Convergence & Accessibility: A Principled Response to a Crisis
RNIB Presentation at the International Symposium on Community-based Inclusive Information Support for Persons with Disabilities. Organized by Assistive Technology Development Organization in collaboration with the DAISY Consortium and Sponsored by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan.
Date: 06/02/2009
Venue: Kyoto, Japan
Article
1. Introduction
We are facing a crisis in access to digital information by blind and visually impaired people because of:
- Medium-specific, rather than generic, strategies;
- The graphics explosion; and
- The declining leverage of legislation and regulation.
To understand where we are now, we need to look at the analogue past and the way that digital technologies have emerged.
Because analogue media came from very different backgrounds, the way that they have been regulated is radically different:
- In almost all countries where printing was introduced, the licensing of presses was a matter of state control but it was not long before the notion of text piracy became tied up with the rights of authors so that very stringent copyright laws have far out-lasted state censorship;
- In almost every country analogue broadcasting was strictly regulated:
- first, simply because it could be and politicians and the establishment felt safer that way
- secondly, broadcasting spectrum, being scarce, gave governments' regulatory leverage;
- Music, always more subject than any other medium to piracy (stretching back to the first printed music), has a strong copyright regime with a tradition of stringent regulation and the use of litigation to maintain rights.
The advent of digital technology has had a large number of consequences:
- Piracy is simple and cheap, threatening all current copyright models;
- The analogue silos of the printed text, the audio recording and the celluloid film have been broken down;
- Global networks are difficult to regulate such that regulation will cause operational migration.
2. Media and Accessibility
The histories of the regulation of different analogue media have had an impact on the way they have been regulated:
- The biggest regulatory impact on print has been copyright and it has maintained its hegemony over theories of access rights almost until our own day; what applies in a strong form to print applies in an extreme form to audio and music;
- The leverage of broadcasting regulation allowed state broadcasters in particular to require concessions in exchange for spectrum, e.g. audio description and sub-titling.
The major manifestation of convergence is the World Wide Web which is, ostensibly, self regulated but that part of self regulation which deals with accessibility is falling behind that part which is developing new standards; and by 2015 the text content of the Web will be microscopic compared with multimedia traffic. Indeed, one basic principle which we will need to adopt is one in which any rights of access are generic rather than medium or platform specific. There is no point, for example, securing rights of access to digital television and then be forced to start from scratch with High Definition television.
3. General Principles
One of the curiosities of analogue media is the way in which different traditions grew up. I cite the tiny but interesting example of United Kingdom alternative format production where pictures are always described in Talking Books and hardly ever described in braille books; a few braille books have tactile graphics but I have never seen an audio book with tactile graphics.
At a more generic level, there has naturally been a great deal of emphasis in television accessibility on audio description whereas web accessibility has concentrated on describing static graphics. In DVD accessibility, there has been proper emphasis on the accessibility of menus and 'start' procedures but this has not morphed into an equal concern for television electronic programme guides.
It seems to me that we should start with three basic digital media accessibility principles:
- That all media should be coded to recognised standards which include the principles of granularity and progressive enhancement so that there is always a manipulable version of the material; this means, for example, that any text file can be put through templates to alter size, font, leading, kerning, justification and page layout; that different elements or even layers of a picture can be separately manipulated for enlargement, contraction, simplification and contrast; that audio is delivered unmixed so that, for example background noise can be filtered out; and that additional material, such as story boards for people with learning difficulties, can be inserted. This can and should be done without threatening the authorial integrity of any product. Designing data in a granular way also allows the development of systems which adapt to user behaviour and this is vital for blind and visually impaired people who stake so much time to find what they want; it also allows a wide variety of search strategies;
- That all media should be distributed in a form independent of the platform and/or user interface, so that the end user can choose whether the material is accessed on a television, telephone, PDA, computer or any other device through the operation of macros. Part of the problem of access by blind and visually impaired people would be solved by the development of al universal, programmable, user interface/remote controller device but this would not deal rapidly enough with technological change. One particularly important aspect of this principle is the choice of whether assistive services and generic product are delivered from a television processor or from the remote controller; we also need to prepare for further hardware modularity which will allow cable-free access to assistive devices;
- Produced multimodally so that, as far as possible, graphics, audio and language can deliver the author's intention discretely but where the three strands are mutually reinforcing. If we think of high quality television with a 'talking' EPG and programme sub titling and audio description we will be pretty close.
There are a number of different but not mutually exclusive justifications for these requirements:
- Fiscal - State broadcasting and Government media funded from taxation should observe a very high standard of accessibility;
- Legislative - Governments may decide to guarantee a right of access to information that is in the public domain; this at the very least should be equal to copyright protection so that the two rights can be held in tension. In my view a universal, unqualified right will not work because compliance, not least from governments, will be very poor. We should either consider:
- A generic right from which an exception can be granted
- A targeted right which requires compliance from, for example, governments, agencies funded by governments, agencies licensed to operate by governments;
- Economic - While the general claim for a business case for accessibility rests on the doubtful premise of the unlimited availability of capital, the long economic 'tail;' of digital content and the ease with which it can be upgraded justifies a high degree of multi modal multi media in areas such as broadcasting, commercial cinema and government information.
I should say a further word about my caution over universal accessibility rights. The peculiar problem for access by blind and visually impaired people to digital media is the falling cost of producing static and moving pictures and the rising cost of producing clear, simple language. The plummeting cost of digital photography has revolutionised every aspect of the family and professional use of the internet and the trend towards pictures is now reinforced by globalisation and national multi-lingualism. At the same time, that very multi lingualism has put a high premium on simple, clear language but, at the same time, the general cultural trend in multi lingual societies is to use language less precisely. This is why the debate about how to enforce standards is so important. I think we will have to consider three factors:
- What blind and visually impaired people need and want;
- What capacity an organisation has to deliver;
- The social gain from delivery.
In many countries there will be an extreme dilemma as to whether new media comes under regulated broadcasting or much more liberal publishing legislation; the libertarian in me wants publishing but the accessibility advocate in me wants broadcasting. Whatever this turns out to be, we do not have much time to:
- Define our needs;
- Generate standards; and
- Justify what we advocate.
Web 2.0, with its almost unimaginable expansion, graphic content and sloppy coding should be a warning to us all; but not only because of what it tells us about accessibility but also what it says about creativity. For too long we have concentrated on the ability of blind and visually impaired people to access and process data created largely by government and industry; but we have spent very little time on the standards which enable people to contribute to social networks; and while it is by no means clear how far Web 2.0 will be a significant economic, as opposed to a social, phenomenon, we are fast approaching the time when our accessibility concerns will have to embrace creativity.
If we have learned anything during the past two decades it is that the policy makers have been unfocused while the engineers have been too obsessive. Now is the time for us all to form effective teams to realise the standards which will keep the disadvantage of blind and visually impaired people in the media world as small as possible.