E-Europe and E-Accessibility: The User Perspective
Speech given at “The European Conference on Persons with Disability and New Technologies: an Open Market”
Date: 06/02/2002
Venue: Madrid
Article
1. Demographics and Markets
For the past decade there has been a fierce debate about access by disabled people to technology; at its simplest, one side says that building accessibility into products delays rollout, while the other side says it increases market share. Much depends in this discussion on two factors: the first is whether you are interested in the length of time between product conception and launch or whether you are more interested in the gap between conception and profitability. The second factor, which all of us in the disability field have to face, is the way we make the market case for accessibility.
Historically, in order to raise funds from individuals and private sector benefactors and in order to secure public sector benefits and privileges, disabled groups have tended to emphasise what makes them different from the rest of society. It is difficult to argue for a specific disability benefit - or, in the near future an EU Directive on Disability - if you simultaneously maintain that there is not much difference between those who are and are not disabled. This method of arguing has a number of serious drawbacks, including giving the appearance of being two-faced, talking about equality and wanting privileges, talking about integration but erecting barriers, but in this context I want to focus on one particular drawback; this is that to make disability an exclusive phenomenon is to completely destroy the economic case for private sector design for all. It leaves us dependent on retro-engineering funded by the public sector and damages the integration case very severely.
The exclusivity case is further complicated by a piece of statistical inclusivity which leaves us with the worst of all possible worlds. You paint a picture of severe disability, tell politicians that disability is suffered by 10% of the population and then create this vision of one in ten of the population being severely disabled. The market, busy recouping its R&D budget through rapid sales, has no patience with difficult cases; it wants to get its product out and then cash in on upgrading at every opportunity.
We have got the fundamental demographics of our case completely wrong. There are a very large number of functionally disabled people, but most of their information needs can be met through generic provision rather than through niche markets in accessibility peripherals. To understand this, think of the four clusters of syndromes we loosely describe as: "Cognitive, physical, hearing and visual disability or impairment". Each of these covers conditions from the very extreme to the very mild, and the more mild the condition the greater the number of sufferers; so if you look at a disability cluster in a graphical format, it looks like a wedge, with the narrow end representing the severest cases.
Let me now look at a couple of real cases to show what the potential is for integrating access technology into general provision. Think of the wedge which describes visual impairment. At the narrowest point there are a few thousand people who can read braille. If you then draw a vertical bar at the point where legal blindness shades into poor vision, the 96% of the people classified as "blind" read some form of print. Now ally these to the remainder of the wedge who simply have some kind of problem with print and you have a huge market for symbol and image magnification within standard computer applications software. Braille users will still need a niche market for their accessibility peripherals but the rest of those in the wedge, the overwhelming majority, simply need more flexible word processing and graphics packages. The number of people who can be helped by a better-designed package goes far beyond those who are officially recognised as "blind" or "partially sighted". The more exclusive the criteria, the worse the market case will be and the more dependence there will be on public sector financing for niche markets.
Here is another simple illustration of the same point but with a slightly different twist. The largest market sector which requires hands-free telecommunications systems is not physically disabled people, it is automobile users; and the largest market segment that needs image free Internet access is not blind people but those who want to use mobile phones in poor light or who want to use mobile phones with small screens. We have been so busy arguing for exclusivity that we have failed to seek out our natural allies in the marketplace. We also must be careful not the translate uncritically from the United States to the EU an analysis based on human rights; access claims in the US are based on the written constitution of a sovereign state whereas the EU is still fundamentally a trading bloc. So although the rights case and the market case need to go together, the second must always be much stronger than the first in the EU environment. With these remarks, I turn to the case for accessibility.
2. Four Aspects of Accessibility
There are four basic aspects to the provision of services in the Information society; these are:
- Moral
- Legal
- Fiscal
- Commercial.
The moral case for accessibility is based upon the idea, regardless of legislative provision, of equal citizenship within society. If a segment of the market is cut off then it loses its elasticity, its efficiency, its effectiveness; it becomes, over time, completely stagnant, ossified, economically dependent. As that would have been true for farmers on barren land five hundred years ago it will soon be true for the information starved. people with cognitive and physical impairments have always had a problem making their proper social contribution and there is a severe danger that the Information Society phenomenon will widen the gap between the information rich and information poor, exacerbating other inequalities rather than ameliorating them. Apart from the direct consequences to people of their own exclusion, we now know quite enough to identify much greater collective and transferred social costs in unemployment, drug and alcohol addiction and social dependency. This is a legitimate field for the exercise of corporate social responsibility which crosses the barrier from pure altruism into commercial opportunity.
There is every chance that the legal right to information and associated services will strengthen during the next decade. I do not think that there will be a major piece of EU legislation on this issue, the history of the last five years has been far too depressing for that and the climate of de-regulation is not likely to change, but, nonetheless, I think that Governments will bow to pressure for legislation superficially based on the Americans with Disabilities Act and consequential Regulations. This may not in the first instance be provided through portmanteau provisions but in such areas as National Curriculum, rights to Government information, rights to telecommunications and rights to library services, there may well be very useful precedents.
All the evidence shows that when this happens industry and the public sector implementers of policy will be almost totally ignorant of their obligations. It is important, in this context, to urge disability groups to campaign for the enjoyment of rights they have already been accorded before spending too much energy on getting new theoretical rights. It is also particularly important, in the context of the Information Society, to determine whose legal and financial responsibility it should be to enable rights of accessibility to be enjoyed; and how far accessibility must be adopted and permitted by the creators of intellectual property. For representatives of disabled people claim a blanket right of access to all information is just not good enough. There is no more reason why intellectual property creators should subsidise my right to information than there is justification for the owners of grocery stores halving the price of food to poor customers. This, I know, is not an orthodox position but the industries in the information society, with their high risks and fast development are not going to be sympathetic to calls for unfocussed altruism.
