People with disabilities are being discriminated against
due to poor provision of user-friendly technology. In the recent
Turing Lecture, Chris Mairs, director of Data Connection, exposed
this sad state of affairs and looked at how the situation could be
improved.
"OAPs in sex orgy protest" - an intriguing headline and one
fraught with the possibility of misinterpretation, particularly if
the "reader" is blind and is relying on a voice synthesiser to
interpret it for them, said Mairs. The user's PC will misinterpret
it because it has no capacity for building on previous experience,
which enables humans to understand ambiguous sentences. Experience
is a prerequisite for complete interpretation, and no machine has
evolved to do this.
In the UK there is a legal and social framework which protects
the interests of its 8.6 million disabled people. The Disability
Discrimination Act insists that goods and services provided for the
public must be accessible to all. It covers all manner of
technologies, including websites, but does not compel technology
manufacturers and designers to consider disabled users; it only
requires that reasonable adjustments are made to accommodate
them.
Sometimes manufacturers do not see the opportunities - disabled
people spend £50bn a year in the UK alone. And smaller
organisations are probably only going to move towards greater
accessibility through legislation.
Website designers too need to be led to make content development
tools integral to their sites, not add-ons, said Mairs.
The Disability Rights Commission Website Report for 2004
surveyed 1,000 publicly available websites. No site reached the
highest compliance level, and less than 19% had made any effort to
include visually impaired people.
In HTML, one can tag the images, but these still need to be
specific in content and context to provide useful information to
someone who is visually impaired. To improve this situation there
needs to be appropriate structure behind the website design, and
web architects need to think carefully about how it can be read or
interpreted.
Through open design principles such as XML-tagged data and
Resource Description Framework for content interpretation, the
headline"OAPs in sex orgy protest" can be broken down for the
listener so that they can determine the true meaning of the
phrase.
Ultimately, if designers made things simpler for everyone, more
than just minority groups would benefit from talking visual remote
technologies.
The IEE and BCS can help by acting as information centres to
better inform designers and industry, by contributing time and
skills in the promotion of open source technologies, and in
lobbying government.
Disability is diverse. As a consequence, we cannot possibly
address accessibility for everyone all of the time. Universal
accessibility is impractical, but it is ultimately in everyone's
interests to try to improve the situation, and if ethics is not the
driving issue, then potential increased revenues should be, Mairs
concluded.
Turing Lecture
In recognition of Alan Turing's contribution in the field of
computing, the BCS and IEE established the Turing Lecture in 1998,
and this series of talks continues to promote debate and
innovation.