ICT Access, e-Government and Civil Rights
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Presented to the E=MC SQUARED Information Age Conference, organised by IDeA (Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government)
Date: 21/02/2001
Venue: Sheffield
Article
Usually at conferences like this I have become accustomed to taking the floor in the last session before the wrap-up, as if Social Exclusion was an after-thought, something to be included for the sake of political correctness but hardly vital, hardly central to our concerns. This situation does not arise because as a society we are unfeeling but, rather, because our demography is seriously faulty.
If you say the words "Social Exclusion" the listener immediately summons up an image of sink housing estates. They then summon up some kind of social security identikit of recipients of benefit: young tearaways who have never had a job; families trapped in succeeding generations of deprivation; single mothers breeding girls who become single mothers; people made redundant in their late 40s who will never work again; ethnic minority groups who find it easier to turn in on themselves and the culture of their ancestral lands; seriously disabled people who find it difficult for educational and technological reasons to come to terms with our febrile, consumer-oriented society.
This is not a cruel nor a conspiratorial situation. People like you, who have to be very careful how you parcel out vital public sector assistance have to make difficult and careful choices. Every time you exercise discretion out of a sense of constructive engagement, out of a sense of generosity, are always subject to scrutiny and criticism. You look at a situation and opt for a creative solution and are immediately caned by a self-appointed judge from the media who has no understanding of poverty or economic distress. There is a fashion at the moment for 'real live' stunts where journalists and politicians cast off their designer clothes and discard their credit cards in order to live among the homeless and deprived; but, of course, they know they are serving out a time limited sentence with a publicity coup at the end of it. They will do without their champagne today in order to store up more champagne for tomorrow.
So, quite rightly, you lean very heavily on standards and definitions. IN order to be fair you, as representatives of the public sector, want to know where priority begins and ends; you want to know whether you have any discretion. this is as it should be. In the Victorian era charity was doled out according to a patchwork of criteria but underlying every standard there was a terrible arbitrary but unspoken context. This is why successive reforming governments evolved the benefits system.
So it is that social exclusion as an idea is linked to the state benefits system. People, because of their poor lot in society, because they have been dealt a poor hand by inheritance or circumstance, are given assistance to try to increase their economic, educational or social leverage in what we once called society but increasingly call the market.
There are fuzzy edges to this picture. There is not an exact overlap between medical, economic or social inequality and the benefits system or the criteria for special assistance provided by the public sector but we all know roughly what we mean; we know why such and such a place has been chosen as an Education Action Zone, a Health action Zone, an area for Single Regeneration Budget or EU Framework V.
The need to divide people between those who qualify for assistance and those who do not is reinforced by many not for profit organisations and consumer groups who rely on public support and charitable donations to fulfil their objectives. It is, for example, much easier for a charity to raise money for a group of people if it can include children; it is also much easier to raise money if a stark picture is drawn of the plight of the client group. Consumers within deprived groups also play their part. If you have a particularly serious problem which is shared by a small group of activists it is only human nature that you will not look generously on a much larger group which shares your condition but in a much milder form. The whole system is geared towards drawing a stark line between those who have a need and those who do not. this is sadly inevitable. Let me tell you a story.
In April last year I went to Lisbon to a Ministerial Conference on e-Europe to consider the future for electronic transactions in the EU. In the initial document presented to the Conference there was a separate Chapter on disability and social exclusion. Along with colleagues I urged the Commission to drop this special section as patronising, we wanted disability and social exclusion to be a cross cutting theme in every Chapter of th3e document. This is, as you will recognise, a widely accepted contemporary strategy, representing what socially excluded people long for. By the time that the document coming out of Lisbon had been revised for the Council of Ministers, the apex body of the European Union, every single policy on disability and social exclusion had been lost in the horse-trading. We had made a monumental tactical blunder. If you are excluded the only way you can get help is to highlight your exclusion, to erect a tented camp outside the city walls enclosing cosy houses; to be included in theory is to disappear altogether.
Let me now tell you another story which illustrates the other extreme of the ICT problem. this story is probably not true but I love it. It tells of a group of Nobel Prize winning physicists who were at a conference in York. ON their day off they decided to visit the Minster. Their hotel was North of the city so when they were given North oriented street maps they could not use them effectively to travel South. The simple point of the story is that they could not navigate using a representation at 180 degrees variance from reality.
The second story is a very crude illustration of the point that is central to my presentation. You cannot take any model of social exclusion and automatically assume that all those who fit your criteria are automatically excluded in ICT terms but, much more importantly, you cannot assume either that people who do not fit your initial exclusion model are not ICT excluded. The two phenomena do not correspond. Let me tell you why.
There are four broad groups of people who find it difficult to deal with various aspects of life, including information systems; they are those who:
- Are visually impaired
- Are hearing impaired
- Are physically disabled
- Have learning or cognitive difficulties.
