The properties and limitations of assistive technology for people with visual impairments

Article Sections

Contents

  1. Preliminary
  2. History
  3. Future Challences

Future Challences

I now want to turn, in the second half of my presentation, to the major challenges which now face VIPs in the converging digital world:

  • The Graphics Explosion;
  • Web 2.0;
  • Common Standards;
  • New Economic Models.

6. The Graphics Explosion

We might say that writing was invented because sculpture was too expensive to create and cumbersome to carry as a record of our experience; and because there was only a limited extent to the serviceability of beads and notched rods for counting.

From the time that writing was developed its cost differential with solid representation remained varyingly wide; but always very wide. The development of painting introduced a new form of representation, richer and cheaper than sculpture but still the preserve of the rich. The printing press widened the gap radically and the development of pictorial plates did not narrow it significantly until the late 19th Century. Even the internet started out as an almost exclusively textual platform.

In the space of less than 30 years the terms of trade have completely altered. While printing technology became cheaper with offset Lithography and then word processing, analogue television was expensive and kept artificially high by labour practices even more Byzantine than those which had plagued the movable type press. Then, with the advent of video recording, the equation began to change. The major developments of the digital revolution have all turned out to be fundamentally graphical:

  • The Graphical User Interface;
  • Digital Still and Moving Photography;
  • Graphical editing.

Beside these developments the word processor, spreadsheet and database are puny.

Further, as the price of high quality photography falls, the price of high quality prose and signage continues to rise. The global market and the domestic multi lingual market have enhanced the need for pictures but they have also brought about an imprecision in the use of English. Nobody would complain about the rising standard of Media Studies projects but everybody complains about the falling standard of English!

These twin phenomena naturally present a particular problem for VIPs because the era of automated graphics description is far in the future. Captions for the deaf may be generated through speech-to-text engines but description of pictures will continue to be laboriously human and expensive.

We have already seen how voluntary standards have failed to produce adequate graphics description on the Web and how it has taken legislation to impose description on broadcasters. I will come in a moment to the regulatory framework for accessibility but, in the meantime, we need to note the gravity of the crisis. Far from the common supposition, description is not a natural gift, it is the prized possession of the novelist and the gifted teacher. Further, it is necessarily deeply selective and contextual.

Let me illustrate my point with an example:

I send two of you outside. One of you is to take a picture of the campus, the other is to describe it. The first takes a superb picture that can be instantly edited. The second laboriously writes a short essay. But whereas the picture tells almost all, what should be the framework of the essay? Does the reader want a description of the flora and fauna, the architecture, the meteorology, the garb and mores of the inhabitants or precise three-dimensional measurement? Without wishing to elaborate further, you see the problem.

In institutional terms this means that as the use of graphics proliferates, the need for description proliferates with it but the VI sector still labours under the misapprehension that description is a natural, almost universal gift that is, so to speak, culturally osmotically acquired, like the use of language. It may surprise you, incidentally, that the teachers of VI children are not taught to describe. I will, as I have said, return to this subject in the context of standards but one conclusion of an institutional nature is clear: we need a centre of excellence in description attached to one of our university departments of media studies. In tandem with this, we also need to make our sector much more aware of the huge libraries of pictorial description that could simplify their task. There really is no need to try to describe the Mona Lisa if you can access the Louvre catalogue.

One final, slightly ironic note on this topic; with the advent of haptic force feedback devices and rapid prototyping technology (Stereo lithographic apparatus - SLA), it might just be that CAD files and other 3-dimensional digital objects will be liberated to take solid form for VIPs, an example of history turning back on itself.

