Flexible Information Access: Design, Technology & Environment

Date: 18/07/2001

1. Introduction

1.1 Accessing our public museums, archives and libraries is an integral part of full, participative citizenship. It provides the opportunity for all citizens to enrich their personal experience through the acquisition of background, context, comparison, commentary and even confrontation. It allows convergences, parallels and divergences to be identified; it allows a complex geometry of relationships and positioning; and it allows both a deeper sense of reality and a fuller experience of escape.

1.2 These educational, leisure, political, economic and social, individual and collective potentialities which public art, artefacts and documents facilitate are naturally subject to selection and abridgement. Only the most dedicated and exhaustive scholarship insists that every line of every document on a subject must be read; visitors rarely give equal and lengthy attention to every picture in a gallery; museum visitors naturally tend to select favoured or unknown periods or sectors. Some of us perform this selection deliberatively, others serendipitously.

1.3 Those who, for reasons of physical or learning/developmental difficulties with English, fear of cultural institutions, low levels of vocabulary, difficulty in making choices without intermediaries, may find all of these choices either difficult or impossible. No matter how well equipped to make most choices, a totally blind person or a person who speaks fluent Urdu but no English will not be able to make choices if all of the information is in English print.

1.4 The digital age provides an historically unique opportunity to create material that is integral to or additional to our great cultural store of documents, artefacts and experiences. Although the key elements may change over time, the fundamentals, at the time of writing are:

Thoroughly ‘tagged’ digital material for easy prioritisation (Section 2)
Material created for interoperability, to avoid re-purposing for new hardware (Section 3)
A selection of access devices connected through common communications protocols (wireless, Bluetooth) to the information base (Section 4)
Options for human intervention (Section 5).

1.5 Although it may be argued that quantitative research is required into this matter, this proposal is based on the assumption that most visits by the public, particularly those who may have characteristics in the list at the beginning of 1.3, will not be totally isolated experiences; and that individuals will want to oscillate between autonomy and discussion, between assimilation and interrogation. The following Sections are, therefore, not based on the totally autonomous experience on, for instance, the basic requirement that the environment must be designed for totally autonomous access.

1.6 The following Sections also assume that autonomous and collective feedback into the system is a basic requirement, that citizenship is more than absorbing information; that a system will be better ventilated, more muscular and vigorous, more fit for purpose, if it allows two-way communication.

1.7 humanITy has already undertaken a considerable amount of formal, systems-based work in this sector (see Appendix I for list of Deliverables) and has also produced a discussion paper Control, Content and Context (Appendix II).

1.8 This document assumes a basic understanding of humanITy’s key Deliverables in accessible information and does not, therefore go back over work on accessible design in such areas as size of type, font, colour, contrast, navigation and taxonomy criteria, lexicality, content value allocation, etc.

2. Information ‘Tagging’

2.1 Since the development of Standard Generalised Mark-up Language (SGML) we have become ever more accustomed to the idea of providing pieces of information, particularly digital information, with labels so that it can be passed between processors and rendered. This has made specific the distinction between what content says and how it says it, between content and style. This kind of information labelling covers, for instance, heading levels designating the importance of a heading, as opposed to body text which is divided into blocks governed by these headings. Within blocks there are devices such as altered font (e.g. italics) for designating importance within body text. In areas of interoperability, Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) is used to permit content to be rendered in different output manifestations (audio, as opposed to symbolic text) and now, with Resource Description Frameworks (RDF) in XML, new levels of sophistication in metadata signalling have been added. Nonetheless, we have been much less concerned with the way information works for people, e.g.:

Classifying lexicography into tranches so that levels of vocabulary simplification can be engineered
Identification of key phrases or the ranking of vital information, regardless of its order in body text, so that it 'reads from the top'. (Parsing and precis software is an imperfect substitute for this kind of 'tagging'); much of this is an extension of contents and index functions in word processing
Identifying useful resume and anticipatory information in an on- going experience so that people can be brought quickly up to date or know what to look or listen out for
Chronologically or geographically 'tagged' information that allows easy access within a large piece of body text to required information. This is quite a separate consideration from the taxonomy of navigation. You cannot navigate within a large piece of information, no matter what the metadata and taxonomical characteristics, if that information has not been broken down and 'tagged'
Parallel, complementary and contradictory information sources.

2.2 The key to the design of information is not the manual but the tool; an intermediate stage is the development of best practice in this area. It cannot be duplicated or replicated because it does not exist. The nearest attempt at the National Centre for Accessible Media (NCAM), an independent arm of WGBH- Boston Public Broadcasting has hardly got further than audio and symbol subtitling primarily for visually and hearing impaired people.

