eAccessibility and Legislation Post Riga
humanITy’s response to the legislative question
Date: 30/03/2007
Article
- Any statement on the accessibility or usability of information technology intended as a basis for legislation or regulation should be based on a generic user requirement and should therefore not refer specifically (and certainly not uniquely) to particular platforms, operating systems, applications, user interfaces, data or metadata, eg: there is a great deal of difference between the statement:
"All citizens shall have easy and affordable access to broadcasting services" and
"All citizens shall have easy and affordable access to a television set"; or
"All citizens should have access to public telephone networks" and
"All citizens should have access to pay phones". - The ideal form of adherence to a user requirement is self-regulation but this does not work in asymmetric markets. If different countries, media sectors or companies within a single media sector are at substantially different implementation points (usually because of asymmetric legislation and regulation), self-regulation will tend to move parties down to the lowest common denominator. The most effective strategy is to legislate a 'level playing field' from which to devolve compliance to an increasingly light regulatory framework. In the UK the prime example of the success of this strategy is the legislation and regulation on accessible broadcasting; a UK example of failure is the lack of legislation and regulation with respect to public telephone networks.
- The larger the number of parties involved in an agreement to legislate, the weaker the legislation. Any legislation, therefore, should be confined to establishing a regulatory framework for eAccessibility.
- Although this may appear to be a too distant goal, the increasing pace of technological change will ultimately force the EU to agree a generic right of access to information in the public domain and any shorter term objectives should contribute to rather than militate against that ultimate objective.
- Generic
A generic right to information might look like this:
"All citizens of the European Union have a right to all information in the public domain at an equitable price, in a format they can access and in the first language of their Member State." - Disabled Specific.
For disabled people this might be expanded as follows:
"Disabled citizens have a right of access to all information in the public domain in an equivalent form which strikes an optimal balance between the original and their special needs, at an equitable price without the consent of the rights holder whose depositing content into the public domain is automatically deemed to be on a non discriminatory basis.
- Generic
- Legislation and/or regulation should be conceptually generic. To take the example of a telephone network, legislators look at hardware (terminals) as distinct from software (coding, transmission and de-coding) but some telephone services do not use a dedicated user interface (terminal/handset), they use a PC. The problem with achieving end-to-end accessibility is that different suppliers are responsible for different parts of the transaction chain. Regulators should ensure that the operator of the most substantial element of the chain should be empowered to impose accessibility conditions on other parts of the chain, eg: a mobile network operator should have the power to insist that some of the handsets which can access its network should be accessible.
- At Member State level, having accepted the general principles above, legislation is only necessary to establish a regulatory framework, eg: the 2003 Communications Act specifications about accessible broadcasting then enforced by Ofcom.
- Agreement by EU regulators on the quantity and progression of accessible output in different media (television metadata, hours of subtitling, access to public telephone networks) will create a robust market and will tend towards technical standards convergence.
- The commercial sector is superficially hostile to legislation and regulation but it is even more hostile to asymmetric arrangements; thus, for example, broadcasters do not resent accessibility regulation that is transparently applied on the basis of known criteria. Further, manufacturers would welcome converging standardisation of regulation; what they fear most is having to comply with widely varied technical and consumer requirements. Legislators/regulators should offer standardisation and higher compliance rates as a package.
- Apart from its flexibility and lighter touch, regulation is superior to legislation because it imposes no costs on the public sector but simply requires the commercial sector to provide a specified universal citizen service for which a licence is granted; in other words licence conditions for broadcasting and telecommunications should include clauses on citizen access including accessibility with respect to disabled and elderly citizens. If accessibility had been built into the operations of the 3g network, for example, it would have been tiny compared to the actual auction cost.
- Although it was the explicit focus of the Riga Declaration, computing is less important to elderly and disabled people than broadcasting and telecommunications. Its accessibility provides a particularly difficult set of options because almost all ICT computer-based services are in a near monopoly or a cartel situation. Options in descending order of desirability, as follows:
- The key to any breakthrough in this area is the inclusion of user requirements in tendering documents, particularly by public sector bodies and major corporations.
- A revision of the RTTE 1999 EU Directive to provide an accessibility framework for user interfaces.
- Legislation to make operating and software systems consumer owned (not licensed) and subject to consumer legislation on fitness for purpose.