Enabling E-Democracy - Disability, Social Exclusion and ICT
Systems and Information Design
INCLUSIVE AND OPTIMAL DESIGN
2.1. Although it is an appealingly inclusive concept "Design for All" is a practical impossibility. There are some people who suffer from such a multiplicity of severe functional limitations that their systems requirements will have to be individually met rather through the general system. To give an example of this idea, while it is relatively cheap to provide the technology which turns text into synthetic speech, primarily for people with a visual impairment, it would be uneconomic to provide every ICT system with the device which turns digital text into 'soft copy' braille. The key concept here is "Inclusive" or "Optimal" design which relates the potential users of a feature to its cost of inclusion.
2.2. The value based on "Inclusion" is variable. Where there is a multitude of channels in a market sector the value may be low, with different competitors establishing different degrees of access, but the fewer the channels the greater the requirement for inclusiveness. As there is only one Government and one Parliament there is a high requirement for inclusiveness in their information systems.
2.3. Inclusive design based on the principle of 'Optimal access' (Carey 2000b) produces an explicit requirement for individual, peripheral provision. This is because some accessibility features are so expensive that they cannot be incorporated into general systems optimally but must be supplied to individuals from niche market providers with the funds coming from the public sector.
There is currently no coherent system for supplying ICT peripheral hardware and software to maximise individual access and, clearly, this is not the kind of area in which Parliament would wish to be financially involved, but an equality of citizenship in a digital environment places an absolute requirement on access which far exceeds the Government's pursuit of a largely bipartisan policy which concentrates ICT access in the areas of formal education and employment.
It is therefore a matter of extreme urgency that the Government formulates a policy to under-write digital access before that access becomes a necessity of equal citizenship.
CUSTOMISATION AND INTERFACES
2.4. The key concept in inclusive design is customisation. Most simple features can only accommodate the needs of 90% of the population but each feature excludes a different 10%, so the greater the complexity of the system the more people it potentially excludes. To quote some figures:
- there are 1m blind and visually impaired people in UK, 1 in 60, of whom 4% have no sight at all;
- there are 2m people who use hearing aids; 1 in 5 of all adults have a hearing loss;
- 10% of the population has dyslexia;
- 2% of UK population has a learning disability and
- 2 of 10 employees each year will experience mental health difficulties (Employtourism, 1999).
A set-up that addresses the problems of one group may discriminate against another. The solution therefore to dealing with exclusion is customisation, the ability to alter characteristics of a feature. Thus, in an ICT system it is possible to adjust on-screen colours and foreground/background contrast, the font and size of symbols and the volume of the sound.
2.5. Just as the information output can be customised, so a variety of interfaces can be used. Information needs to be customised for interfaces as well as for people. Web pages designed for a personal computer (PC) screen may be totally unsatisfactory for a WAP (wireless access protocol) enabled mobile telephone with a small screen. Information designed for screen use may be inadequate when used on a telephone without a text screen. The recently launched voice internet service provider, VOCALIS, which aims dynamically to translate from web page protocols to WAP protocols, potentially makes any web page accessible from a WAP phone. Much of the adaptation of information will ultimately be carried out by information manipulation tools but it is important to bear the principle of multi-carrier access in mind when settling on the basic, source file design of information. They key concepts here are information granularity/stratification (preserving the small pieces from which information is collated) and clear labelling.
2.6. Because information systems are changing so rapidly it is not sensible to assign functions to parts of systems. A good example of change is the way in which speech synthesis was once produced through an add-on hardware peripheral running on specialist software but the same effect can now be obtained through an integral sound card and software with the speech produced through speakers which come as standard accessories. However, just because some features become standard, it does not necessarily mean that functionality improves.
One of the characteristics of the ICT industry is that it has a tremendously strong element of 'technology push' and so many elements of complexity are introduced which may not improve overall performance. One of the ironies of current technology, for example, is that the first generation of digital radios were less accessible to blind people than its analogue predecessors.
Given the time it takes to formulate and then execute public policy, it is important to look at technology some way down stream when trying to solve a problem. The current technology of preference for e-democracy is the digital television but surely we need to consider a future where an individual's identity card/passport in the form of a personalised chip in a smart card can be given a small key-pad (whether it's a phone with a sophisticated SIM or a card with a key-pad will soon not be a question); this will satisfy ease of communications with privacy and supply legitimacy through a secure and unique set of individual characteristics. It would also make sense if the chip contains fingerprints that the device can only be activated from the same fingerprints, or iris.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: INTEGRITY AND ACCESS
2.7. Bearing in mind the above observations, it is helpful to think of whole systems, rather than specific parts of systems, as the mechanisms for providing a technological link between the information author/creator/provider on the one hand and the recipient on the other. The purpose of the system is to convey to the recipient as accurately as possible the intention of the author. There is an important distinction here between the intention of the author and the initial expression of the author. If for example, the author simply creates material using symbols written on paper it is inaccessible to those who, for whatever reason, cannot read such symbols. The intention therefore has to be fulfilled through turning the material into audio format or supplementing it with pictures. This explains the concept of multiple but self-standing expressions of the author's intention.
2.8 There is a very complex argument concerning the extent to which the intermediaries for disabled people or disabled people themselves can transform or supplement intellectual property to maximise their access to the author's intention. This involves the balancing of the rights of the author under copyright and the rights of the citizens to access information in the public domain. Until now it has been universally assumed that the rights of the author are paramount. The Copyrights Design and Patents Act 1988 (UK Parliament) is specific on this point. The author must be consulted, for example, before a text can be transcribed into braille and refusing the permission or failing to deal with the request are equally final; the permission has to be explicit.
