Accessibility and Convergence: Threats to the Passionate Glacier

humanITy Paper

Date: 21/08/2007

The disability sector in general and the Visual Impairment (VI) sub-sector in particular have been slow to react to the changing technological environment, concentrating too heavily on accessing and processing computer-based information at the expense both of accessing broadcasting and focusing on the merging requirement for digital creativity as peer normative. The position of disabled people in the digital environment will be influenced by two major negative factors - the shift towards creativity and the regulatory melt-down - and VI people will face the additional problem of the inexorable shift in the terms of trade away from text and towards graphics; a more positive factor is the effect of the ecological imperative on reducing the multiplicity of user interfaces. The Presentation then goes on to make recommendations for the sector and for those concerned with design.

0. Introduction

Perhaps the title is a little enigmatic, so allow me to explain. I have been working in the accessibility sector now for 15 years and working for much longer in the visual impairment sector both as a professional and as a part of the governance of major organisations such as RNIB of which I am Vice Chair. What strikes me about almost all of these organisations is the passion of their employees and trustees but, paradoxically (and that is a word which will occur often in this presentation), I am also struck by how lacking such organisations are in driving the agenda forward. They are, quintessentially, organisations which judge performance on how people work, on inputs and not on what they do for customers, client’s, users, i.e. outputs. I have come to think of the visual impairment sector in general as the "Passionate Glacier"; so that explains the analogy. As for the threats to its survival, we are in a phase of unrelenting economic warming, with production cycles going faster and faster, shorter and shorter; and, if we are not careful, the interests of minorities, no matter how pressing, might simply be bypassed in global markets focused on growth in an environment of cut throat competition and microscopic margins. If you want a model for this, then the one that is easiest to grasp at the moment is the set top box market for digital televisions. The adjustment to the chip set to allow Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) information to be accessible for blind and elderly people is tiny; but so is the margin per unit on the boxes. It does not matter that it is a matter of public policy for digital television in the UK to be universally accessible; it does not matter either that there is some public money for this policy to be implemented. The whole process is stalled because there is no agreed way forward in the manufacturing sector.

Turning in more general terms to the economic situation, I am always suspicious of institutions which refer to the "external environment" as if it was alien or even hostile just because it is not within the institution's control. In an era of massive capital shifts, peculiarly uncertain meteorology and sheer complexity, the idea of being able to control anything is somewhat old fashioned and even dangerous. Better by far to think of ourselves in the world and to accept how little we can really change.

But whatever change we can make will not be helped if we are not aware of our world, so I want to talk about the four big factors in our digital world which I think are receiving far too little attention in the disability sector in general and the visual impairment (VI) sector in particular. (In this presentation I will largely use the situation of the VI sector to provide me with detail but I hope that much of what I have to say will apply to a greater or lesser extent across the disability sector as a whole.)

So, here for a start are my four factors:

Shifts in the Digital Environment 2007-2012

The shift in communications economics from words to pictures
The shift from accessing and processing to creating
The ecological drive for hardware convergence
The regulatory meltdown in a global market.

I will then try to draw up some conclusions for the disability sector based on my analysis before drawing some conclusions which I hope will be of relevance to this conference.

1. Words and Pictures

By far the longest section of this presentation will deal with the changing terms of trade between words and pictures, not just because this is of critical importance to VIPs who find accessibility to multi media digital information most problematic but also because it will have a profound effect on the democratisation of culture.

Humans invented text because although it is approximate, it was the optimal way of communicating and storing experience. Compared with the great Greek sculptures of the 4th and 3rd Centuries BCE, scratching symbols on a stone or writing on early papyrus or animal skins was easy. The printing press established an almost absolute symbolic hegemony for half a millennium but the birth of photography, and then the cinema, began to erode it and in many ways, in spite of a brave rearguard action by the intelligentsia, television was the real death knell of the symbolic paradigm.

Nonetheless, for many decades after the birth of picture technology in the analogue era the price of creating text fell steadily faster than the fall in the cost of picture creation; the celluloid camera was certainly not the equivalent of the manual typewriter. In this era the creation of text was much more 'democratic' than the creation of pictures, particularly moving pictures, for the following reasons:

Factors in Analogue Image Restriction 1940-1995

The state control or licensing of television
The unionisation of television and cinema and
The consequent punitive economic models for television and cinema
The duopoly of photographic supply.

