The Motley Chefs and the Fast Food Chains: Market Failure in Accessible IT

Speech given at e-Access ’05 Conference

Date: 14/09/2005
Venue: CBI Conference Centre, London, UK

1. Introduction

Not very long ago when the e-access bulletin asked me to celebrate its 50th edition by saying how information technology had changed my life, I was something of a party pooper, reporting that the only significant change for the better in my life had been my talking microwave cooker with accompanying talking weighing scales. Which made me think of a food analogy for where we are now. Our sector is made up of a motley crew of home grown would-be chefs competing against a couple of global fast food chains.

Just to give you a flavour of how access technology looks from my personal standpoint, here are some bullet points:

Accessibility Shortcomings

The technology has ossified. The braille embosser and refreshable braille display are now over 25 years old but their performance and price have not significantly improved since birth
Poor product and support. During the past year there has not been a single day when the whole of my accessibility equipment suite (valued at £8k) has worked properly
Poor Internet Accessibility. That same 8k can only access about 20% of web sites
Text starvation. The proportion of publishing accessible in braille (other than through the internet) is falling; the official figure is 4%.
Losing Ground. The accessibility of consumer electronics is decreasing and we may soon be faced with inaccessible radio for blind people.

Let me try to identify a few reasons why we are in this dreadful state:

Factors in Poor Performance

The accessibility market. In Europe the accessibility industry is largely the afterthought of a United States cartel; frequently we pay in Pounds what US customers pay in Dollars
Cartel in sellers' market. The accessibility cartel does not need to deliver high quality or performance, and certainly not low prices
Publishing constraints. Alternative format publishing is still beset by restrictive practices and sheltered workshop hours
Poor prioritisation. The disability sector, rooted in congenital disability, has ranked PC concerns way above consumer electronics, broadcasting and telecommunications
Accessibility low priority. Neither the public nor the private sector is interested in accessibility per se; the Government will not keep its own rules and the private sector will do nothing without legislation.

That is a miserable little litany; but, as far as I am concerned, that is the end of the doleful analysis. If you want more of the same it can be supplied without trouble; but what I want to concentrate on in my presentation is how we might put all this right.

This analysis falls into three overlapping topics:

Presentation Topics

Hardware and software design
Digital information design
The industrial and political framework

2. Hardware and Software Design

Not long ago I was at a meeting to discuss the incorporation of accessibility capability into the set top boxes for digital televisions. The problem, I was told, was that the accessibility functionality would have to be incorporated into the chip set which, in turn, would have to be incorporated into the box itself. My immediate question was why the capability could not be developed as a portable, blue toothed device which could be interposed between a remote controller and a standard box or even perched on top of the box? Or, if this was slightly too advanced, why could the functionality not be put into the remote controller? I was asked whether I had written up my ideas but said that I had expected the industry would be way ahead of my thinking. I was, in fact, shocked by the legacy thinking in the approach to the accessibility of television, very reminiscent of old men from the telecoms sector who hang around work canteens talking about copper wire.

What we should be thinking about now are the opportunities available as the result of separating data processors, monitors and controllers. Think, for a moment, of the traditional television. First the remote controller broke away, now the screen has broken away; so a television has three separate but connected components: a receiver, a controller and a screen.

Components of a Personal Information System

Now think one stage beyond this and imagine that a disabled person owns:

a personal controller with which she is comfortable that is good for all digital data devices; and let us say that she also has
a monitor (a braille display or folding screen) that is good for all processing devices. And then let us say that in case she is in a place that lacks the processing power she needs, she carries her
own processor which is about the size of a matchbox. If we could cut down on all the reception and processing hardware, such as computers, television sets, radios, MP3 players, and could invest all this money in a personal, programmable controller device, we would be a great deal more comfortable, a great deal better off, and we would provide some ecological benefit. The device would have
numeric keypad functionality with SMS which could be used for word searching; and there would be the option for a
folding qwerty keyboard or braille display. It would produce
'talking' feedback to inputs and enable voice in. There is nothing in this broad specification that cannot already be delivered. On the monitor side, the greatest example of market failure in the accessibility sector has been the failure to produce cheap refreshable braille; and voice in/voice out hasn't been much better; but in the area of visual monitors we not only have the prospect of the folding portable screen, we will also be able to use tables and walls, and any other objects, as screens.

On the hardware and software side, instead of some of the more way out ideas of academics and business hoovering up Framework Six funding from taxpayers, who usually operate without any reference to potential beneficiaries, here is a short research agenda:

Research Agenda

An affordable, device neutral, braille display
Affordable, device neutral speech in/speech out
Device neutral portable large screen technology
The application of 3d printing
Haptics generation

Note the inclusion of 3d printing and haptics; man cannot live by text alone and for many disabled people, particularly children, there is a great need for cheap, accurate models; and with haptics these can even be dynamic.

