Life Chances for Blind and Visually Impaired People in the Information Age
VIPS and ICT
Let me now turn, at last, to what all this means for blind and visually impaired people. And I think I need to warn you immediately that what I am going to say will not be popular, particularly amongst the congenitally blind, high school educated, elites which have run policy in our NGOs based in capital cities.
Although some blind and seriously visually impaired people are immensely proficient in their use of ICT systems, they are likely to be less efficient than their sighted peers. Before anyone is offended by this, I have to say that the main reason why this is the case is that information design is based on a highly gaphical environment.
- First, most standard software using a graphical user interface (GUI) is difficult to translate into an audio environment
- Secondly, most web designers do not adhere to the WAI basic standard; a recent survey in the UK showed that only 19% of major sites complied with Level One or A. Only 0.6% of sites were compliant with Level 2 or AA. So no matter how good your access technology may be, it cannot make sense of many applications and much of the World Wide Web. Further, the same survey showed that in task completion on the Web, the average for all disabilities was 76% but that partially sighted people came second bottom at 76% with blind people bottom at 53%.*1
- Thirdly, access technologies are not particularly good. There are a wide variety of reasons for this which I don't want to go into but anybody who has used screen reader technology with standard applications will know exactly what I am talking about; and no matter how good they are, there is always a lag between a new standard system and the accessibility technology to go with it.
So the question naturally arises, under what conditions would you encourage blind people to train to become ICT workers? I think the simple answer to that question is that you would not want to train people as an end in itself, as a way of enabling them to compete in the labour market as administrators or secretaries. On the one hand there is not only the cost of the access technology but also the perpetual cost of upgrading it; on the other hand there is the problem with the design of information and the design of systems. There is also the problem, as I have said, that access technology lags behind standard systems upgrades. This is not to say that individual blind people cannot be ICT workers, it is simply arguing that there does not seem here to be a good basis for policy; we cannot really make general rules on the basis of unusually gifted people.
Quite separately, however, we do need to give ICT training for those who need it because it is integral to a job that they are planning to do or are doing: journalists cannot survive without information; physiotherapists may need the latest literature; lawyers need statutes and case law; students need books; small businesses need accountancy; but in all of these cases the information is a means, we are not trying to create ICT workers competing for jobs, they are competing within their own professions where they are highly regarded by those professions; ICT skills help them to perform better but their primary asset when recruited is their professional knowledge not their ICT skills.
This is bleak indeed but after a very brief period when blind people were well known as computer programmers, the subsequent history has not been encouraging. I can understand why all blind people should want access to ICT but if we are making policy we need to be clear what meeting this need will actually produce. If we want to use ICT so that blind people will be better informed and have wider choices of information sources then that is quite a different argument from saying either that professional employment is not possible without these skills or that such skills will be a means to securing employment. We have to ask ourselves in all honesty, if there is an employer recruiting ICT workers, how anxious will he be to take on somebody who needs to install an extra layer of complexity and cannot access graphical material?