From the final third to the struggling seventh
humanITy panel presentation given at National Digital Inclusion Conference 2008 ‘Reaching the Final Third’
Date: 29/04/2008
Venue: The Brewery Conference Centre, London, UK
Article
Accessibility for the final third, and even more so for the 'struggling' seventh is a clear example of market failure, particularly in the area of PC-based systems; the forecast that the quest for market share would drive eInclusion was wrong. We need to question why mobile phones and subscription television were different.
The Government's platform bias in favour of the PC and its medium bias in favour of language need to be replaced by platform and medium neutrality. A large slab of the 'final third' have great skills with telephones and the use of graphics.
The key problem is that there has not been an evidence-based dialogue about the grounds for abridging shareholder value. If the Government will not comply with its own regulations on accessibility and more or less ignores usability, why should industry do any better? Industry, quite properly, is concerned with the maximisation of the return on capital; the market case for usability and accessibility is based on the utopian fallacy of unlimited capital; competition for capital favours the rich and the educated; the upgrade will produce a better margin than the impoverished new entrant. This bogus argument about the market case spares Government the difficult task of deciding where and how to regulate.
The solution is to work out how much public and third sector funding is required to enable industrial capital investment into accessibility and usability products not justified by the normal competition for capital. Industry will quite properly not act alone and the public and third sectors do not have the expertise or funding to act without industry.
Five related immediate issues are:
- First, the need to see that exclusion is not purely an anthropocentric issue; if it were, television and mobile phones would be in the same market position as the PC;
- Secondly, we need to think about procurement high level user requirements which Government could set and which industry would have to meet, including training-free goods and services;
- Thirdly, there needs to be a shift from abstract concepts like ‘accessibility' and ‘usability' to a focus on peer group normative tasks in areas such as shopping, banking, searching and self expression;
- Fourthly, we need to think about graphical and audio literacy's as an equivalent skill to reading and writing;
- Finally, as we manage to mop up a high proportion of the 'final third', we need to concentrate ever more on the 'struggling seventh' the 'bottom' 15% of the population; this is way beyond the platitudes of low hanging fruit and corporate social responsibility. It's difficult to see how industry can or ought to be involved here; it might be best to stay with the 'top' part of the 'final third' while the public and third sectors struggle with what's left.