This Paper Proposes that the core activity in respect of optimal access should be the detailed specification and development of tools to prompt information designers, converters and editors, together with tools for metadata design.

2.3 Specified and designed tools should then be applied in a variety of combinations to real pieces of intellectual property such as:

Critical bibliographies
Exhibitoin catalogues
Audio-visual commentaries and expositions.

2.4 This should lead to tools sets and information design frameworks based not only on sound taxonomical principles but also on practical experience which balances the holistic and the granular and the theoretical with the practical e.g.:

What is the appropriate level of geographical taxonomy for a British or for a European display?
What is a good balance for chronological divisions between, say, the decade and the day?
How many links to parallel and alternative sources should there be (vide The Power of Nine)?

2.5 We should not fall into the trap of the classifier and the collector and certainly not into the trap of the designers of SGML whose over-elaboration made the product eminently elegant and practically unusable.

The second proposal of this Paper is, therefore, that following some basic design and research to develop optimal design criteria these should be tested against more holistic and more granular alternatives at either end of the spectrum of detail.

2.6 The objective should not be to create a rigid set of frameworks, templates, tools and guidelines but we should become a world leader in information accessibility, usability, interoperability, intelligibility, navigability and connectivity.

3. Information Interoperability

3.1 Clearly the information design criteria are not identical for access on a wireless device (telephone or radio with a small screen), a PC or large screen television and sound or picture only devices. Many information designers simply believe that XML is the answer but there are more fundamental factors in design than simple, digital, bit for bit, interoperability.

3.1 A national service such as Re:source will, for instance, not wish to provide a mass of information on digital television which it then has to re-purpose for interpretative devices at sites of historic interest. Information should be made from scratch with accessibility criteria in mind quite independent of a device. Thus, if you want to make text available on a flat screen at 25 feet for the 'normal' viewer but use the same information on a tiny interpretative device with a 21 inch by 2 inch screen, it is not the size of the text nor the style of the font that counts but the capacity to alter them and the range to which they can be altered.

3.2 Particular attention needs to be paid to the arrangement of information which may be altered by enlargement or realignment; this is particularly important for metadata. If, for example, you double the size of print in body text, software simply alters the pagination but if the size of metadata text is altered it often simply 'drops' off the screen.

3.3 One of the major considerations is the distinction between essential and illustrative material; this particularly applies to the use of visual material on wireless devices but, conversely, it also refers to the definition of visuals on large, flat screens. This is why descriptive material in text or voice needs to be provided not just for people with poor vision but also for people who want to access information on wireless devices with small screens or no screen at all or, most often, a small screen they cannot see.

3.4 There is a similar scaleablity problem with audio which may sound clear on a domestic television or wireless device but may be difficult to hear by earphone on an onsite interpretative device. In this case the basic (or foreground) information needs to be made separately from the colour (or background) information; in other words, information should always be 'tracked' or layered.

3.5 Levels of information access via different hardware requires a much greater degree of understanding, particularly in the context of access in public places.

The third proposal in this Paper is, therefore, that pieces of information should be designed for a variety of hardware access and the effectiveness of the tolerances allowed should be tested.

3.6 Again, such criteria/standards should not be theoretically derived but should be based on real experiences with domestic television and radio and on-site personal and public information access devices.

4. Information and Hardware Access

This sub-Section deals primarily with the onsite experience, assuming that domestic and remote access devices are determined by the user or another body outside Re:source.

4.1 Although it is a near miracle of our time, the portable interpretative device is almost always a one size fits all solution. It is designed primarily to provide a discrete, self- contained, cable free but necessarily standardised information flow. The not inevitable but usual corollary of the information being standardised is that the accessibility is standardised, too.

4.2 The development since infra-red of device communication protocols such as the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP and Bluetooth mean that:

The user can bring her own or choose from an array of autonomous access devices (something to carry round)
The public, whether faced with information access problems or not, can access elaboration, magnification, compression, overlays, through calling information onto public 'flat screens' placed out of the line of sight, for instance, of hanging works of art.
The user can use server side intelligence to select information
The facility can prompt an individual user or the public on the basis of what is known to be popular, essential, etc
The facility can prompt micro-navigation and macro, selected route navigation, e.g., all French, all 17th Century, all abstract; some combination; or, alternatively, the one hour trip or the half hour trip.