Just for an instant, for approximately a decade between the mid 1970s and mid 1990s, it looked as if the terms of trade were going to become even more radically separated by advances in text-centred computing. In the space of 20 years hot metal editing gave way to cut and paste type and then automated, computer driven typesetting and even the fax machine, which had primarily been used for the transmission of pictures, became a text-centred artefact.

But then there was a series of rapid changes in less than a decade which radically altered the position:

From Word to Picture 1990-2000

The development of the World Wide Web
The Graphical User Interface
The digital still/video camera.

And so, reminding ourselves of one of the flagship rules of accessibility or "Design for All", that all media should be created multi modally, i.e. pictures, text and audio should complement each other but also be discrete carriers of the authorial intention, what future is there for text in a graphics-based market?

The key factors are:

Factors in Text Production

Declared mission
Global reach
Cost/benefit.

Before I deal with these three factors I want us simply to imagine that we leave this room and look across the York University campus. I would be very surprised if there were not at least one competent digital photographer in the room, more likely there are a dozen who could take pictures of the Campus from which we could select a winner and pay a modest fee, modest because the actual labour and materials would be negligible and because at least some competitors would rate winning above being paid, driving down the price of the transaction. Now think about the parallel exercise of commissioning a verbal description of the winning shot. The need to provide an editorial remit, the relative scarcity of accurate descriptive power and the consequent rise in the price of labour and the time taken to write and edit the description would all make this process uncompetitive against the picture unless there was a highly specific justification for the text. Conversely, the market for the picture would, without special circumstances, be potentially much higher than for the text.

Whereas a photographer selects by defining the content within the frame, a prose describer has to select what is chosen from within the frame. A single picture can capture the aesthetic, the historic, the functional, the meteorological and biological, student anthropology, idiosyncrasy, embellishment and ugliness. What is an author to do?

The answer lies in the first of our three points; it depends on the mission of the author or organisation. There are, essentially, three kinds of author:

Information Suppliers in The Public Domain

Public sector and public sector supported organisations funded by taxation
Commercial and private organisations operating in a market
Public domain information providers with no obligations and expecting no return.

Government organisations which claim to serve all citizens have a high accessibility requirement but it is at least philosophically questionable whether market players, even privatised utilities, should be forced to make accessibility decisions on the basis of legislation rather than market advantage. The compromise position in this area should be that those organisations, important enough in our society to be subjected to a licensing regime, should be subject to accessibility requirements as part of the license; this maintains a modest level of extra cost on a level playing field.

Private organisations and individuals should, as a starting point, be under no obligation to make material accessible, particularly if they calculate that the cost will massively outweigh any advantage to their enterprise. The comparative cost of posting a photographic exhibition onto the web and describing it is, surely, disproportionate.

I will return to this topic later when I come to tackle regulatory issues but, in the meantime, I want to look at a hybrid phenomenon - i.e. a digital space occupied by all three kinds of authors - such as Second Life.

What if, as currently happens, institutions funded by general taxation, are sited in Second Life? The starting point must surely be that a tax payer in the Maldives should be able to access its visa information in Second Life; the same goes respectively for the White House and an increasing number of sovereign state entities that live in virtual space. But how much control can and should these particular parties have over the navigation which might allow people with accessibility requirements to find their front doors? Are there obligations on private shops in second Life to do anything about accessibility, particularly if their owners conclude that this will not result in extra sales? If, for example, your business is to sell virtual jewellery for avatars, what is the cost of the description compared with the likely sales?

This is a good place to insert a simple note about what people refer to as the "Business Case" which, roughly speaking, goes as follows:

The Business Case for Accessibility

There are ‘x’ disabled people
With ‘y’ combined spending power
Which constitutes ‘xy’ revenue
Which is ‘z%’ of the total market.
Which is so economically significant that no major business can afford to ignore it.