On the software side the biggest failure has been in using simplification software for people with learning, cognitive and developmental difficulties. Five years ago when resource description frameworks (RDF) were being developed under the banner of the 'Semantic web' you could not shift for articles on Bayesian logic and so-called 'intelligent agents' but all that has now died away. There is immense potential for the improvement of the lives and effectiveness of a huge slice of the population through the implementation of software which:

Assistive Software

Ranks according to user behaviour
Selects lexicography according to user reading age
Provides précis and/or simplified parsing
Uses z39/50-like tools to render a variety of web sites in a common format

At an even more fundamental level, we know that Microsoft has launched a cut-down operating system for Asia and there is no reason why it should not do so for that 40% or so of the population who find its standard products intimidating.

We have for too long lived in an environment where policy makers are in a state of denial; while major corporations have made massive profits through a strategy of enforced upgrading, public policy has resorted to sad mantras about the rights of inclusion. The public sector and the major global companies could use procurement policies, by setting minimum software performance standards, to overcome a majority of accessibility and usability problems but they have massively failed. What we need to do in usability in general, and accessibility in particular, is to abandon our attempts to be engineers and instead concentrate on generic user requirements which we expect manufacturers to meet.

3. Digital Information Design

Although this is a central topic, there is not that much which needs to be said about it.

The really positive development in the area of digital information design is the way that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) have caught on. As some of you know, I am a somewhat severe critic of the Guidelines themselves because they are too long and too detailed to make any sense in a commercial world always working under pressure against deadlines, but their key success has been in providing an anchor point for legislators and regulators. What we need to do now is to work on this good foundation but without being tied in knots by a process which takes five years to deliver a new iteration of its guidelines. In many ways what we need to do more than anything else is to understand the principles behind the guidelines. Earlier this year in my Inaugural Lecture at City University I took six of the best accessibility tables and boiled them all down to three, over-riding principles which are:

Digital Data Accessibility Principles

Design multi modally
Enable simplification and customisation
Enable choice of platform and user interface.

If we could get people to understand and adhere to these three principles, we would succeed much better than achieving admirable but passive acceptance of the WAI standard. Incidentally, people often ask me what the first principle means: "Create multi modally" to which my reply is: "Make it like television". It is very strange that web designers have learned so little from cinema and television.

4. The Industrial and Political Framework

In looking where we go from here, in Europe, we are faced with an inescapable paradox. If we are to succeed in forming a pillar of consensus and production which can undertake equal dialogue with the United States both in the context of standard setting and production, then we must concentrate on a European framework which has so far failed us. Again, I only want to sketch the reasons for the failure very briefly:

Europe Failure

Lack of participation. In every document the EU has talked about the participation of disabled people but apart from observer status for the European Forum on Disability, as far as I know I am the only disabled person who represents a Member Government on any accessibility committee
Silos facing convergence. There has been a failure to alter consultative structures to take account of convergence
Inappropriate research. Research budgets have been cornered by multinationals and universities acting with little or no reference to disabled people on whose behalf they claim to be working
Abstract Standards. Standards bodies which are crucial to progress are equally distanced from end users and so they tend to produce abstract propositions; standards should be about x per y not about principles summed up in guidelines.

My central proposal to deal with all of this is the establishment of a European Centre for Accessible Media (ECAM) to pull together all interested parties into an almost virtual organisation; these are the kinds of activities such a centre would be interested in:

ECAM Activities

Convergence. The convergence of media standards in broadcasting, computing and telecommunications
Standards. The establishment of European accessibility standards to drive a competitive hardware market
Inter Sectoral Forum. A forum for disabled people, industry, academics and public policy makers
Research and product assessment. A research proposal assessment service; and a test centre for accessibility products

What we in Europe need is an effective focal point which can:

Purpose of Focal Point

Absorb and synthesise information
Commission its members to undertake specific projects; and
Issue authoritative guidance

What we must attempt is to fix the terrible damage caused by deregulating the hardware market to such an extent that the only regulations surviving concern health and safety. We cannot turn the clock back, so what we need to do is to create a critical mass of knowledge and standards which will enable us to cut costs in accessibility and provide the foundations to market solutions for our problems.

In spite of the temptation of going it alone, in spite of the high cost of consultation and collaboration, in spite of our inner conviction that negotiation only results in the lowest common denominator what the past 25 years clearly demonstrates is that:

Lessons

Small is not beautiful
National is not economic
Genius is not enough

5. Conclusion

The conclusion is not difficult to draw. The e-access sector in Europe needs some clear thinking and hard driving and a more responsive regulatory framework promulgating standards that will create a viable market for European goods. That means more disciplined strategies on the part of our home grown chefs to keep the multinationals at bay.

Only a viable market will drive out the lassitude and self indulgence of the past 25 years but is a sector which is better equipped to talk to social services than commercial companies equipped to meet the challenge?

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