4.3 Although some of the access will be set6 by the user, some of it should be heuristic, changing its aspect, for example, with the level of light in a gallery or the amount of ambient sound experienced in a room or from the point of view of the individual user . Nobody minds making initial settings in 'fair' conditions but cultural experiences are damaged by the need for constant adjustment/fiddling.

4.4 Public access terminals require queuing protocols which may affect the “Fair setting” (see Section 6 below), so options for waiting and missing, or waiting for a public terminal and enjoying a lower level of access on a personal device should be considered.

4.5 In the use of access hardware, a balance needs to be struck between optimal access and the range of devices available. To some extent this problem will be overcome in the future as increased 'server side' intelligence and cable free connectivity allows individuals to use their personal access device wherever they go but, in the meantime, and this is the Fourth suggestion in this Paper:

the way people behave with a mixture of personal and public access devices needs to be studied.

4.6 It must always be borne in mind that such research is highly environment sensitive.

4.7 A special note needs to be added on voice in technology, not just because of its usefulness to a wide variety of potential users but also because its limits are not well known. Establishing rules for input, such as rigidity of syntax and lexicographic range can be cumbersome and might not easily be part of an introductory briefing but those who are accustomed to these rigidities will find this facility extremely useful. They may be expected to bring their own devices or use a public, portable device for voice-in but the system must be able to accommodate this application.

5. Human Mediation

5.1 Anyone entering an unfamiliar establishment with a large inventory, a high cultural value, unfamiliar mores and a bewildering degree of choice of content, routes and access, will require a degree of human intermediary assistance. The better this is at the starting point the less likely it is to be required later. People will, by and large, want to become comfortable and then to work their route in an autonomous fashion or with the person(s) accompanying them. This is why, either in special sessions or as part of the general provision, individual introductory assistance is required to get the visit off to a good start. More details will be listed in Section 6.

5.2 Our understanding of autonomy and intermediary access is primitive. It should be assumed that the customers should make the rules and indicate the level of assistance and intermediary participation they require. A simple script should be devised at the introductory phase and the user should then be asked what kind of intermediary options he/she requires subsequently.

5.3 There should be a call device but this should be able to differentiate between a call for help with information and a medical emergency.

5.4 The basic requirements of intermediary assistance are consistency and flexibility; common systems, with flexible access, must have common means of support and amplification.

5.5 The role of human intermediaries is essential in any access system but this is not one of the specialisation areas of humanITy; still, work in this area is still required.

6. What's IT Like?

2.1 When you arrive you are greeted by a host who gives you a two sentence description of the place you have come to. He then, to waste no time, offers the following assistance:

Acclimatisation briefing
Menu options:
- length of stay, routes
Topics, regions or other taxonomical options
Choice of access equipment
Fair setting of access equipment.

6.2 A level of assistance for the alarm is set.

6.3 A level of information richness is established.

6.4 All users of the facility have a catalogue note advising that all patrons are free to seek advice and assistance which will be provided to all on an equal, though different, basis.

6.5 The visitor is offered a de-briefing and advised how feedback can be provided, either to set questions or on an improvised basis.

6.6 Further cultural options are suggested.

Appendix I

Deliverables - 2001

Deliverable 1: The Accessibility Information Matrix & the Design of an Accessibility Toolkit. (March 2001)

Deliverable 2: ICT Literacy Training Requirements & Tools: Towards an Inclusive Definition of Literacy. (March 2001)

Deliverable 3: Designing Tests for The Power of Nine. (March 2001)

Appendix II

Control, Content and Context

by Kevin Carey
10 April 2000

"Social exclusion" is becoming a caricature. This is hardly surprising since the term was coined to escape the unpleasant overtones and undertones of the "underclass" but sophistry is a poor opponent of prejudice and the caricature has brought us back to the "Underclass" with a vengeance. The Social Exclusion Unit of the Cabinet Office will rightly wish to avoid narrowing its own remit by excluding people from exclusion but official utterances show a marked consistency in thinking aloud of the "socially excluded" in terms of sump housing estates with a tint of ethnicity. To advance the proposition that people can be socially excluded in spite of being immensely rich and gifted is seen as idiosyncratic.

I think we have to focus on the simple notion that to be socially excluded in a cultural setting such as a library, gallery or museum, means that one is unable to acquire experience and, where possible, contribute experience, to the fullest possible extent that individual aptitude allows and individual preference requires.

This brief analysis of access to culture is based on three concepts: control, content and context.

