Web Design – Ending Apartheid
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Speech given for the Design Council at launch of ‘Designing an E-Future’
Date: 31/10/2001
Venue: London, UK
Article
Accessibility to digital information is, of course, a moral right and it may soon become a legal right but the crux of the solution to it is that it is a market opportunity.
Of course there are some people with very severe disabilities who need enormous help with access and there are people who cannot understand any of the words or the images on the Web because they do not understand the symbolic language or the meaning of the graphics. These people require very special provision. But most people who have problems are not like that.
We estimate that half of the current population could not use the Internet effectively even if they were given a Pentium and an unlimited training voucher. This is not because the equipment is difficult to use (though it undoubtedly is) but rather because of the way the information is designed and arranged.
We at humanITy have established accessibility standards, specified information handling tools, explained how tools can be integrated into information and explained how basic information should be manufactured. The rules are not difficult and to think about them the easiest place to start is the rock record where all the different vocal and instrumental tracks are laid down separately. Their balance can be altered, a track can be completely removed or a new one added. This is the kind of information stratification that we need in visual information so that it can be effectively manipulated. Think of foreground and background as two channels in stereo; think of your captions as a vocal overlay that can be added or taken off; think of the way you deal with colour and now think about the way you find your way round sound. At one time CDs used to have bit bands which related directly to large chunks of music such as whole movements of symphonies. Nowadays you can get a symphonic disc where the sound is chopped into tiny pieces so that each thematic element can be isolated.
There has been a huge debate about what I am saying amongst designers and politicians. One side says that designing for the whole market puts a bar on competitiveness; but this is only true, I think, of your criterion as the time from conception to launch. I am much more interested in the time from conception to profit, and that involves a consideration of your broad market.
And remember, the kind of people we are talking about here are not necessarily poor, though of course some of them are; if you think, as we do, that half of the population could benefit from improved information design, then it is clear that there is a huge market. We have got far too stuck in the digital age in the history from which we emerge, from the computer, from the PC, the keyboard and the mouse; and we have failed to see that the future lies in the revitalised consumer electronics devices, the television and the telephone. So what we are looking towards is the consumer electronics market of almost 100% penetration rather than upgrading the 40% of the population who use a PC-based model.
So, having made this introduction I now want to take us through the exclusion challenge:
- First, and I am speaking for myself here, we don't want to be included but then stigmatised, irked off, put into a separate category. There is something chilling about the separate web site for disabled people which reminds me of the separate railway carriages for black people in America's racist age. One of the huge chunks of evidence we have is that even severely disabled people don't self classify as disabled and people with more moderate disabilities such as arthritis or short sightedness certainly don't; so the inclusiveness, encompassing strategy is the only one which will be effective.
- Secondly, inclusiveness involves talking and testing; there are already too many architects who've never been in a kitchen; so Web designers need to think about people rather than pure aesthetics. One tiny example of this is our attachment to the aesthetic of the printed page with its block-like appearance and its right hand justification. If you unjustify your right hand margin and drop proportionate spacing this increases your intelligibility to 15% of the population who find navigation much easier with a less aesthetic finish.
- Thirdly, if we are going to drop our rather aesthetic bias in favour of something more effective, design must be much more inter disciplinary. I am not sure whether they teach taxonomy at art school but they certainly didn't teach good design in my Greek philosophy classes where I learned my taxonomy. Even if you get this bit right there is still the thorny problem of navigation. I used to enjoy playing Adventure on a mainframe at Harvard in the early 1970s but people trying to pick up their social security benefits don't want to play adventure, wasting hours, getting lost.
- Fourthly, we have to stop thinking analogue when we’re designing digital. There is nothing more weird in this digital age than the taxonomical tree. We need to think in hyperspace so that we can offer our users a variety of approaches to finding information; some may want it alphabetically arrayed, others may prefer it to be spatially presented using, say, a maximum number of nine elements per screen so that the data can be accessed from numeric keypads. What we don't want is a complete mish-mash of links and routes which don't allow clear choices and then a consistent follow-through. You know what I mean; you go onto a site and navigate more than 100 links on the home page, you find the sub class of information you want and click, and the presentation totally changes 'look and feel'. Of course this is inevitable if you are following a link from one site to another; but within information systems we need to offer a choice of consistent options.
- Finally, publishing on the Web is provisional but forever. This presents a very clear commercial choice. In this era of short termism it is all too easy to push up a site now and leave it to the next generation to put it right but, in the meantime, you have been robbing yourself of market share. Lay down a good foundation now for steady market growth and you will be able to make good adjustments as opportunities and technologies change.
Those are just a few notes about design but I want to conclude by getting back to the story of exclusion and inclusion. The great advantage of being outside the city walls, in an encampment, in full view of the sentries, is that everybody knows you are there. As soon as you opt for inclusion, for being, as the jargon goes, integrated, you suddenly disappear. Society doesn’t mind sending food parcels outside the walls but it's damned if it wants you to sit at its table. Of course I find that difficult but I understand that in an analogue world it is very difficult to start out from an inclusive design position. What I most want us to guard against is taking that rigid, analogue position into the digital age. You can do almost anything you want with information, include almost everybody, if you start with the right attitude, understand basic design and integrate appropriate tools. If you think that design is a matter of aesthetic self-indulgence then you are harming clients and their potential customers. We will, of course, continue to press politicians to legislate for a guaranteed level of access to information in the information age; we will also press the moral case. But I always say to people in Corporate Social Responsibility departments, I'm pleased with what you are doing but the chief responsibility of a company is to make money and if you were better at that you would no doubt take care of most of the people I am concerned about. This is particularly true in the digital design field; if companies ensure that their information is optimally accessible for the population as a whole, then special sectors and niche markets can be dealt with more effectively by the not for profit and public sectors. It may sound rather odd coming from the Director of a charity specialising in ICT and social exclusion but all I want you to do is to go away and think how you can make money by making your information more accessible. If you will take care of the market, we will take care of the rest.