7. Web 2.0

For a variety of reasons, the VI sector has largely been concerned up until now, with facilitating the accessing and processing of information. I noted earlier the marked tendency to emphasise web accessibility rather than modifications to authoring tools. There are, I think, four reasons for this emphasis:

  • Technical feasibility;
  • Demand Side Autonomy;
  • Education & Employment Requirements;
  • Top/Down Web 1.0.

a) Technical Feasibility

In general terms, it is always easier to consume than to produce; and that applies to the tools for accessibility. Making web pages accessible is easier than building tools to enable VIPs to create their own web pages.

b) Demand Side Autonomy

Whereas the assistive technology sector can produce hardware and software to render content more or less accessible, it has not hold on authors and their authoring tools

c) Education & Employment Requirements

In education, in spite of the rhetoric of creativity, the vast majority of activity is concerned with accessing, processing information which is then returned to the teacher in language. Yes, there are art classes and multi-media projects but the paradigm largely holds. Again, in spite of the rhetoric of a creative society, most of our employment follows the educational pattern. The creative industries receive great prominence but the backbone of our economy is processing.

d) Top/Down Web 1.0

In spite of the potential for creativity, latterly realised in digital photography, Web 1.0 was largely a top/down environment in which:

  • Governments promulgated;
  • Businesses marketed; and
  • Academics posited.

The whole dynamic of the system, before peer-to-peer and the explosion of email, was top/down. Email has made individual publishing a reality but that publishing has largely been uncreative, as has the photography which is more by way of being reportage than radically creative.

I should say here, in acknowledging my debt to Margaret Boden [xii] that I am not calling for a whole society of Bachs and Prousts, although that would be a wonderful place to be in.

Boden, if I may paraphrase her, divides creativity into three kinds:

  • Collage/Linking - A DJ medley;
  • Exploring Known Space - Jazz;
  • Transformative - Beethoven's 5th Symphony.

Fortunately for most of us, it is the middle form of creativity which is most in demand:

Soap opera, reality television, games, pop music, popular fiction, fashion, movies, cuisine and cartoons

to name but a few, are all examples of exploring known space, of taking a formula and devising variations. We might argue that this kind of exploratory craft is a necessary precondition for transformative creativity, exemplified in Renaissance painting, Elizabethan English and Viennese classical music, but the truth is still that most of us will be creative journeymen. The challenge, then, for the VI sector is to make that kind of creativity accessible through the development of tools.

It is not clear yet whether Web 2.0 will simply be a social phenomenon or whether it will have major economic implications - I cannot see a global rush to copy the South Korean appetite for virtual gifts for virtual identities - but being social is a key part of being human and I therefore conclude that we need to develop these tools whether or not their use has economic significance.

Not for the first time, the questions will be about the way we are human: should we struggle to render Web 2.0 accessible for VIPs or should we encourage the development of a particular, largely aural space, in which they can operate comfortably? It should not, of course, be such a stark dichotomy but the issue is still acute.

8. Common Standards

8.1 Introduction

As with the section on the elderly, I have recently delivered a full paper on common standards [xiii] but I will say a few words here as a matter of completeness.

Let me sum up the accessibility situation as we look into the digital age:

  • Books and other documents are subject to stringent copyright laws;
  • Television is subject to regulation which favours accessibility;
  • Film/DVD is not subject to regulation but is liberal on accessibility;
  • The Web is self-regulated, political support is strong but compliance is weak.

The quirks of the different analogue media are also reflected to an extent in the VI publishing sector; for example, in the UK braille books do not contain descriptions of pictures but audio books do; conversely, braille books often come with tactile graphics but audio books never do.

It seems to me that we have to begin to think about common standards to facilitate accessibility across all digital media, quite independent of their historical regulatory frameworks:

  • Code to basic standards, including granularity and incremental enhancement;
  • Code for platform and user interface neutral distribution;
  • Produce multi-modally.

8.2 Coding to Basic Standards.

We have already seen the importance of sound coding and the problems that arise with sloppy coding, hybrid solutions and thoughtless improvising.

The two aspects of coding that I have highlighted are granularity and incremental enhancement. I have already dealt with the latter but need to say a word about the former:

Granularity is the aspect of coding which assembles content from its basic elements and allows each such element to be separately manipulated

Granularity enables:

  • The discrete manipulation of elements;
  • The addition of supplementary material;
  • Choice in search strategies;
  • Systems to respond to user behaviour.

Here are some illustrations of the general principles:

  • All symbolic language should be manipulable to allow the adjustment of size, font, leading, kerning, foreground/background colour/contrast, on/off right-hand justification; separation of data and metadata for re-pagination and conversion to synthetic speech, the insertion of story boards for people with learning disabilities;
  • Delivery of audio as separate strands but optimally mixed, to enable the elimination of various instruments, background noise; the ability to add audio, e.g. audio description, second language;
  • Superimposition of textual elements on static and moving graphics to enable discrete text manipulation, e.g. size of sub titles;
  • separation of layers of graphics, e.g. the line drawing and the 'filling in' of a picture; outline and major cartographic features separate from rich map.

There are two further benefits of granularity:

  • First, it enhances choice in search strategies; VIPs find navigating large quantities of unclassified data very difficult and will often want to employ different search strategies on different occasions, e.g. word search, chronological, alphanumeric, favourites;
  • Secondly, it enables systems to 'react' to user behaviour and rank data, metadata and styles according to user behaviour.

One objection to this degree of flexibility is the issue of authorial integrity; the technical response is, of course, that an author should be able to register a non-manipulable form of anything she creates but the degree of manipulability depends, as we shall see, on the purpose of the product.

8.3 Platform and User Interface Neutrality

As convergence progresses, it will be possible to access the same information on a variety of user interfaces which reflect our history; there will be devices that stay in our houses, devices that we travel with and devices we encounter as we travel; but there will be devices which simply reflect the manufacturing requirement to make things which we are forced to buy if we want to consume information.

There may well be a 'green' imperative which pushes us towards reducing the variety of our information consumption hardware but there will always be a temptation for industry to wrap content in soft, digital rights management wrappers and also in hard player devices. For VIPs, the issue is acute because there is little or no prospect that all user interfaces will be accessible; more likely, we will have to develop multi-purpose, programmable user interfaces which allow us to consume the kind of information which has traditionally been broadcast, sent by telephone, sent to computers and boxed for home entertainment.

This is a clear danger of manufacturing self interest threatening genuine convergence but, equally, there is little evidence that media production companies are adjusting to new possibilities by writing macros to enable to automatic conversion of data from one platform and user interface to another. Most organisations, for example, write web pages for the PC and then write another series of pages for mobile hones.

8.4 Multi-modality

Multi-modal content consists of static and moving pictures, audio and graphics such that each medium supports the others but each, as far as is possible, discretely communicates the authorial intention

Multi-modality is a tall order: it is difficult and expensive to execute; but at another level, it's just a posh phrase for what we think of as television with its additional services such as sub titling and audio description. Again, we will come to this in the next section on economic models but it is, I think, reasonable to expect media with a public purpose and media that make a large amount of money should be subject to some kind of multi-modal requirement.

9. New Economic Models

9.1 Introduction

When we think about economic models, we should start with an obvious proposition: there is nothing easier than spending other people's money!:

  • It is easy for Governments to impose obligations on the private sector;
  • It is easy for the charitable sector to wait for Government to act;
  • It is easy for the private sector to park accessibility with its CSR division.

So let me start this penultimate section with a simple rule:

The agency which legislates the ends must facilitate the means

A quite remarkable example of this principle working is the public funding of broadcasting which requires accessibility; an example of this principle not working is the UK Government's legislation on the National Curriculum which makes no allowance for the public sector funding of alternative format textbooks but expects the charitable sector to cross subsidise the Government which is unethical and probably illegal.

Let me summarise the economic issues:

  • The anomalous era;
  • The Utopian business case;
  • Market failure;
  • Exceptionalism and Incrementalism.

9.2 The Anomalous Era

The problem with only living a short time is that we tend to think of our own time as normative, it's all we have ever known; but in economic terms the period from 1914-1973, from the outbreak of the First World War to the first great oil crisis, was historically anomalous; societies based on libertarian principles were prepared to empower governments in order to prosecute two world wars and make some kind of equitable domestic settlement after the peace; the deal broke down after the First World War but Roosevelt in the USA and then Atlee in the UK epitomised the paradigm. This, the plunge into de-regulated liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s was a return to business as usual; yet the disability sector in general, and the VIP sub-sector is no exception, still talks and campaigns as if we were in the Attlee era; we spend time and money lobbying for things that we can never have and bemoaning Government indifference. To state this is not to deny the principle of means and ends it is simply to recognise its limitations.

