There are 54 million Americans with disabilities. Less than one-third of adults with severe disabilities are working, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, and barely half the number of students with disabilities graduated from high school, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

But throw away those negative numbers, pick one individual, and a story about someone determined to live a normal life is found. Add the benefit of technology, what happens when a person with disabilities is given a chance to use his talents can be seen.

Take Dimitri Kanevsky. Born in Kiev, Ukraine, and deaf since the age of three, Kanevsky has come far since growing up disabled in the former Soviet Union. Today, he's a member of the research staff in the speech recognition group of the Human Language Technologies Department at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, based in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Kanevsky holds a doctorate in applied mathematics as well as 23 patents and has another 60 patent applications pending.

Working for IBM, he developed the world's first speech recognition system for the Russian language. Kanevsky also developed a Web-based stenographic captioning system and is working on IBM's NetScribe system, which replaces stenographers with automated speech recognition software that can be housed in a local server or a remote location via the Internet. This could be very useful for real-time transcription of college lectures, legislative debates or city council meetings. Kanevsky never hears the words his technology converts from sound into text. He must use the assistive technology he produces.

Kanevsky's work in the field of speech recognition could help boost employment and graduation rates for the disabled population. The solutions also could prove a boon to e-government and distance learning, where technology already has triggered major changes in how the public sector interacts with citizens and students. With the right kind of assistive technology tools and standards, e-government and distance learning could deliver new opportunities to citizens with disabilities.

But making that happen is proving difficult, according to disability experts. "The significance of e-government has not been addressed in a systematic way by public policy-makers in the United States, particularly in relation to Americans with disabilities," said Martin Gould, research specialist for the National Council on Disability, in a speech delivered at Michigan State University in October 2001.

He continued to say that Internet access by people with disabilities is half that of people without disabilities, while the use of technology to help educate the disabled has been hampered by poorly equipped schools and lack of training among special education teachers.

Meanwhile, e-government is taking off but threatens to leave people with disabilities behind, according to Gould. While the number of e-government initiatives at the federal and state level continues to expand, access for the disabled is moving at a snail's pace. A review of federal and state Web sites found that only 27 percent had some form of disability access, such as TTY or TTD numbers, Section 508 or World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliance, or passed testing by "Bobby" software designed to expose accessibility problems. The survey, conducted by Brown University in September 2001, found a tremendous variation in the percentage of states with accessible sites. They ranged from Maine with an accessibility rate of 60 percent down to Idaho, which was only 3 percent accessible.

No National Policy
Part of the reason accessibility ranges so widely among federal, state and local government Web sites is the country's lack of national IT accessibility policy. Instead, there are a number of laws that mandate accessibility in certain contexts.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 requires government to furnish aids and services to the disabled where necessary, unless doing so would result in either a fundamental alteration of the program or an undue burden. In 1996, the