I have quoted these in approximate ascending order of magnitude but there are some factors which we must immediately recognise:
- First, although it is not true in every single case of a disabling syndrome, in general the functional limitation picture is like a wedge. As you move from the narrow end with the most extreme cases towards the broader end, the number of cases expands though their syndrome is milder. So, for example, there are relatively few people in the visual impairment category who are totally blind compared with the huge number of people who cannot read standard print.
- Secondly, although our cultural history and charitable fund raisers conspire to make us think of disability in children, the majority of people in all four categories are the elderly, usually suffering from mild but ever increasing forms of disability, often suffering two or more simultaneously; so instead of thinking of a totally blind woman with a guide dog or a totally deaf man reading sing language; think of a person who is mildly hearing and visually impaired, with an irritating but not catastrophic memory loss and a short attention span.
- Thirdly, just because people cannot interact with information systems does not mean that they are stupid and/or poor; remember, our physicists were neither.
Bearing all this in mind, the really important thing to grasp is that the biggest group we have to work with are those who have cognitive difficulties. Again, it is easy to envisage the autistic child but bear in mind that about 20% of the population is classified as illiterate in the sense of not being able to work functionally with traditional written media. I think that estimate is on the optimistic side.
Now take a quick look at interactive systems, searching on the Internet, filling out electronic social security forms, interacting with a Government Web site. Forget, incidentally, the current fact that many people can't afford computers; just think of five years from now when everybody either has a Web enabled digital television or mobile phone. Soon the exclusion will not be economic at all, it will be by virtue of an inability, for whatever reason, to handle digital information systems.
If you put all this together a rather startling picture emerges. Our analysis at humanITy is that if you gave everyone a free Internet device and unlimited training vouchers half of the population would not be able to use the Internet effectively.
Now for you this is a crucial problem because of the government's target for on-line transactions. Of course the target is misplaced because it confuses being physically on line with being mentally on line; it confuses physical availability with the ability to access and interact with the system. For you this is critical because the bulk of public sector transactions take place with those who will be the last to go on-line.
So what are the key problems:
- First, and quite simply, many people find it difficult to interact with technology which is baldy designed; it has mostly been dreamed up by teenage whizz kids and engineers to meet their own needs. If you look at your own ICT systems you will immediately recognise that they are not user friendly; they depend upon intensive learning and daily interaction which alerts us to the foibles of a system
- Secondly, even if people get the hang of what you are telling them, this does not necessarily mean that they can work out how or what to tell you. The QWERTY keyboard is very constraining but the obvious answer of voice in technology also has limits because it only works if people apply rather strict rules about the way they talk
- Thirdly, you mostly design systems for everyone; there may be a few forms in languages other than English but in the main the Secretary to the Cabinet and the homeless illiterate have to fill out exactly the same form.
In summary, whoever the information system was designed for it wasn't designed for the user.
Now let me look at the converse side of this situation. The one over-riding aspect of digital information systems which can redeem us of our woes is that it is absolutely adjustable and customisable. Even if you think of your office computer at the simplest level you can choose your foreground and background colour, the size and font of the print, the amount of on-screen help.
Now we need to think of more fundamental ways of designing information systems so that people can use them; some of what I am suggesting is a matter of basic design whereas some other measures will require software tools; here are some basics:
- First, there is information Design. The Government has already released a first set of Web design guidelines and is about to release a revision; but these largely relate to the way in which standard PC Web pages are set out with printed information as the prime medium; they encourage designers not to go in for fancy layouts just for the sake of it; to reduce information to its essential building blocks.
- Secondly, there is the question of the words you use. This is not really related to the Internet at all; but through no fault of yours most official forms look ass though they are designed to prevent people from getting anything out of the system. Soon it will be possible for computers automatically to simplify jargon into ordinary language but that does not excuse obscurantism.
- Thirdly, there are tools which enable computers to translate from one language into another. This is very important for people whose first language is not English; but remember that straight linguistic translation is not enough; content has to be culturally appropriate as well as linguistically accurate.
- Fourthly, people get lot in computer information systems and need to find their way back to the start, as in the Monopoly instruction "Return to Go".
- Fifthly, and this is obvious but usually totally ignored, a computer screen with options should limit itself to nine or less so that the screen array can be tied up with the telephone system.
- Finally, All information systems should be tested on a cross section of users.
This is not a comprehensive set of rules but it does give you an idea of what you can do to decrease information system exclusion.
I want to end with a plea to everyone in the public sector. For the past four years I have been trying to get central government to adopt a unified approach to this problem so that public sector information systems have a common standard, a common look and feel. this is not to say that different Departments will not say different things in different ways but users don't want steep learning curves every time they fill in a form or look up a piece of information. the same goes for local government; you can stay local while adopting common standards. this saves the customer time and it saves you money.
Finally, forget the PC and its complexities when you think of what you are getting ready for; think of people with digital televisions with remote controllers that double up as mobile phones; think of mobile phones that double up as televisions. You may run the system but I have paid for it and if I've paid for it I want to be part of it. You can't collect universal taxes and provide systems that shut out half of the population. Access to information isn't a matter of making concessions, nor is it simply a matter of social policy; in the information age, access to information is a civil right.