ICT and Disability: A Personal View

Speech given at the e-Skills NTO Conference “Disabled People in ICT Jobs”

Date: 21/03/2002
Venue: London, UK

Why should anybody want to listen to yet another card marking exercise which says to the Government: "Well done! but could do better!"? The answer in this case is that I do not use "Could do better" as yet another way of asking for more resources. For the next two years at least I think we should take stock and see how we can use our resources better before moving on. It may be argued that taking a step back will delay services for some people, and this is inevitably true, but there are some extremely important and fundamental issues that we have to deal with before we move on afresh. I will start with these and then go on to look at the disability and employment sectors and see how they can help each other.

So here are five fundamental sets of issues:

First, what do we really know about how people, particularly those with a degree of cognitive difficulty, learn basic skills, whatever they are. Is it a coincidence that the Special Needs classification is approximately 20% and that 20% of adults are classed as illiterate? How different are the techniques needed for people with genetic cognitive problems and those who are simply alienated from the system; or is part of the alienation the result of poor teaching? Then again, there is the recent UNICEF/WHO supposed finding that 20% of our children are mentally damaged. There is a lot of material here and of course you can't use children as guinea pigs in research as that is unethical, but we do need a much stronger evidence base in our approach to teaching disabled children, particularly those with learning and cognitive disabilities. These arguments have been aired in Chris Woodhead's Class War: The State of British Education and Bill Lucas's Power Up Your Mind where the battleground is partly political, partly educational, but whatever its significance for high achieving children it clearly has a much greater significance for children with special needs. Perhaps, then, I only need to mention the controversy over synthetic phonics and Helen Guldberg's comments on ICT and learning and you will see there is quite enough raw material. I'm not asking for a moratorium or a conference, just the opposite; we want less theorising and more observation of children learning.

Secondly, are we sure that ICT actually benefits people, not least disabled children and adults, in the way that we think it does? There is now a substantial body of work by Keri facer and colleagues which must at least call this into question.

Thirdly, if we can agree on a definition of education around process and on training around outputs, do we need a fundamental re-assessment of when education should give way to training? This is particularly important for disabled children.

Fourthly, how useful are the administrative and epidemiological classification in the context of disability and ICT? How useful are the paradigms of the wheelchair and the Guide Dog? How useful is it to know that 15% of the adult population who can read can't read Times New Roman 15-point print? What does that tell us about the line between optimal design and niche packages for accessibility? Definitions as they stand might be convenient for charity fundraisers and Government administrators but how useful are they here?

Fifthly, when we have got through these four, what realistic approach can we make to ICT and design given that "Design for All" is a myth which ignores the establishment of a rational line between optimal design and the use of niche market technology with public sector funding?

I now turn to the question of what the employment sector can do for disabled people; there are six points so I will have to keep them short:

First, disconnect disabled people from CSR and put them where they belong, in the marketing department. We really ought to be past the age when major companies think of disability as the province of the Chairman's wife! The more useful products are to disabled people, the less they will have to rely upon public sector and charitable funding.

Secondly, this leads directly to my second point, understand the demographics. Even if definitions of disability are useful for administrators they are irrelevant in marketing ICT. If you take the starting point that about 10% of the population are classified as "Disabled" you can add another 40% who have problems with standard PCs and their bundled software. It may be a simple thing like magnification or poor manual dexterity, or something more complex like the ability to navigate or the need for a language other than English but disabled people as such are just a fifth of the market that has some kind of ICT special need.

Thirdly, because it has such a strong say, industry should call for modifications to the National Curriculum which disproportionately damages disabled children because of its emphasis on solo achievement rather than collaboration. If employers really want creativity and teamwork the silent examination hall isn't the place to get it. We are all interdependent but that is particularly true of disabled people.

Fourthly, and here again we need research, we need to re-examine the division of labour in the ICT environment; we need to question the practice of CEO's typing with one finger and we need to look at collaboration techniques between people with different skills and aptitudes.

Fifthly, we need more vehicles for on the job training and trials; this may be true of the general population but ignorance of disability makes it even more essential in this sector.

Sixthly, see home working as a flexible option rather than compulsory imprisonment. Most of us go to work to socialise as well as produce.

What can disabled people do?

First, get the sector's message and image right. Forget the demographics of exclusivity because they rely upon high public sector input and very low industrial interest. You can't ask for optimal design and simultaneously make the market for it as small as possible; this makes no sense. We also need to be more constructive and less inclined to think of ourselves as victims. Even if it is true, people don't like to be reminded repeatedly how badly they are behaving.

Secondly, we don't want to repeat our significant failure to get proper accessibility in ICT that we made in our failure to get access to the public broadcasting that we paid for, but if you don't know what is possible you can't ask for it.

Thirdly, make more effective coalitions; the largest market for ICT systems requiring hands free and vision free ICT systems is not the disability sector but car drivers.

And, finally, what should the two sector employers and disabled people, concentrate on together? I have five suggestions:

First, analyse each case for accessibility against four criteria: moral, fiscal, legal and market, and don't mix them up. It is appropriate to put the legal and moral case to a Government; but an SME is necessarily much more attracted to a market case.

Secondly, look carefully at collaborative content creation. Within ten years machine processing through Resource Description Frameworks and the Semantic Web will have taken millions of routine jobs out of the market that are currently occupied by people with modest achievements. The current strategy of nailing people to chairs with a clapped out 386 in front of them, insisting on basic literacy and numeracy, is no solution. We need to think of cultural product in the mould of feature films, not the novelist in the attic.

Thirdly, we need to study the division of labour and we need to look at what I call the soap opera effect of ICT. We are currently in a 'can do, must do' frame of mind rather than looking at outputs. People who have to husband their resources are more likely to be more careful how they are used.

Fourthly, disabled people can provide vital marketing information, product testing and on-going support. They don't necessarily want to be in some ghetto of provision where their only customers are other disabled people but this is, nonetheless, a valuable function; and it is immoral that many disabled people are asked to provide commercially valuable information, individually, or through charities, free of charge.

Fifthly, in the new legal environment it is important to check that multimedia information is multimodular so that it is as accessible as possible to the largest number of people. This is a very special and new concept requiring a new understanding of the initial product commission instead of retrofitting audio and visual sub-titling.

Finally, and more generally, we need to start thinking much more about digital television and telephones and much less about PCs.

ICT and Disability: A Personal View

Article

Further Reading: