IRS implements system to help the blind file taxes online

The Internal Revenue Service is pioneering a new product designed to make its online tax forms accessible to anyone, including the blind, and it could serve as a model to other federal Web sites for meeting mandates to make their online information fully accessible to the disabled.

Using a product publicly released last Thursday by the software manufacturer Adobe Systems, the agency is making a variety of its most popular tax forms available on the Internet, enabling visually impaired people to complete them on the Web.

Mike Moore, head of the IRS' Alternative Media Center, said the agency knew the issue would emerge upon implementation of Section 508 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which requires all federal agencies to make their e-government offerings accessible to all.

The IRS found that the visually impaired could not access the online versions of its forms because of the way they would be interpreted by technologies such as speech synthesizers, which translate digital documents. The complex layout of the tax forms made them impossible for the synthesizer to scan and translate so blind users could complete them online.

Although the IRS and its contractor, Plexus Scientific, with the help of Adobe, created systems designed to help blind users read tax forms with synthesizers starting in the mid-1990s, the latest technology-Adobe PDF Forms Access-will allow users to actually complete PDF versions of documents online. So far, the IRS has posted eight tax forms to its Web site and plans to release another 12 by Friday and a total of 50 by year's end.

Curtis Chong, technology director of the National Federal for the Blind, said if the IRS follows through "on their promising, it will really enhance our ability to access proper PDF forms." But he cautioned that the initiative could backfire if not executed properly.

"The creation of an accessible form is not going to be a trivial task," he said. "If the entity who wants to create an accessible form doesn't do it right, you can still have a form that isn't accessible to a blind person."

Although the new technology is making the creation of accessible documents cheaper, the more documents that the IRS must post online, the more money it could require, Moore said.

But the development may prove a cost-saving model for other federal agencies. The Alternative Media Center hosted officials from various agencies Wednesday, where Moore demonstrated the new forms and presented officials with a guide on creating fully accessible PDF documents.

Adobe officials said the six other undisclosed agencies are working with the firm on similar projects. Moore said that collaboration is key to the efforts across the entire federal government.