This model only works in a Utopian economy of unlimited capital. In the real economic world there is competition for capital and in almost all digital spheres the opportunity cost of capital favours supplying the young and upgrading the rich rather than supplying the old and marketing to the poor. If there really was a disability business case major providers of goods and services would adopt it as part of their primary function of maximising shareholder value.

The second point on text production is global reach. As the global economy becomes more integrated, not least the communications industries, led by the roll-out of IP6, more communicators will want to develop language free communications strategies:

Language/graphics options

Instead of a press release, a movie clip and a logo
Instead of an expensive, multi-lingual web site, a telecast on a loop
Instead of a set of technical specifications, a demonstration of features.

We have to remember that when we talk about a text equivalent of an image or a movie clip, we are not just thinking about an English Alt Tag or Long Desc. Perhaps the American-dominated WAI can settle down to a life of English with a liberal dose of Spanish thrown in, particularly as English speaking is a matter of public policy in the USA; but Europeans have a very different experience of the relationship between public policy, commercial strategy and multi lingualism and in countries like the UK there is still a lively, even agonised, debate about the propriety of multi culturalism. Is the Greater London Authority to provide all its text in 300 languages? Globalisation definitely constitutes an opportunity for reducing pro rata marketing costs but a successful campaign to impose textual equivalence would put much of that gain at risk.

Which leads, naturally, to the third issue of cost/benefit. I think it is clear that in the context of a radical shift from symbolic language to pictures we are running into a situation where our real campaign is to reduce the cost/benefit of more visual communication. We are, in effect, calling for a text tax. As I will show later, I am not necessarily against this, but we have to be clear that this is what we are asking for; there is no getting round it. We are asking other people to use their private or shareholder funds to undertake actions which will guarantee them no profit and will, more likely, cut their profit on investment.

A standard argument against this grim scenario is that the Government should make up the difference; but there are two major trends in public expenditure in the last 30 years as 'Western' societies have steadily moved away from the command-and-control systems required for fighting two world wars:

Public Sector Decline 1980-2007

A decline in the popularity of general taxation
Concentration of stable or falling tax revenue on health and education
Global competition to reduce business taxes.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is for the public sector to impose a degree of accessibility on a level playing field under license but I am wary. The European Union refused to grant a Union-wide concession on copyright for disabled people in the late 1990s because they were an "economically insignificant" market sector and no amount of demographic grandstanding is likely to change that. There will be increased competition for a decreasing amount of central government control and regulation and disabled people are likely, on past form, to be near the back of the line.

To sum up: what we have in the changed terms of trade of word and picture is a complete reversal. The picture is now much cheaper and much more democratic than the image. The questions we will have to ask ourselves are the extent to which we want to and are capable of taxing that democratic process in order to make its very limited benefits available to people who cannot see pictures.

2. Accessing, Processing and Creating

Second Life is only one manifestation of what is frequently and pretentiously referred to as Web 2.0. Not for the first time, a commercially driven and glitzy phenomenon has reflected the zeitgeist rather than creating the conditions for it. In Third Wave Alvin Toffler [i] developed the philosophically elegant but linguistically ugly phenomenon of the "Prosumer". He drew a modern moral from the famous pronouncement of Mr. Micawber in Dickens' David Copperfield, net importers are poor, net exporters are rich.

We have spent so much time in the past 15 years concentrating on accessing and processing digital data that the critical area of creating has been left somewhat behind. Now I understand why this is so. The initial golden age of computing when "blind" and "computer programmer" went together like peaches and cream, was followed by the terrible shock of the GUI. At the same time there was an understandable push, with the dawn of digital television, for access to it to be radically expanded as the cost of audio description and sub-titling (but not signing, for some highly specific reasons) fell substantially. There was so much of a struggle to get blind children computer literate and blind adults work ready that the idea of creativity was simply fanciful. Now, however, in the cold light of 15 years of pushing, the results have been nugatory. The reasons for this are highly varied but include:

Factors in Poor Digital Outcomes, VI Sector 1993-2006

The necessary reaction to the World Wide Web and GUI
Conservative SEN sector
Conviction that user performance would overcome employer prejudice
Fragile, costly access technology sector
Low emphasis on games, haptics, 3D printing and other emerging technologies
Massive gap between generic development and accessibility products
Someone else should do it.