There are strong links between the legal and fiscal arguments for accessibility. All disabled people in the EU pay sales taxes, most of them pay local taxes and many pay national taxes. Citizens, at the very least, have a right to what they have paid for, whether this is Government information or library services. This also means a right to public broadcasting and its associated services where these exist. Indeed, one of the great failures of the disability movement during the past half-century is its inability to influence the accessibility of public broadcasting. It must not suffer the same failure over broadband and digital television.
For these three reasons, industry ought to be aware of developments which may well affect the way it produces goods and services for the Information Society but, of course, the fourth aspect of this access is economic. Returning again to the demographic observations I made earlier, if you add up all the people who have problems in accessing cyberspace at the moment within the EU, setting aside economic barriers, you are still left with approximately half of the population. Many countries have a stubborn illiteracy bedrock of about 15% and there are many to be added to this number who have small vocabularies, poor grasp of complex sentences, the inability to work in their country's first language; there are those who have poor hand-eye co-ordination, millions with poor navigational skills; some people are just clumsy; others need enlarged print; others need captioning. There are overlaps in these groups but they constitute a huge segment of the market and it is wrong to think that they are necessarily poor. Much of the loss of functionality is part of the ageing process but you only have to look at figures for disposable income and the growth of occupational pensions to know that the grey market is lucrative. Contrary to the assertions of charity fundraisers and public paradigms created by them, disability is largely a sub-set of the aged not the young.
3. Understanding Information Systems
So far, the disability sector and the industries associated with the Information Society have failed to understand the whole nature of the problem which confronts them.
Although there is an economic barrier to access by disabled people to the benefits of the information society, this is often over-emphasised at the expense of a much more fundamental set of problems. There has, too, been a quite understandable emphasis on the inaccessibility of hardware devices for receiving, processing and sending information, e.g. the inability of people to use a mouse or a keyboard, see what is on a screen or hear what is being said. Very soon, because of protocols like Blue Tooth, it will be possible for us to customise our hardware devices, at the same time cutting out a mass of duplication. Instead of having computers, televisions, radios, disc players and mobile telephones, we will have one central, personally customised control device, probably assembled from modular components; and we will have a similar but smaller device for travel. This will free up a huge amount of expenditure on computer and consumer electronics devices, freeing up expenditure for expenditure on telecommunications. This will, in turn, facilitate a massive revolution in constantly upgradeable server side facilities, much more flexible and powerful than client side services which require dedicated hardware. At that point, disabled people will be able to commission customised interfaces.
This change, however, will still leave two fundamental problems which require much more attention; these are: the information carrier capacity; and the initial information manufacture. There is not very much point in insisting on content creators providing all kinds of alternative information in a multi modular environment if it cannot be carried by communications channels or de-coded by what we currently call set top boxes.
The fundamental issue, however, is to solve the problem of how information is made. Currently we make audio in separate, individually manipulable tracks so that each track can be lifted and dropped, expanded, contracted. There is no reason why we should not make visual imagery in the same way, separating symbolic language from pictures, foreground from background, the essential from the tangential; but we do not. Neither do we provide users with a variety of tools so that they can choose an optimal route in, for example, navigation. some people may want alphanumeric listing or a key word facility whereas others will want a spatial array of terminology. Those using a mobile phone may want an array which only allows up to nine choices but this would be useless for navigating an encyclopaedia or an atlas. Likewise, we are just not providing language-engineering tools inside public information systems.
In order to look at e-access in the Information Society we need to look at the whole system, the data manufacture, the carrier and the receiver/processor/transmitter. Above all, we need to recognise that the more modular or granular the system, the easier it is to manipulate and customise the pieces; this applies to information as well as to hardware design.
4. Conclusion
In mapping the way ahead the first three priorities I have sketched out are of vital importance: to understand the demographics; to accept the four criteria for justifying access; and to understand the holistic nature of information systems. If we do that, then the road is clear for us to take some important first steps and it is these that I want to map out in my conclusion.
First, there has been a tendency within the EU to make public declarations of general principle that are not made concrete in Directives. We don't want benchmarks and milestones, the dissemination of good practice in some abstract form, what we actually need is to start with the major sectors of our life and ensure that accessibility is built into them. I suggest that the first four should be:
- Government Information, particularly on health and benefits. Here the EU has made a good start with its rules on Web accessibility.
- Financial services information
- Major retail
- Public broadcasting.
Secondly, given the demographics, Governments and the EU need not necessarily take direct responsibility for this. In the context of major corporations, most of them operate under licensing systems and accessibility should simply be made a condition of the licence. If you think of the huge amount of money that telecommunications companies have paid for 3-g licences, building in e-accessibility would only cost a minute amount.
Thirdly, we should turn "Design for All" from a slogan into a set of technical standards and into products that people can see; no more manuals, no more abstract formulations. this will require an inter-sectoral initiative between the public sector, business, the voluntary sector and academics.
Fourthly, again considering the demographics, access to education and employment are vital but these can be achieved through general programmes; this is more difficult in the case of providing entertainment, leisure and domestic services for disabled people in general and elderly people in particular. There is more to life than education and employment. as I have said, there is shopping, banking, Web television and information on health; but there is also a vast, undefined area of human endeavour and interest which all goes into the rich mix of citizenship.
Finally, the e-accessibility component of e-Europe must no longer be considered as peripheral. It concerns approximately half of the population and will be a source of substantial economic growth. A misunderstanding of the demographics has led to entrenched positions that has helped nobody. If we do not make a new start now, we will be left behind.