This situation has been complicated by legislation on the National Curricula which implies the access to some text is compulsory, so there is a conflict between copyright legislation and legislation on the National Curricula.
2.9 Such complications, however, should not apply to any intellectual property created by the public sector or on behalf of the public sector. This material should be available to all citizens not least because all citizens have paid for it. There is, of course, the question of a proper relationship between content creators in the public sector and their code of practice for intermediaries and disabled people who wished to make material more accessible. There is a particular problem in ensuring that amended and supplemented files are not confused with source files.
This is an extremely complex technical area because the principle of the integrity of intellectual property is in conflict with the principle of accessibility. Much more work must be done in this area.
SYSTEMS DESIGN CHARACTERISTICS
2.10. The following are the six key design requirements for an information system:
- Accessibility - the capacity of the system to deliver information to the senses. This is the most familiar to disabled people but it has wider ramifications. In an ideal system each piece of information is delivered in the maximum number of media where each medium can deliver the information as a self-standing strand.
- Apprehension - the ability of the system to communicate to the user the intention of the author of the content. Examples of this might be the clear establishment of lexicality (the order in which the information is to be processed); weight (the relative importance the author assigns to elements of content, the establishment of what is essential and what supportive) and authority (the degree to which the user can rely on the content). This allows the user, particularly one with a narrow skills base, a slow acquisition and interpretative rate or someone in a hurry to process the information with maximum efficiency in order to reach a clear and simple conclusion.
- Transparency - the ability of the system, taking the previous two factors into account, to separate style from content, foreground from background, source from criticism/commentary and peer reviewed criticism and commentary from ad hoc comment and 'virtual' marginalia. This aspect presents particular problems when authors deliberately employ irony, ambiguity and other deliberately misleading devices, permissible in creative content but not, for instance, in Government information.
- Navigation - the ability of the system to facilitate simple data location through the optimal balance between elements in an array and the number of steps required. (Stringer & Carey, 2000).
- Interaction - the ability of the system to facilitate user feedback to meet the requirements of the author.
- Expression - the ability of the system to facilitate the creation of and to collect unsolicited content.
2.11. If these requirements are set at right-angles to the four functional limitation groupings discussed in Section 1., a matrix can be produced which matches systems requirements with functional limitations to produce an inclusive design for an information system. This Accessible Information Matrix Version 1.1 is shown in Table I.
Table 1 - HUMANITY’S ACCESSIBLE INFORMATION MATRIX (AIM) Version 2.1
| Cognitive | Physical | Audio | Visual | General | |
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| Accessibility |
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| Apprehension |
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| Transparency |
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| Navigation |
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| Interaction |
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| Expression |
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| Fitness |
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© humanITy, February 2001
2.12 Using major commercial and public sector websites as evidence, it is clear that many organisations view the Internet solely as a method by which they can provide information to users. They do not see the Internet as an interactive mechanism. Clearly, the government needs to take advantage of the interactive potential of the Internet for delivering services and for gathering reaction to its proposals. It would also need to provide facilities for general input for citizens not specifically in response to a particular proposal. It is therefore important to emphasise interaction and expression in the list of systems characteristics.
TWO EXAMPLES
2.13. First Example
A Select Committee produces a report of some 200,000 words; if the words used are ranked in terms of their frequency of use and degree of difficulty, some of the words fall in the required vocabulary level of 25-30,000 words. The initial file is accompanied by a series of simplification tools so that the user can select from the options set out in Table II.
Table II
| Document length | ||||
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| Document complexity |
Full text |
50%: text without illustrative examples, tables, appendices, references |
20% content of conclusions, recommendations and action without supporting evidence |
5% extended Executive Summary |
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Full text |
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Vocabulary range up to 15,000 words with specialist micro vocabulary |
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Vocabulary range up to 5,000 words with micro vocabulary glossary |
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NOTES
- Some of the text shortening might be accomplished through pricis software tools but the most effective way to assist this process is to tag text in a hierarchical form so that, for instance, Appendices are tagged differently from main recommendations. A tool can then extract material with common tags. This underlines the importance of the construction of the source file.
- Most documents, particularly those handled by Governments and legislatures, can be split into two classes of vocabulary, general and particular (or micro). If the general vocabulary is ranked in tranches according to frequency of use and difficulty then a tool for translating inside a language could be developed to simplify without the need for a human intermediary. Many word processing software systems have defined micro vocabularies for such disciplines as law and medicine and others, on such subjects as property law, agriculture and foreign policy might easily be developed.
- There are also tools for syntax simplification.
- There is an important distinction between the two forms of simplification above; shorter does not necessarily mean a smaller range of vocabulary. An Executive Summary might, to retain brevity, use a large number of very difficult words. A full length text using a small vocabulary range might be longer than the original.
2.14. Second Example
There is a "No Confidence" debate in the House of Commons. A viewer unfamiliar with the procedure and vocabulary of the House wishes to understand what is in progress. She logs on to the Parliament Channel and is presented with the following options:
Table III
| Options |
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NOTES
- Full text of speeches can be generated almost instantaneously through voice in technology.
- The summary function might be a little delayed, particularly if some of the vocabulary features from Table II of the first example are used.
- All but the last function could be performed by an impartial content creator with tools; the last function requires some human intervention which might be regarded as partial but it is important because it stops the viewer being caught unawares.
2.15. Although it has been implied so far, the last example illustrates the way in which previously separate publishing and broadcasting functions are now merging. This has implications for Parliament (Carey, 2000) but it also has implications for disabled people which centre on comparative disadvantage resulting from technological ubiquity as opposed to the technological scarcity which characterised ICT access in the 1980s and early 1990s and it is to this subject which we turn in the next Section.