The case for universal access to public culture is economic, just and utilitarian: it is economic in that all citizens pay local and national taxes regardless of their income and wealth (through, at the very least, Council Taxes and VAT); it is just in that, in spite of highly individual articulation, culture is a collective, social phenomenon: made by all it should be enjoyed by all; and it is utilitarian because it promotes social inclusion and moderates alienation.

It has been the habit of the public sector to inherit, acquire and guard the cultural artefacts of previous generations and make them available to the public on a restricted basis; one always has to ask the question implicit in Umberto Eco's The Naming of the Rose "Whether the monks are guarding their manuscripts from the people or for them?” In more recent times as social attitudes to public goods have slowly changed it has become less acceptable, for instance, for the poor to subsidise the pleasures of the rich; this is not to say that such a distorted fiscal arrangement has ceased, it has simply become less acceptable than it was. There has also been a recognition that physical access should be improved so that, for instance, people who use wheelchairs can at least reach the gallery foyer. Nonetheless, in spite of free access to many cultural facilities, notably libraries but to a greater or lesser extent museums and galleries, there are still many, mostly poor people, who are intimidated by palaces of public culture. Again, in this context, the frightened, bewildered and poor end up cross subsidising the brave, assured and modestly prosperous.

The notion of cultural control, however, is much wider than the ability to include or exclude, encourage or discourage, through the design of the environment, the location of facilities, the opening hours and the attitude of staff. Collections are necessarily based on choices and certain kinds of coherence; they necessarily reflect assumptions about relevance, usefulness, connectivity which, in turn, reflect aesthetic and moral values. It is not my purpose to argue that this should be otherwise. The construction of any collection of public culture cannot be based on the post-modernist 'theory' that there is no cultural canon, no differential value between artefacts; on that basis one might as well fill cultural spaces with random objects. On the other hand the post-modern approach allows for coherent diversity in the way we see things, understanding that a piece of information or an artefact is capable of being understood from a large number of perspectives. To quote an obvious example, an account of slavery might be understood both as the foundation of civic importance and as a cruel and crude economic instrument. Thus, the concept of control involves the power of selection, of arrangement and of interpretation.

There is one more important comment that needs to be made on the subject of control as it relates particularly to selection. There is a bias in our current cultural ethos in favour of choice exercised by the individual, as opposed to the presentation of an array of factors through an intermediary institution. We do not know enough yet to assert this absolutely but it is an intuitively elegant proposition that effective choice is directly proportionate to the knowledge base you already have; if that is true then systems that rely upon independent choice are bound to favour the intelligent. A more sceptical analysis might be that the promotion of choice as an end in itself is simply a method of cutting down the cost of intermediaries, that it shifts the cost from the producer to the consumer (as it does, for instance, in self service retail outlets). So, to give an example from the electronic media, many people may accidentally acquire new and interesting information because they tune to a radio channel like BBC Radio 4 which has deliberately had designed into it the propensity to widen consumer interests. The opposite is true of single issue channels for sport or a certain genre of music. To go this far is not to have engaged in any discussion of quality or good taste, it is simply an observable fact that multiplicity is not the same as plurality; there is more variety on the five BBC Radio national channels than is available across the whole radio dial of New York City.

The conclusion in general, which has special applications for the socially excluded, is that a series of choice-driven interactive information systems is not the solution to all problems. Just as we may wish to retain intermediary broadcasting alongside narrowcasting, so we will need human intermediaries in our cultural establishment alongside interactive technologies.

Even where there are fully qualified intermediaries there will be certain content which is inaccessible in any real sense to some people; the example of explaining the Mona Lisa to a congenitally, totally blind person is obvious enough. This raises, in turn, two questions: what sort of content should we choose? What is our obligation in respect of accessibility?

The choice of content is difficult to separate from the idea of context. A cross section of the public, even when half of it has graduated from an institution of higher education, is not going to be interested in the kind of content which fascinates a Professor of archaeology. Many of our cultural institutions - libraries, museums and galleries - are hybrids of formal education and popular culture. There is nothing wrong with this in principle but the problem which most frequently arises is that an artefact - say a pot from Athens at the time of Pericles - hardly excites except where there is a huge degree of context which a Professor might carry but which most members of the public will not. Trying to avoid the hackneyed issue of "relevance" it might be better to look at the issue in terms of how much context is required to make an artefact fully comprehensible. I know that begs the question of what I mean by "fully comprehensible" but that can be set out in terms of degrees of breadth and depth whereas apart from chronological or ethnic proximity the notion of "relevance" becomes circular because it usually ends up being related to what the person interrogating the object or fact knows already; so if you are a farmer the history of farm implements is "more relevant" to you than the history of mining implements. On that basis, if you want your knowledge broadened then the last thing you are seeking, in terms of the way the word is used, is relevance.

