User requirements for the next generation of talking books : Preliminary findings
Return to Blindness and Visual Impairment
Presentation given at Techshare 2007 Conference 4th-5th October 2007
Date: 05/10/2007
Venue: Novotel London West, London, UK
Article
Earlier this year I was asked by the DAISY Board to investigate a generic, non technical user requirement to drive a technical specification for the next generation of talking books. I invited comments from the VI sector, industry and other interested parties and I personally visited nine countries. In collecting data I attempted approximate requirement ranking. The data will be presented to the DAISY Board on October 8-9th 2007 with a view to the publication of a final report in February 2008.
This Paper is based on the data I have collected; the opinions are personal and no names are cited.
Although many of my friends and acquaintances found it very difficult to believe, I began the work with no personal opinions on user requirements. I am a braille reader and only used a talking book player in the analogue age when I lived in a country with no braille books. I have worked in the VI sector in more than 70 countries as a professional and trustee for 30 years and I am currently Vice Chair of RNIB; and I am now the Director of an independent consultancy which focuses on the barriers between people and information systems.
For all the rhetoric about user centred design it is questionable how much of it actually takes place in the visual impairment access technology sector. For many years before I came into the sector in 1977, it was plagued by idiosyncratic inventors, many of whose devices I had suffered in a special school for blind children. More recently there has been a marked rise in the power of the visually impaired technophile. You could legitimately argue that the latter group are more likely to be in tune with the needs of their non technical peers than the former but there is still a wide gap between technophiles and the mass of VI people.
My suspicion of the gap between the rhetoric and practice of user centred design was confirmed as I conducted my investigations:
- First of all, the engineers are already on their way to designing solutions for problems they see with the next generation of talking boods which they seem to have formulated largely without user involvement.
- Secondly, when I specifically requested user involvement in my work it was very difficult to get past the policy makers, administrators and VI technophiles. Of the nine countries in which I worked only one provided me with access to a group of users unaccompanied by policy makers and engineers and only four gave me access to any kind of user group. Apparently, none of the countries had representative samples of users who could be called upon to test ideas before they were put into prototype and only one country was methodically testing a prototype.
This puts my question about the gap between technophiles and ordinary users into sharp focus. I will mention two issues which stand out, one from each end of the technical and demographic spectrum:
- First, I was constantly told by technophiles that blind and VI students require a highly sophisticated data navigation system to handle their audio material. I was never given any evidence for this assertion and in the two cases where I met groups of students they begged for simpler systems than those they were using. At the very least this indicates the need for some research into current practice and future requirements
- Secondly, I was repeatedly told that ordinary users, particularly elderly people, were incapable of using IT. Again, nobody produced any research. I repeatedly asked policy makers and old people themselves whether they could use commercial electronics products like radios, televisions and CD players and mostly received very positive answers. There were a few very old people who could not handle television controls but, I was told, most of these could hardly appreciate content!
At both ends of the spectrum, then, assumptions were being made about user requirements which were not supported by evidence. Was all the complex design for students really necessary? And, at the other end of the spectrum, was the alleged technophobia of elderly people an excuse for the bad design of accessibility products? If older people can tune their televisions and operate a CD player but can't use a talking book machine, what conclusion do you draw? Again, however, there was no research on the comparative performance although even without it I would be tempted to recommend that access technology designers should take a close look at how consumer electronics are designed. Incidentally, few of the scores of the technophiles I met had an HCI background and few of them showed any evidence of reading research. I felt, in short, that I was working amongst a group of amateur enthusiasts. There were, of course, exceptions but they only proved the rule.
At the core of my research was the question of whether blind and VI people need specialist players in order to access audio books. Perhaps a better question is: would there be a special player if there were not massive, irrational publisher pressure for closed systems to protect copyright? I never got anything like a straight answer to this question from policy makers but I formed the overall impression that the publisher requirement came first and the VI user requirement for a special player was used as a post hoc justification. Looked at objectively, you might want to argue that blind and VI students had a user requirement in the mid 1990s for bespoke navigation software to access metadata; but there is no evidence that your average light fiction reader needed anything other than a commercial CD player. The argument against this was that many older people can't replace their discs in the tray of a commercial player which is why DAISY books are encased in a cartridge. Now that there is an expanding range of commerical solid state players which do not require the insertion of discs, the force of this argument must surely weaken. This leads to the inevitable problem that the greater the number of blind and VI people whose needs can be met by the use of commercial players, the fewer the number of special players that will be required. This will present us with a hard economic problem because special players mights simply be too expensive to make.
