Life Chances for Blind and Visually Impaired People in the Information Age
Technological Trends
In spite of what our politicians want us to do, people in North America and Western Europe are far more interested in their televisions and telephones than in computers. Indeed, the people who might benefit most from computing, particularly those who are heavily dependent on Government services, are the very people who are most reluctant to go on-line. This is partly because the systems are so non intuitive, because they are difficult to use, partly because we can never be sure of how safe our personal information is when we commit it to the Internet. And so in most Western countries computer penetration is between 50 and 70% and stuck. Penetration of digital television and mobile phones, however, is likely to go much higher. In the case of television, many countries are already contemplating switching off their analogue signals; and many countries, not least in Africa, are also contemplating the end of fixed line phones. These are two instances where Africa, if it plans sensibly, will leap frog a whole generation of clumsy computing. The danger is that it will imitate the OECD about 15-20 years behind. There was a foreshadowing of this when the OECD dot.force was considering basing its Third World ICT policy on Japan's need to unload millions of legacy PCs.
To understand what the future means we have to go back to some fundamental points about the way we behave as human beings:
- First, almost all of us consume more information than we produce. Think of four men in a bar; each produces one piece of news but each consumes three pieces of news. Most of us read books but few of us write them. So, naturally, most of us watch television and listen to radio but we don't aspire to being producers.
- Secondly, then, It follows from this understanding of the way we are that it is pretty redundant to base your communications strategy around technology, the computer, whose fundamental purpose is to facilitate input, processing and output. There is a fashion for information to be interactive; but the book never was and most broadcasting still is not.
- Thirdly, then, there is naturally a need for information systems which allow input, processing and output, systems which allow people to reply to questions and to publish information but these will only be part of systems which are much simpler in the area of receiving information.
- Fourthly, people don't want technology that is somehow more powerful than they are. So although it might be more efficient to use a qwerty keyboard for email than it is to use your thumb for text messaging on a mobile phone, it has already been shown that text messaging is an immensely powerful and popular tool.
In summary, then, most of us are primarily information consumers not producers and so much present computer-based technology is superfluous to our needs, though it will take its proper place in those areas where production, processing and output are all needed; and the numeric keypad is likely to be more popular than the qwerty keyboard because it is standard in telephones and television remote controllers.