Boosting Take Up means Ensuring Access for All
Introduction
In this short paper I will come on to look at accessibility and usability but I want to start with an introduction of some general cultural and political factors in the relationship between ICT producers, the public sector and users.
I used to think that the failure of the ICT sector to design goods that almost everybody can use without going on a training course was simply a market failure; that the engineers were still in control of products rather than marketing departments because they talked the talk, or, rather, the jargon, and that everybody was frightened to admit to their technological ignorance; but I have changed my mind. I have come to the conclusion that the ICT industry resembles the fashion industry; that its designers are less interested in making money than they are in artistic and technical self-fulfilment. There is, after all much more money to be made out of selling suits to people like me than there is selling torn jeans to teenagers; but no fashion designer seeking street 'cred' is going to think about me. ICT designers do not think that they are the contemporary successors to graph paper manufacturers; they think they are an interactive extension of the mass media sector; they want to party with television executives not with metadata specialists.
We also need to bear in mind that the territory of computer based ICT is still disputed. Most older people, particularly women, think of computing as an extension of what they do in their study or at their writing table or desk; They are single task oriented and are primarily interested in outputs rather than the pleasures of praxis. The industry, on the other hand, thinks that computing is an always on, restless, multi tasking environment for people with the attention span of a hyperactive four-year-old and a vocabulary and syntactic tools to match. Computing for individuals is still Wild West territory; we have no cultural settlement and nothing like good standards.
Paradoxically, then, something that is superficially attractive and which ought to be particularly useful for people with modest intellectual achievements has turned out to be just the opposite. While digital television take-up rose through the traditional class descriptors from E to C2 and then C1; PC technology started with As and Bs and has got stuck at the C1 level. Indeed, as far back as 1997 we at humanITy were predicting that PC-based systems would face a severe barrier of take-up at about 50% of the market, a figure confirmed by Ian Cairns of IPPR in his Paper earlier today; and that figure includes purchases in cupboards under stairs and in lofts.
Further, I don't think any of us were very surprised when Microsoft announced last November that research carried out for it - as yet unpublished but promised - by Forrester of 15,000 households completing a self referential survey found that 60% of the respondents said that they could not use Microsoft products adequately. I take this to mean, incidentally, that 40% who thought they could use the products adequately actually meant that they could use those functions they had learned about or accidentally picked up; it did not mean that they could use all functions adequately; perhaps 20-25% use would be a realistic figure. So there are two very large general factors which we have to bear in mind and I do not think when I state them this way I am using that much hyperbole:
- First, products are not designed for people but for producers
- Secondly, the evidence of what that results in terms of social exclusion is ubiquitous.