9.3 The Utopian Business Case

Governments, facing the decline in their power, naturally wish to retain the illusion of power without taking responsibility; this is why under US and UK administrations during the era of declining government power have increased disability rights but decreased budgets for their enjoyment.

Governments have therefore resorted to the idea of the business case*10; the argument goes like this: take all the disabled people in a country, calculate its income and conclude that it has enough market power to justify manufacturing investment in special goods and services or in the integration of accessibility features into generic products. Of course this only works in a Utopian environment of unlimited capital; as soon as, say, the rainbow phone for teenagers is up against the grey phone for pensioners, the rainbow phone gets the investment.

9.4 Market Failure

For this and other reasons, ICT accessibility is a plain case of market failure. If we look at the global ICT accessibility picture for VIPs it would look something like this:

  • Regulated 10% television audio description;
  • Unregulated inaccessible television EPGs/menus;
  • Unregulated major movie menu access and audio description;
  • Voluntarily regulated declining Web accessibility;
  • Unregulated largely inaccessible consumer electronics/user interfaces;
  • Unregulated, high cost access to mobile phones;
  • High cost, limited use screen readers/text magnifiers, CCTV; publicly funded for education/employment;
  • Copyright restricted, high cost, access to less than 5% of published books, near 0% of magazines, periodicals, journals;
  • Voluntarily regulated no access to creative tools for web development, audio/visual.

There is a pretty comprehensive picture of market failure: regulated broadcasting was a response to that failure (although it says something that I can express some pleasure at having access to 10% of programmes); the voluntary action of major movie studios is the only real example of a measured response to need.

9.5 Exceptionalism and Incrementalism

Having painted such a bleak picture, let me draw towards my close with some solutions.

It seems to me that there are two major options which I have summarised as Exceptionalism and Incrementalism; here are their definitions:

  • Exceptionalism - The enactment of a general law on accessibility from which organisations can gain an exception;
  • Incrementalism - The enactment of a law which progressively imposes accessibility on:
    • The public sector;
    • Public sector funded agencies;
    • Enterprises licensed by the public sector;
    • Organisations directly concerned with disability;
    • Major corporates, defined by turnover.

In looking at these two models we need to consider an organisation's profile:

  • Purpose;
  • Capacity to deliver;
  • Achievement of social gain.

Let me illustrate these three points with two examples:

  • The RNIB exists to serve VIPs, it has the capacity to deliver accessibility and such are the number of visitors to its web site that social gain can be measured;
  • The NOW Art Gallery exists to sell new, abstract paintings; the cost of describing the pictures would bankrupt it; and there is no evidence that a VIP has ever visited its site.

These two examples illustrate the impracticability of legislating a universal right of access independent of mission, capacity and social gain; any law that stipulated such an unrealistic standard would be flouted even more openly than current legislation on web accessibility.

We should therefore seriously consider Exceptionalism and Incrementalism, particularly in the context of VIPs whose requirement for description is so costly.

Exceptionalism is by far the most elegant solution but, realistically, I think we need to press for Incrementalism. If VIPs can access government information, broadcasting, banking, public utilities, universities and major retailers, it will be time to think again.

There is no doubt that country of original regulation will induce regulatory flight but the recent discussions between ISPs and the music industry and the recent comments of the ISPs about the BBC's iPlayer are harbingers of regulation at the point of consumption and/or payment for which ISPs will properly expect to be remunerated [xiv].

9.6 New Economic Models

Let me return to the principle I stated earlier, that the organisation that legislates the end must facilitate the means. Note, immediately, that I use the word "facilitate" not "fund"; this implies for me that the legislator must be the funder of last resort but it also implies that an end may be desired by parties other than the legislator. To take an example, the Government may pass a law that all the material used in universities should be accessible: in addition to the Government desiring this, surely that desire will be shared by many universities, organisations of and for blind people, student organisations and some publishers. In other words, just as disabled people do not want to be put into charitable ghettos, they do not want to be in a Government ghetto. IN other words, although it sounds somewhat glib, we really need active partnerships between key players in obtaining agreed goals.

