The Right to Digital Creativity for Disabled People
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humanITy Paper
Date: 19/12/2005
Article
1. Introduction
1.1 Ever since the dawn of the digital information age, the emphasis in the disability sector has been on the autonomous consumption of data. In the first instance, when IT was largely confined to autonomous text generation, there was a balance between production and consumption; but since the development of new technologies, particularly those associated with the Internet, the emphasis has swung decidedly towards consumption.
1.2 Ofcom's definition of media literacy is:
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/advice/media_literacy/of_med_lit/whatis/
This emphases the contemporary relevance of Alvin Toffler’s thesis in The Third Wave (http://www.skypoint.com/members/mfinley/toffler.htm) that true citizens should be both producers and consumers (in his own word, prosumers).
1.3 The emphasis of consumption in a converged environment is further enhanced by our cultural history of regarding broadcasting as a cartel enterprise confined to very large entities; in spite of multi-channel television since 1990, our mentality is still largely that created by the BBC/I TV duopoly.
1.4 Disabled people have been no different in their experience of digital information where the emphasis, with early exceptions such as blind people specialising in computer programming, has been on consumption.
1.5 In 1996 the World Wide Web Consortium (w3.org) began its valuable work of making the Internet accessible to disabled people through its Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). It has defined its mission as concentrating on web accessibility as a whole but its two major concerns have been the consumer (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 1.0) with some attention to authoring tools (www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10) which contain prompts to authors to make their material accessible.
1.6 Across the disability sector there has been very little emphasis on digital information authoring tools.
1.7 There is a tendency in analysing the capabilities of individual disabled people to rely on 'medical model' stereotypes and to concentrate on what individuals cannot do rather than on what they can do. These tendencies are made even more damaging when they are taken together with a general tendency in personnel recruitment to analyse human skills as if they are always to be exercised autonomously. This cultural paradigm of autonomy is a 19th Century Romantic paradigm, which was initially applied to 'high octane' creativity in such areas as writing poetry, composing music and painting (eg Byron, Berlioz and Gericault); it was then combined in the UK private education system of the late 19th century with the need to produce colonial administrators who were generalists, often expected to act alone. These two sources of legitimacy for autonomous competence in turn deeply influenced our examination culture. Nonetheless, it has always been the case and is even more so today in the digital age, that most activities, at school, at work and in our family and leisure time, are collaborative. As in the industrial age when the division of labour facilitated efficient production, so in our own skills specialisations can be combined to produce complex artefacts.
1.8 Disabled people suffer particularly from the autonomous paradigm. Even if they are given credit for what they can do rather than being penalised for what they cannot do, they rely much more than do their able peers on the ability to integrate their skills with those of others in the production process. The narrower their skills base, the more they require a collaborative framework.
1.9 It is therefore important in considering digital authoring tools for disabled people that such tools enable collaborative as well as autonomous processes.
2. The Creative Imperative
2.1 In an information society it is as important to be a producer of information as it was in the industrial revolution to be a producer of goods. A model based solely on consumption is an unbalanced model.
2.2 Nonetheless, almost all initiatives in connection with digital access by disabled people have been concerned with consumption.
2.2.1 As has already been noted, the WAI has been largely devoted to consumption and processing
2.2.2 Proprietary brands have been almost exclusively concerned with access
2.2.3 Educational provision has been largely concerned with processing and there has been very little effort to produce appropriate authoring tools.
2.2.4 The current major initiative for off-line adults, MyGuide, which has designated disabled people as a major target group, is limited to consumption and processing.
2.3 In general, individuals consume more data than they produce (those who have the converse digital profile are relatively rare) and this partly explains the emphasis in respect of disabled people on consumption but there are areas where production is essential: in the formal sector, there is an educational and an employment requirement; and in the informal sector there are citizenship and leisure requirements. It might be argued that the market of disabled producers is smaller than the market of disabled consumers; but it is also true that this smaller market can be more easily satisfied. Tools which make digital data accessible must be designed to handle a huge variety of contingencies (operating systems, applications, renderings, codes) whereas dedicated authoring tools are relatively simple to produce because they are based upon a highly specialised user requirement which in turn produces a set of templates which are able to work with specified accessibility peripherals (voice in, voice out; screen readers, switches).
2.4 Any user requirement must take into account the compatibility between authoring tools for people with a variety of different skills bases and with general authoring tools.
3. The Process
3.1 Although there is a theoretical argument in favour of urging the market to produce authoring tools which can be used by different disabled people, all aspects of digital access for disabled people have been suffered from serious market failure. Even where the voluntary, industry-based w3.org has taken the initiative, its standards setting processes have lagged far behind commercial development.
3.2 Any initiative which is aimed at meeting the needs of UK citizens should, if possible, be EU based. There is a strong case for any such initiative being Transatlantic but this would reduce the UK to a marginal position. A generic EU-based requirement might well command the attention of standards bodies and attract multi national funding. Without such an EU initiative, tools will be developed in different national markets at a relatively high R&D cost with little prospect of a favourable return.
3.3 This having been said, EU processes work somewhat slowly and so three initiatives need to take place in parallel:
- The development of the case for a right of creativity to take its place alongside the generic right of access
- The creation of a national initiative in the Uk which can act as the locomotive for an EU initiative
- The development of an EU initiative.
3.4 Even though the demographic pattern of disability it heavily skewed towards older people, the heaviest potential digital creators in the disability sector are those involved in education and those in or seeking employment.
3.5 At this point there are a number of public sector agendas which coincide; the Government's wish to enable:
- Active citizenship
- Lifelong learning
- Access to work.
None of these can be successful if disabled people are simply able to access and process in-coming information; citizenship, education and employment almost always require a degree of production as well as consumption.