This last bullet points to a central fallacy, hinted at earlier, but needing a very explicit statement: the ideological position that the enjoyment of rights (as opposed to the promulgation of rights) is a public sector dependent sphere, particularly with reference to finance, is no longer viable. As I have already noted, a fiscally neutral tax policy at best is not going to expand the enjoyment of rights parallel with the expansion of the assertion of rights, or even their constitutional promulgation. Among the serious casualties will be any attempt to force employers to employ disabled people. Paradoxically, perhaps, for VI people this is not such a disaster as quotas and other statutory measures have never worked; but we will all be forced to look more carefully at the place of people, such as VIPs, with narrow skills bases that can only be optimally applied in a collaborative framework.

It may well be that the expansion in the graphical world and away from text will be paralleled by smaller expansions in audio, taste smell and touch producing and marketing so that the sales environment tries to engage all five senses. Even if this is a false hope it is definitely the case that the multi media environment and the explosion of community and internet radio offer opportunities for the VIPs who can obtain the necessary degree of self confidence and range of skills; but it only takes a small amount of digging to see that the tools are lacking, even in such an obvious area as music and radio production. Meanwhile, as the world of commercial self publishing explodes, we are still fighting the battle of WCAG 2.0.

From the pre school blind child to the blind woman who needs to change career at the age of 50, we have just not been thinking creatively about being creative.

There seems to be a paradox in the way we talk about future employment patterns. On the one hand, we talk about increasing specialisation and on the other we talk about people having five or six sequential careers or a dynamic portfolio which means that we need generic skills. But if we think about this for a moment there is no contradiction. We need the generic skills such as:

Generic Employment Skills

Communication
Flexibility and
The capacity to absorb and process vast quantities of new information

In order to switch, or more likely, move sideways, into new areas of work. Just to give you an example, my dynamic sideways slide went as follows:

Carey's Crab-Like Progress

Epidemiology - understanding taxonomy
On-line Public Access Catalogues - creating taxonomy
Computing - architecture and taxonomy
Computer accessibility - equivalence
Data accessibility - equivalence
Data usability - authorial intention
Digital creativity - authorial intention.

It is my contention that the area of skills development has become rather scrambled in public policy terms. The three generic skills I quoted are not computer skills, they are simply made different (and not necessarily easier, nor beneficial) by the existence of computing. What is more, a great many of the tools which exist apparently to make things easier do not really do so: a spelling checker is of marginal use to a good speller and of hardly any use to somebody who can't spell; the same goes for grammar checkers. A grumpy old man who hates people won't send nice emails. A person who always does things the same way will be deeply disoriented by a radical product change such as the switch to Vista. A Google search is more or less useless if you don't know what you're looking for. So the basic strategies we need for becoming employable have nothing to do with word processing, spreadsheets, databases and accessing the web; but to listen to politicians you would think that that is precisely what is required.

Conversely, this obsession with a package of so-called basic skills (they are, in fact, as I have shown, derivative) doesn't help with the specialisation. If you want to be peer normatively proficient you don't need a general package, you need a tailored package. A hairdresser who needs to keep an appointments diary on a PDA doesn't need spreadsheet skills if she's got an accountant; and an accountant doesn't require the same kind of communications skills, with or without technology, that the hairdresser requires: his problem is clear, jargon-free communication with clients who don't understand why their tax is so high; her problem is knowing when to talk, when to listen, when to empathise and when to shut up.

There are, however, some very basic skills which a computer environment particularly requires but which do not seem to figure on most training courses. Paradoxically, in an age of hypertext, understanding file hierarchy is pretty crucial if you want to find things. Equally, you need a search strategy for finding things on the non structured internet.

As with the National Curriculum, disabled people have been severely disadvantaged by a rigidly standardised approach to IT employment. In education it has meant that disabled children have had to try to acquire autonomously exercised skills when their main strength is, as I have noted, in collaboration; and in IT-based employment, mechanistic, secondary level skills have taken precedence over 'softer' primary level skills. Sadly, the disability sector has swallowed this false paradigm so it can't blame employers for doing the same. My long-time Ability Magazine [ii] comrade John Lamb has just produced an excellent accessibility manual for generic IT directors [iii] but it needs a companion volume on the basics of 21st Century employment such as communication, flexibility, empathy, quality service and understanding brand values. There was a brief time when you couldn't drive a car if you didn't know what was under the bonnet but that time's past; and in computing, it's about to.

