INTERVIEW WITH JOHN WILLIAMS:

RGP: All right, John. Thank you. I’d like to begin by asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself. By the way, this interview will be transcribed and probably placed on our web site. So if you will just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re doing now and what you’ve done and kind of fill us in on that I would appreciate it.

JW: I’ve spent most of my life, exactly two-thirds of my life, writing. The last twenty-four years of my life or twenty-five I’ve spent working in the disability field first as an advocate but most of that time has been spent as a writer journalist. I was beneficiary of how a computer program after eighteen months of training reduced my stuttering rate from about a 90% to 95% rate to about 10 to 15 and it made a big difference in my life. Once I saw the difference it was making in my life, I thought to myself, if a computer can do this for me what can it do for people who are severely disabled and I started writing about how people with different disabilities have been using technology. I am the writer who coined the phrase "assistive technology" in 1982 and if I had been smart and copywrited it I would now be living on some South Sea island or in some huge mansion, but I didn’t. I’ve written more articles on technology and its benefits to people with disabilities than any writer that I know. I have reviewed scores of products. I have also written legislation dealing with helping people with disabilities. This has been federal legislation. In my lifetime or in the last twenty-two years I have easily answered more than 20,000 questions from people looking for information on technology. Three years of my life…

RGP: That’s good because I’m only going to ask you five or ten. Keep going.

JW: Three years of my life from 1997 through October of 2001 I wrote a weekly column for a Business Week online magazine which I loved. It was a great challenge. This was the first time that a national online service and publication gave disability exposure and it was great for both Business Week and me. Currently I have my own web site. It is at508.com. It is sponsorship driven and it focuses on…I publish stories beginning with section 508 and with technology. In my life I’ve won about ten awards, seven of them for writing. I know a great deal about technology, about assistive technology. I know about all the problems that people who need this technology face and I can’t think of a question that has been asked to me since I started in this business that I have not been able to answer.

RGP: Can you tell us a little bit about 508 and what it means? I think there are many viewers, I guess you call people on web sites, who aren’t familiar with that.

JW: Sure. Section 508 is part of the 1993 Rehabilitation Amendments Act and what it says is that as of June 21^st, 2001 information technology vendors selling products through the government, hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment, unless it was an undue financial burden on the part of the company the products had to be usable by federal employees with disabilities who needed to work on the web and the law is a good law because it provides federal employees with disabilities information and access to the web areas that they traditionally didn’t’ have access to or had to rely on somebody else to assist them in achieving access. The law also states that federal web sites must be accessible to people with disabilities who are trying to access information from federal web sites and there are a number of ways that you achieve this. You achieve this by providing a voice or the means to have your material read online. You achieve it by having text with video so that when somebody is speaking either live or you are viewing a tape the text of the person’s statement appears on the video. You provide access by also making sure that the programs that you provide can have printed backgrounds for people with learning disabilities and so forth. The big key is to ensure that many people with disabilities can have web access.

RGP: What has been…I mean, this was 1993.

JW: Actually, in 1998. The bill was first passed in 1973 but nobody really paid attention to it.

RGP: Was it 1973?

JW: Well, section 508 was first mentioned in 1973.

RGP: Really?

JW: Then in 1998 it became part of the 1998 Rehabilitation Amendment Bill.

RGP: Okay. So, that’s not been very long. And you have obviously talked about it a lot. Have you seen progress?

JW: Some. It’s a law that needs backing by the administration. It is a law that needs the administration’s help to be making accessibility a national priority. It does so but not to the extent that it should to make the law as effective as it should be.

RGP: Our project, yourmovieproject.com, involves really the notion that the way people are portrayed in the media, the way people with disabilities and chronic diseases are portrayed in the media matters, that it changes attitudes and that the way people treat you then changes. The way people treat people with disabilities has an effect on their well-being. I’ve been talking to people, mostly actors, about this issue and directors, but you give me an opportunity to talk to somebody from the press and I wonder what do you feel is the state of affairs with the written press in terms of the way people with disabilities and chronic diseases are viewed and treated in articles. Do you understand what I’m saying?

JW: I think the decision made by the Supreme Court on the Americans with Disabilities Act in the last…I think the first decision was in 1994 or 1995 and I think that made the media aware of the gravity of the problem that people with disabilities face in the job market and in education, but it’s still not a major priority with the media. That is, most media publications do not have somebody covering this topic so far. You have a lot of the media still using language that people with disabilities find intolerable or unacceptable such as the word...I was talking to a reporter recently and they asked me how long had I been suffering from stuttering. Suffering isn’t a word that people with disabilities like because it has a negative connation. The media is learning, but it has a long way to go. A long way. It needs to know as much about disability issues as it does about finance, as it does about tax issues, as it does about foreign affairs.