If we are to make any sense of our culture the key notion is surely connection. We should interest ourselves in content that explains us. Greek pots explain us to a certain extent which might stimulate a handful of Professors, but televisions explain us a good deal better. They are not antiquities but there are now many kinds and classes of antiquities that hardly explain us at all even though they might explain the way our ancestors thought and behaved. What, I think, is confusing for us, which misleads us in the way we collect and display artefacts and paintings is that we fail to recognise that until the end of the last Century, in spite of the Industrial Revolution, the upper classes in our country which made decisions about collecting and displaying things really believed that their studies of Classical Greek and Latin texts and history at public schools had more influence on their inner lives than the works of Newton or Darwin.

In considering how difficult it is now to make any sense of ancient objects, let me cite three simple examples; only a tiny minority of us are interested in the role of rhetoric in all branches of art and learning up until the middle of the 18th Century, together with the reinterpretations of a small number of centrally important themes. In spite of as well as because of my Cambridge and Harvard education, I cannot function culturally without Robert Graves' Greek Myths. The books I read refer to them, opera libretti bristle with them but I no longer have the stories in my blood and marrow, I have to study them and their centrality to the book or the opera. Another example, on a different level, is the failure of most people to understand the sheer physical effort required until the 20th Century by most people simply to survive. A third example to sharpen the point is the way that risks have changed along with the way we view risk in our culture. These three examples are only small illustrations of the barriers which have to be overcome to make any real sense of antiquities which many people still maintain are central to our understanding of ourselves. If they are right they have some explaining to do!

Much of what we put on public show as culture, expecting a certain degree of context to be brought to it by the public is, on the basis of the three examples quoted, arcane. There is certainly a role for antiquarianism in places of public culture but it seems to me that at this moment a slice of rather basic geography might do more good.

Setting aside the most difficult and apathetic cases, the second question we have to address is how far should a public cultural organisation be obliged to make its offerings accessible. At the simplest level, if there are 100,000 print books published in the UK every year, should each and every one of these be put into braille and audio recorded for blind people? Should people with learning difficulties be allocated a full-time intermediary? Should all multimedia offer a choice of levels of richness of subtitling? These questions, conversely, throw a good deal of light on the previous discussion of intermediaries and choice. If objects and information are chosen well to meet the learning and knowing requirements of our culture, then what matters is that as many of us as possible can derive maximum access to the same objects and information so that we can become involved in discourse.

A further requirement of content and context is that they should help to forge mutuality within our culture. This, it may be argued, is Stalinist, but it is the public duty of elected government to establish and maintain social stability and reduce alienation and that depends on a recognition of mutuality and an ability to promote that through discourse. That is not to say that private cultural activity should have this obligation nor that public culture should not embrace the ambitious and the apparently incomprehensible or anarchistic, but that the state's primary obligation is to society as a whole whereas it has no clear responsibility to be a patron of the arts.

If we are to greet the new Century with a coherent public policy towards culture, then we need to set ourselves the following questions and arrive at least at provisional answers to them:

How can we make our cultural institutions less intimidating for that part of the population which pays for them but does not use them?
Granted that we can formulate strategies for increasing access to buildings and content for people who are disabled or who for a variety of reasons cannot readily access content in the forms in which it is initially created, how responsible is the public sector for accessibility and how far should that responsibility be taken, given that there are not enough resources to provide maximum access to every object for every person?
To what degree should we legislate to allow individuals temporarily to alter the intellectual property of a creator?
How can we move from a theoretical comparison of legacy cultures to making concrete connections between them and then move from connectivity to mutuality?
And, coming full circle back to the first question, how can we move our cultural posture from reception to interaction?

It is time to face up to the prospect of using our cultural budget for far more focused, multimedia events which interpret the origins, life forces and manifestations of our culture. This may mean selling pots and coins to a new class of archivists - if we have created a minutely accurate haptic file of a Roman coin why do we need the real one in a glass case? - and it may mean that the barriers between the library, the museum, the gallery and the classroom have to be broken down. As schools become community facilities community facilities will have to become schools, but as these institutions will have to cater for lifelong learning maybe the word "school" will have to be abandoned along with the Greek pots.

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