Given this huge amount of economic and market background, we have to face some critical issues which are difficult to discuss, let alone decide:

VIP Employment Issues 2007-2010

What should we do with VIPs who cannot work in the 21st Century labour market without support?
Who should provide the support and how much?
Is there a fundamental obstacle to VI entrepreneurship?
Can we overcome digital creativity barriers?

The last of these questions is the most pertinent for this gathering but the others will not go away.

One of the reasons why the creativity question is so critical is that digital self expression is rapidly becoming peer normative for people between the ages of 10-35 and that trend will not only increase as cohorts grow older, it will increase in the older cohorts who have, for example, already embraced SMS and attaching pictures to emails. A large sub-class of people who abandoned writing anything once they left school now send emails. If the peer normative milieu is largely graphical, how are VIPs to function?

3. The Ecological Imperative

Having looked at two fairly negative sets of factors, I want to turn now to a much more positive area which may provide us with some major opportunities.

Think, for a moment, about the digital content user interfaces in your house. My wife and I, relatively prosperous and much more interested in books than television and multi media entertainment, own between us:

Carey’s electronics 2007 two adults

5 radios
3 CD players
2 lap tops with media centres
2 mobile phones
1 hi-fi stack
1 DVD player
1 television.

The people upstairs would regard us as deprived and stone age. The general point here is that the production of all this engineering, silicon, plastic, glass and even platinum and gold, is unsustainable. At the same time, the way that consumer electronics and computers have become modular is the beginning of an answer to the problem.

For disabled people, one of the trials of life is the user interface chameleon. For a blind person, the simple act of entering a hotel room and using the television is a matter of guess work, frustration and frequent failure. I never tire of telling the story of my blind friend who checked into a Miami hotel, fiddled with the television and was billed for 24 hours of hard core porn! If it's bad for one device, how bad is it when we have to move between devices where basic functionality does not go across devices. I think it is now far too late to try to achieve any degree of standardisation of such basic controls as:

Basic Controls

On/Off
0-9
High/Low
Forward/back

But I do think that we will be able to develop a programmable user interface that works with a wide variety of devices and behaves in a way that the user requires. Recently I have been working on the generic user requirement for the next generation of 'talking book' players and the really frustrating element is the obsession of the sector with dichotomies where the person talking to you is always right: "you can have this or that and I say it should be this". Needless to say, such assertion leaves out third possibilities or, even more radical, the idea that you don't limit the possibilities, let alone throw your weight around, telling other people what they must have. At the moment the key question is not which technology should be used to receive DAISY material but how many technologies can do so at a reasonable marginal cost. Later the question will be: how can we programme this controller to suit the needs of the user and to re-programme itself as the user's habits change? For reasons which are quite beyond me, the disability sector seems not to have been interested in systems that react to user behaviour. I would have thought it was obvious that this is a key area for people who find change difficult to handle.

It seems to me that the ecological sphere will be the next great, and possibly last, bastion of regulatory activity and so we can hope for some help here but in the area of content and metadata regulation, I think we are in for a horrible shock, to which I now turn.

4. Regulatory Melt-Down

Disabled people don't have much to thank media regulators for. A recent EU decision on the accessibility of public telephone kiosks was almost the regulatory equivalent of agreeing new rules for disabled access to sailing ships. The following points are, I admit, an over-generalisation but they will give you an idea:

Media Regulation and Disability

Television sub-titling approaching 100% in USA and UK; Audio description 10% in UK, declining in US; signing covered by regulation in UK; all other countries less good
Internet accessibility peaked at no more than 40% compliance; now falling in US and EU
No guaranteed accessibility of public telephone networks
Except for caption toggle in US, hardware de-regulated.

