print. Methods of effective communication include, depending on the nature of the information, Braille, large print, audio cassette, electronic formats, and reader services. Ideally, financial institutions should post their alternative formats on their web sites, preferably with a link from the home page. Banks with posted policies include Sovereign bank http://www.sovereignbank.com/companyinfo/accessibility.asp ; Bank of America http://www.bankofamerica.com/accessiblebanking/, Union Bank of California http://www.uboc.com/about/main/0,3250,2485_2877,00.html, Fleet www.fleet.com and Wells Fargo http://www.wellsfargo.com/about/diversity/accessibility/index.html . As with all accessibility features and services, a bank's alternative format policies must be used by the public to ensure they remain a strong aspect of the bank’s services. Consumers who experience problems getting needed formats should remember that the ADA, as well as the laws of many states including California, guarantee effective communication: being able to access banking information is a right that can and should be exercised.
Web Accessibility
Over the last several years, many banks, with the assistance of the blind community, have expressly committed to make their websites accessible to persons with disabilities. Several banks have agreed to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium, commonly know as the W3C, and available on the Web at www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ . These guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with various types of disabilities, who may access the Web using screen reader software, may be unable to hear audible content, may need to enlarge font sizes, or may need to access the web using only a keyboard (no mouse) because of a physical impairment. The Guidelines, in their own words, "do not discourage content developers from using images, video, etc., but rather explain how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience." Many of the accessibility pages listed above include information about the bank’s efforts to design and generate accessible web pages. Again, users experiencing problems accessing website information should contact the bank and explain the problem that was encountered. Only in this way will the financial industry truly begin to understand the way in which blind people and others with disabilities are using the Internet for information and services.
*This information is provided by Lainey Feingold, a Berkeley, California
disability rights lawyer who has represented the blind community nationally for close to
ten years on accessibility issues in the banking industry. Her co-counsel in this work
includes Stan Eichner and Jane Alper from the Disability Law Center (Boston) and Amy
Peterson from Equip for Equality (Chicago). Lainey can be contacted at lfeingold1@earthlink.net or (510) 548-5062. More in-depth articles about the history, technical and
advocacy issues concerning Talking ATMs were published by the American Foundation of the
Blind’s on-line publication "Access World" in January and March, 2003 and
may be read on the web at http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw040106 and http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw040207. Papers on this issue presented at the California State University Northridge
(CSUN) annual conference on Technology and People with Disabilities may be found on the
web at: http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2003/proceedings/324.htm
and
http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2004/proceedings/154.htm
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