Looking at the same problem from a private sector perspective, in an environment of competition for capital there is a case for the Government and the voluntary sector funding the difference between an accessible and an inaccessible product; referring back to a previous example, it may well be that the rainbow phone wins the battle for company capital but an outside agency offers to fund the shortfall.

Behind all these examples there lies a simple truth which the disability sector is reluctant to accept, that there needs to be a very strong reason for the public sector to legislate an abridgement of the maximisation of shareholder value which is the quite proper legal objective of commercial organisations [xv]. In a mixed economy a partnership model of funding should be developed where burdens are shared in a way that does not distort competition. Just as there is a transparent formula under which commercial television channels are required to supply television sub-titling, signing and audio description, so there should be a similar transparency in other media sectors. In all cases we should recall our criteria of the organisation's purpose, its capacity to deliver and the calculation of social gain.

10. Conclusion

I now come to my conclusions. There have been so many conclusions along the way that there is little left to say; and so I will limit myself to five observations:

  • First, the outlook and ethics of the digital media have not yet escaped from their analogue paradigm; the cost of accessibility, with the exception of description and signing is falling; the parroted mantra of high cost demeans those who chant it and those they refuse to serve; to access, process and create digital information at the beginning of the 21st Century is as central as was accessing raw material, processing it and producing industrial products at the beginning of the 19th
  • Secondly, the whole assistive technology sector has been in thrall to the client side model of service; instead of an upgrade taking place on a server, the operation, with all its imperfections, has to take place in thousands of locations; this is a severe obstacle to progress and calls for a much tougher stance from the public sector and those who work with VIPs. Broadband makes client side applications redundant.
  • Thirdly, the modernist notion of standardisation is surely anachronistic; we can no longer design social policy on the basis that the vast majority of us have simple, uniform needs but that there are anomalous, expensive people, such as disabled people who do not so much have problems but are problems; we don't mind spending vast sums on severe but rare medical conditions; every time there is a new drug developed there is an outcry for it to be included in National Health Service provision. We are accustomed to multi-lingualism, our culture celebrates personalisation and behind the simple mantra of choice there lays the reality of customisation. The majority of disabled people have spent a full working life paying taxes and social security and yet there is still a strong whiff of paternalism and niggardly begrudgement
  • Fourthly, in spite of the rhetoric of user centred design, disabled people in general and, in this specific case, VIPs, are largely excluded from the ICT accessibility design process which is an area for policy makers and technophiles [xvi].
  • Fifthly, the lack of access to information and the lack of the opportunity to create information both exacerbate an existing socio-economic disadvantage; and in spite of the wonderful improvements in access to information through digital technology, the comparative disadvantage is widening. Our mission, then, is somewhat chastening; our purpose is to limit disadvantage to its minimum possible level.

Finally, drawing everything together, whatever the technological challenges, the chief obstacles to accessibility for VIPs are of our own making; in the long term, even the description of paintings as complex as those of Titian [xvii] or as profoundly simple as those of Rothko [xviii] will be automated - and perhaps in the interim technologies which bypass the screen and transmit images direct from the source to the retina have something to offer - but our chief enemies will still be short-sightedness and selfishness.

[xii] Boden, Margaret A.: Creativity and Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence 203 (1998), 347-356

[xiii] http://www.humanity.org.uk/articles/blindness-visual-impairment/convergence-accessibility-principled-response

[xiv] The Future of Content Regulation in a Converged Market Guest lecture given in the Semester A core module on "Science, Technology and Innovation"; at University of East London, London, UK 22nd October 2008 http://www.humanity.org.uk/articles/regulation/content-regulation-converged-market

[xv] http://www.humanity.org.uk/articles/economics/accessibility-accommodation-framework

[xvi] The WBU ‘PURE VIP Book Project' Interim Report; commissioned by the DAISY Board; Written by Kevin Carey, Project Manager 19.02.07 http://www.humanity.org.uk/articles/blindness-visual-impairment

[xvii] Titian: The Death of Actaeon, about 1559-75.

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/wa/work?workNumber=ng6420

[xviii] Rothko, Mark: Untitled, Mural for End Wall 1959. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. 1985.38.5 © 1998 by Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art61137

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