The BBC, funded by what is, in effect, a flat tax, and until 1990 the dominant player in a broadcasting cartel, has led the way in television accessibility and it has accepted the case for the total accessibility of its massive web operations but it will be an exception. The regulatory grip on television is already loosening as spot advertising revenue drifts into internet advertising. The EU has made an attempt in its new, and significantly named European Audio Visual Media Service Directive (formerly Television Without Frontiers) to try to regulate television on the internet. It relies upon a distinction between linear broadcasting and programmes that people pick from a menu but if the regulation of linear is much more severe than the regulation of pick-and-mix then except for news and sport the offer will go pick-and-mix to avoid the regulation. We already know that some television transmission has slipped Southwards across the Mediterranean as the result of EU regulation. As broad band capacity increases the slippage from spectrum-based broadcasting will gather pace and facilitate ever cheaper and easier regulatory avoidance.

At the heart of this situation there is an apparent paradox:

WAI

Based on US self regulation
Massive political success
Relied heavily on legislation and regulation.

WAI was born in the United States in a self regulatory environment but its massive political success has not been matched by performance; and where it has succeeded most is where legislation and regulation are fiercest. So, given this modest success and the decline of legislative and regulatory clout, my paradoxical proposal is that we need a generic right of access to information that is in the public domain. This right should be contestable in civil law. We cannot go on lobbying every time there is a new format but we ought to be able to fight civil cases to establish demarcation between organisations whose stated mission or terms of licence require accessibility provisions and those which do not. In other words, the broad remit legislative proposal is there to help us draw lines. There will need to be a shift from government and regulators towards the courts; but even this scope will be limited as long as it is financially worthwhile for media players to migrate.

5. The Way Forward

It is not easy to gather all these different strands together into a set of simple recommendations, but I am going to try:

Generic Right
As I have said, we need a generic right to information in the public domain
Leverage
Rather than a blanket approach to compliance we should apply pressure where we have leverage, i.e.:
- Public sector
- Taxation funded
- Non discriminatory/general remit
- Market opportunity.
Standards
Devise standards that allow digital material to be delivered through a variety of channels to a multiplicity of user interfaces
Programmable
Put strong emphasis on programmable user interfaces.
Open Minded
Abandon arguments based round dichotomies and embrace choice
Structure
Close WAI and establish a medium neutral digital accessibility Interest Group under WIPO/WTO.
Responsibility
The not-for-profit sector funded to help disabled people cannot rely on organisations which only have a tangential interest in disability; they must take responsibility.

6. Conclusion

First, economics. We are moving rapidly from a sovereign state based model of control to a global economy which is difficult to regulate. The reaction to this has been to try to legislate global rights but these are largely theoretical. At the same time, people with disposable income have become accustomed to exercising power as consumers and believe that this kind of behaviour should apply to politics. The problem with this whole transformation from the point of view of disabled people is that the 20th Century model of agencies such as governments paying for services consumed by citizens is disappearing. this in turn means that design will increasingly be based on consumer purchasing power.

The standard way out of this problem in designing for disabled people is to insist on "Design for All" but that will only work if the elements that disabled people require cost less than their market return. That in turn means that accessibility designers need to consider the economic dimension of what they are trying to do.

Secondly, an issue I have not had time to deal with is the sheer range and complexity of information now digitally available. One of the problems which disabled people in general and VIPs in particular experience is the comparative slowness of accessing and processing compared with their peers. The ideological answer is to build mechanisms to speed up these processes but there is only a limited amount that can be done in this field; much more important is the need to develop more sophisticated processes for getting the user to the information she really wants while cutting out what is trivial, marginal or simply not relevant to the task. User-based systems are an important part of the answer.

Thirdly, we need to look at the whole digital experience and cultivate a cross platform learning process. Media have developed in silos but one aspect of convergence should be mutual learning.

Finally, we will all have to move much more rapidly. The days of stately progress, of the elegant, tidy dichotomy, stretching back to Plato, are over. What we do will be provisional; that is the joy of the digital over the analogue; mistakes cost so much less when we are using a plastic medium. The glacier will melt, creating a body of water on which, hopefully, new ideas can float.

[i] Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, (1980) Bantam Books ISBN 0-553-24698-4

[ii] http://www.abilitymagazine.com/

[iii] The IT Directors’ Guide to Accessible IT - email: john.lamb@abilitymagazine.org.uk

Return to Accessibility General