Conducting these discussions without a clear view of the justification for special players and without a clear copyright strategy meant that they took place in something of an unreal world. Although it was not part of my remit, I asked people what their proposed solution was for the severe restriction on international file exchange and sometimes national file production imposed by copyright. Almost universally in the conflict between institutional legal obligations to serve blind and VI people and the rights of authors to impede alternative format production and exchange, organisations of and for the blind sided with the publishers and explained that precipitate action to elevate the rights of access above the rights of obstruction would be counter-productive. When I observed that my whole life had been plagued by copyright obstruction and that I would be dead before anything was produced by diplomacy, there was no answer. Whatever your position on this point, it seems to me that there is still a genuine need to ask ourselves whether closed systems are really required by blind and VI people or whether they are massive publisher taxes on the VI sector.
There is a point of principle in considering access and intellectual property rights but for the VI sector there is also the critical issue of cost. Even if, as the evidence shows, many blind and VI readers want to access books on MP3 players, they may not be allowed because of copyright. This will involve them or institutional finance in purchasing expensive solutions to a cheap problem. Specialist players cost up to 20 times as much as generic players. On top of this there is the cost of parallel audio production of books whose audio files cannot cross borders. I am still trying to find out how many separate audio recordings were made in the run up to the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Where policy makers were at best confused over the history, the overwhelming majority of talking books users and, to be fair, policy makers and technophiles, were clear about the future:
- First, Most people want to access fiction on standard devices such as CD players, PDA's, televisions and radios. The controls they want are:
- Start
- Stop
- Volume
- Book mark.
- Next page
- Next Chapter
- Secondly - and in line with the first point - most people want simple navigation as the default with an option for complex navigation usually required in the name of students. Some people want an intermediate navigation system for manuals and lifestyle products like cookery books and there was a particular interest in search strategies for newspapers which included a proposal for SMS key word searching so that numeric keypads on telephones and other devices can be used for searching.
- Thirdly, many people advocate continuous book reading services using broadcasting. Although this is particularly strong in developing countries with limited or no capacity to record indigenous literature, I heard plenty of anecdotal evidence that many readers (particularly in countries lacking the richness of spoken word radio enjoyed in the UK) simply wanted a book for company. At the very least we need some research to establish the content requirement of the elderly, many of whom may want something much more like a radio channel than a library. After all, the same experts who waxed lyrical on the technophobia of the elderly simultaneously claimed they had sophisticated content requirements. If it is true that the majority of fiction users are somewhat indifferent to title selection whereas readers at the 'heavier' end of the market feel that they are seriously disadvantaged compared with their peers, we might want to re-consider the way we look at the gap between general title publishing and alternative format production.
- Fourthly, the overwhelming majority say that if there are to be special players they should be capable of handling commercial products suc as CDs and DVDs. There is some agonising about the range of content which should be accessed on one device. The main point of contention was the downloading and navigating of newspapers. There are a number of hybrid devices in prototype but the justification for the choice of platform combinations seems to be technology - rather than user driven. The majority of people want their player to provide music from all formats and receive radio.
Of course, the content delivery system reflects the way the VI service sector operates in different countries. So, for example, the UK is a notoriously heavy newspaper reading country but RNIB does not deal in newspaper delivery; India has a heavy newspaper reading tradition but nobody delivers newspapers. Any delivery solution or set of solutions must transcend divisions in the sector.
In developing countries there was a parallel call to the proposal on fiction broadcasting to provide audio in synthetic speech to cut costs and increase supply.
Everywhere the ‘Holy Grail’ was an audio file with parallel files for synthetic speech, modified print and braille. Nobody, including policy makers in organisations which produced all four formats, could explain why this was not already standard practice.