RGP: Well now, that’s interesting. You’d be the one to ask about this. We are starting a free service, a second web site that we are putting together now for the media and for writers, directors, newspaper people, magazine writers, in order to provide better information to writers about disabilities and chronic diseases and chronic illnesses. The object is that if you are writing an article, for example, about multiple sclerosis or you are writing a character with MS into your sitcom but you really didn’t know a whole lot about it, you can go to this web site and type in multiple sclerosis and what you would have in front of you would be a couple hundred letters from people with MS talking about what life is like and giving you an e-mail address that you could use to directly ask questions to this constituency to understand what life is like. We’re going to do this in a wide variety of diseases, but our first illness because I treat a lot of people with MS and because we already have people writing into us is going to be multiple sclerosis. Do you think this would help in terms of providing firsthand information on what life is like and what challenges are faced by people with disabilities?

JW: Yes, I do. Your key to your success is how well you publicize it and how often.

RGP: And the question is will it be well received by journalists? I haven’t spoken to many journalists. I have spoken mostly to the entertainment community.

JW: Let me tell you. Journalists like to be educated. What they don’t like to do is to have somebody tell them how they should write. Because then you’re treading on their livelihood. The thing is whatever we do has to be done in an educational way and not in a way that a journalist feels that he or she is being dictated to be. If they feel that way, then you’ve lost.

RGP: I can understand that and I think the spirit of this web site would be that the information is there for the plucking and obviously you can do what you want with it. There will be no charge for this. I think our only requirement would be that we would ask people to e-mail. You know, whatever they do with it if they write an article we would like to see it when it’s done to know that somebody is using the service. Can you tell us more about your web site?

JW: I’m the main writer.

RGP: That’s a good job for you.

JW: I often do some of the other work, but what I’m trying to do is to focus on products and 508. 508 has the potential to make accessibility to persuade the developers of hardware and software and telecommunication products to ensure that accessibility features are built into these products when they start to be designed. The federal government has the power of the purse to make that happen.

RGP: These have to be web-based products. This is specifically for the Internet. Is that correct?

JW: Right. What I am trying to do with my web site is to cover new products and to be an information source for people looking for information on products, on legislation, for people who are looking for somebody who can give them a reliable independent analysis of the events that surround technology and disabilities. I have plans for the site. I want to bring on other writers because I don’t want people just to…after I see my name up there two or three times, I mean, I don’t need to remind myself that I am writing, that I am the chief writer. We will be providing opportunities for other people to give me stories, to give me contrary opinions.

RGP: Do you concern yourself with other accessibility issues other than the web?

JW: Oh, sure.

RGP: One thing that I found interesting as I got further into this was that when I read the disability press most of what I see involves people with mobility difficulties and often spinal cord injuries. That seems to be the dominant group. That’s why I keep saying disability and chronic illness because I get the impression that people who have chronic debilitating illnesses that are not neurological in origin or that did not arise from an accident, if you know what I’m saying, really aren’t represented very well in the disability community.

JW: You know, since the community is so fragmented…this is a very fragmented community… and I think it’s been my experience most of the stories deal with either blind people or somebody with a disability who has done something that the media likes to point to and call "super crip". I’ve never known a super crippled person in my life.

RGP: Sure. They’re looking for something dramatic.

JW: I’ve known people with varying disabilities who have just found ways to compensate for their disability, but I have never in my life met a "super crip". I think part of the problem that the media has in dealing with disability issues is there are so many and it’s very difficult to cope with so many stories. But I also think part of the problem is people with disabilities have to become part of their community if they want to be accepted and I will give you an example. I am a member of Christ The Redeemer Roman Catholic Church. We have 3000 families. You rarely see any person, any child with a disability, at mass or any of the community functions. When my children were in grade school and high school, we used to go to school functions all the time and you very rarely saw a child with a disability attending these functions. I think people with disabilities have got to show that they are part of their community, that the same things that people without disabilities are concerned about people with disabilities are also concerned about. People with disabilities are concerned about education, are concerned about crime, are concerned about transportation access, are concerned about jobs. But they don’t show it. They don’t voice their opinions loud enough. They don’t go to town hall meetings. I tell my friends with disabilities all the time because a lot of them don’t vote I tell them, "Don’t stand up and tell me that you’re being shafted by your local government or state government or federal government when you don’t vote." And that happens a lot. For people with disabilities to have attitudes changed about them they have to show. They have to begin showing their community that they live there, that they are part of it, that they want to govern it, they want to be involved. If it means that much to them, if they are that passionate about making sure that they have jobs, they have job training, that they are included in their communities, then they have to come out.

RGP: Well, thank you very much, John. That was a good way to end. I appreciate it. A call to action.

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