Boosting Take Up means Ensuring Access for All
Language engineering / public domain documents
I now want to return to the story of the Treasury official and the FT journalist. Granted, legislation needs to be drafted for lawyers but it would be much more sensible if disambiguation tools were in authoring suites rather than in consumer packages. I believe that it is time for us to create a phenomenon called a public domain document which is created by an official author part of whose responsibility it is to check that the original text is capable of unambiguous simplification through language engineering technology. This is not a plea for re-drafting, but precisely the reverse; it would allow a user to choose not only the level of complexity in a document but also its length, remembering that sometimes compression involves the increased use of complex jargon. A person should be able to ask for x% length of the total text and choose the lexicographic range, from fully professional through specialist interest to interested lay reader; below this there would be layers of reader age analysis. Citizens pay for all this government information so they should have access to it. Another tremendous advantage of this method would be the diminution of the power of mass media outlets with political axes to grind. If a Public domain Document is posted, together with the complete code for its language simplification rules, nobody can accuse the simplified version of being 'spin'.
Of course, the long term future of uptake where people are currently reluctant lies in television and mobile telephony; or, to put it another way, in a few years we will only have two digital devices, one in our home controlling all appliances and one from which we are never parted. This latter device will be almost always on, flexible and private. We have to ask the question: when is an Entitlement card a mobile phone and vice versa. The key to uptake is the operation of an electronics payment system through this personal device which will also bear the attributes of an identity card! There are two additional technical developments which will revolutionise our thinking in this area: first, the detachment of screen technology from processing technology; secondly, the radical fall in broad band charges which will drive applications from the client to the server side.
In the meantime, as it is proving difficult to wean the public sector off its obsession with PC-based technology here, for the sake of completeness and as a trigger for discussion, are my top ten tips for greater accessibility to PC-based e-government which are all technically possible but which have not all yet been integrated into one system:
- Date granularity for customisation and machine automatic adjustment
- Language simplification
- Population based user testing
- Multimodal multimedia, particularly simultaneous text and speech
- Context sensitive, Standard search engine algorithms for inter Departmental searches
- Strict adherence to (7 + or = 2)
- Automatic reference to live help after repeated on-line failure
- Make it look and feel like television and telephony, possible with only up to 9 elements a page
- Where possible dialogue based
- Use hypertextual metadata rather than bastardised Dewey.
Finally, and not a strictly technical point, ask yourself one two-sided question; will this technology enhance or damage self esteem and autonomous control?