The other significant structural influence on content provision is the overwhelming power in most countries of professional librarians which may, incidentally, explain why the VI sector has been so slow to campaign for accessible broadcasting. I could not collect enough evidence to substantiate the claim I often heard that blind and VI people, particularly the elderly, read more than their sighted peers; and when I asked users spontaneously to rank their information requirements books always came out on top. After being reminded of other kinds of information, books often slipped down the list below newspapers and lifestyle material and so there may be an element of current structure dictating expectations. Another structural consequence of the library-centred offer was that the service tended to be in a silo. In only one country contemplating internet delivery of talking books was it suggested that the offer should embrace a strong care and social services element: if you can deliver a talking book you can install a web cam!
The idea of information provision as part of an integrated lifestyle rather than being confined to a silo leads to some interesting consumer points:
- First, the overwhelming majority of users, particularly those who are young, want their access devices to look like standard consumer electronics items, or even be fashion items. Blind and VI people have enough problems overcoming their difference from peers without having to use un-trendy kit
- Secondly, there is a massive requirement for portability and flexibility. People want to read on the move, particularly on long journeys
- Thirdly, on the two occasions when I talked to students without their teachers they were much more emphatic about their lack of fiction and lifestyle material than they were in accompanied sessions.
Between them the librarian and the teacher have managed to split content between light fiction and textbooks, with very little else.
One of the really serious problems throughout my investigation was trying to keep people away from engineering talk. Most times I put a simple question to people like: "What do you want" the reply I got was in engineering jargon. If I received a pound for every time I advised people to use: "now" and “later”: instead of "stream" and "download" I would be a rich man!
I have already pointed out the sector's unfortunate tendency, because of a lack of evidence, to elevate personal experience into dogma but if we have another fault it is of lapsing too easily into dichotomy and, by extension, authoritarianism. I frequently brought discussions to a temporary halt and re-launched them when the table became divided between factions opting for one solution and attacking another, the streaming/downloading dispute being but one. It doesn't take a genius to see that this is a false dichotomy; you can simply invite people to choose whether to stream or download. Underlying this piece of nonsense there was a genuine problem getting people to think in terms of how many rather than which one. The great advantage of digital data is that it is plastic and can be sent down a number of pipes and accessed on a large number of platforms but the sector is not well equipped culturally to take advantage of this. To take just one example: pay-per-view television has a PIN system perfect for delivering material which requires copyright protection but we did not see this as a parallel to the DAISY player. Users did not mind how the material was delivered as long as they could have it when they wanted it.
One marked tendency was for engineers to propose solutions instead of designing systems that react to user behaviour. Further, it was highly unusual for anybody even to mention speak recognition as an alternative to manual controls. In operational terms this might mean, for example, a system which streams when people want something instant and downloads orders in the middle of the night. It also might meanw that systems based on the semantic web can title select based on user behaviour rather than expecting people to go through complex title selection procedures. In the third instance, it should always mean that systems default to user behaviour and offer "other" as a second option.
Finally, I want to say a few words about where we need to go in the next couple of years once the data is published:
- First - and in view of time lags I hate saying this - we need much better evidence-based processes for making decisions about user requirements. The odd technophile, or even a cadre of technophiles, just isn't enough
- Secondly, we need a coherent and robust global strategy for copyright that involves a short-term strategy setting deadlines for negotiations and a medium-term strategy for achieving a universal, generic, non discriminatory right to information that is in the public domain; and this should be linked with a financial impact assessment of the cost of the VI sector enforcing copyright restrictions on behalf of publishers
- Thirdly, we may in the short-term have to investigate how copyright can be protected when DAISY books are accessed on commercial players
- Fourthly, we need to understand precisely what blind and VI students really need
- Fifthly, we need to understand how old people access consumer electronics and whether their alleged problems with user interfaces arise from design or factors such as incentive
- Sixthly, we need to look at linear provision in parallel with the library model
- Finally, if the preferred delivery mechanism turns out to be broadband over the Internet, as seems likely, we should think of what other uses we could make of the system to enhance the lives of blind and VI people.
We can't really be serious about user-centred design unless we adopt a methodical and sympathetic approach to users.