Cost 219ter

Proceedings of

Extending Horizons

16th January 2007

Conference organised by COST 219ter

Accessibility to Next Generation Networks

SIR BERT MASSIE: Thank you John, and thank you for inviting me to speak to you today, an interesting thing this - communication. Does anyone remember when you were a child going to the pictures and seeing the westerns from Hollywood? And the Indians used to apparently communicate with smoke signals? Think about the blind Indian. He never got the message.

Then I used to see these films of William Tell and everyone communicating across Austria by yodelling; that’s a bit tough if you are deaf. And even the basic communication from the past we can see excludes many people.

So, that is why the current communication technology, the revolution really, is opening up the world and it's going to do so at a very swift rate. I think by opening up access for information to communications technology enables us to do things we otherwise could not. The Commissioner talked about satellite navigation in cars. I use it a lot, it's much easier than holding a map while you are trying to drive a car with hand controls. A hand on one control and the other on the steering wheel and thinking “what do I turn the map over with”? And so, technology is useful. But really, what it's all about is how we enable people to interact more easily with the world. That's what it's fundamentally about. How can disabled people interact easier with the world around them?

At the Disability Rights Commission, we recognise how vital communication technology is to deliver the change we want to see certainly for disabled people in Great Britain today but by implication for disabled people across the world because we do travel. One of the factors of today's technology is that our messages travel even more quickly. No matter what country you are in, you are very much in touch with home.

The mission we gave to the DRC, the Disability Rights Commission, was to create a society in which all disabled people can participate fully as equal citizens. We think that communications technology gives us a great deal of potential to help deliver that goal.

Now, people in Britain should at least be familiar with the DRC, but those of you from further afield won't be, I will just say something about it. We were established by Parliament, as an independent body in 2000 to promote the equality of disabled people. We also ensure that our disability equality legislation in this country, the Disability Discrimination Act originally of 1995 and subsequently amended and improved, is enforced.

We do have strong enforcement powers, and the Government has given us funding and we have a budget of just over £20 million a year, and we have about 200 staff as well as some outsourced services.

If people do discriminate in this country, we can prosecute, we can call them to account. Some companies have paid quite large amounts of compensation, in one case a quarter of a million pounds. That begins to excuse the mind of even large companies.

Now the Disability Discrimination Act, built on a number of measures, designed over the years to remove the obstacles disabled people face in our everyday lives and the Act covers employment education, and it defines who is disabled.

Now I'm not going to go into all that today but of relevance to your discussion today, is the duty on those in both the public and private sector who provide goods or services regardless of whether they are paid for, or they are provided free.

They must ensure that those goods and services are accessible to disabled people. In Britain, it is unlawful to refuse a service to a disabled person or to charge more for the service, or to offer people a lower standard of service on ground of their impairment.

There's a duty on both the public and the private sector, virtually every company, in the country if their service is not accessible to make a reasonable adjustment to enable it to be accessible. Now reasonable adjustments must be reasonable, so there's nothing unreasonable about this and this is why it's taken from the American legislation. We are not about putting people out of business but we are about making sure that people don't use trivial excuses to deny a service to a disabled person.

I'm not going to give you a lot of detail about our work today, but rather appropriately if you want to you can look it up on the DRC's website. I have a long e-mail address here, but if you go into Google, type in "Disability Rights Commission" and you will find us. That's the easiest way of doing it.

For many disabled people new developments in technology have been the tools to deliver greater freedoms and enable them to live independent lives. For example, I'm on this platform using a wheelchair. Now some people say the wheelchair is a blessed nuisance and sometimes they can be. The battery goes flat and tyres go flat and it can be a nuisance but the option is crawling around. The wheelchair is about the most useful thing I own. It's not a problem for me. It's the answer to a whole range of other problems. When you are developing phone systems, communication systems, and other technology, it is so easy for the manufacturers to ignore disabled people.

I'm going to talk a little today about the internet which is not your main focus but a relatively new technology. It is only about 15 years old, and yet, for disabled people, it's already gone dramatically wrong. It is so easy for your discussion to go wrong unless you get it right at the beginning. Now goods and services are increasingly delivered online, I received a letter from the Government yesterday at my home telling me that next month my car needs re-taxing. It also says, of course, you don't need to write to us, do it all online, it's quicker, cheaper. We haven't got to check your other documents we know whether it's insured or whether your car has an MoT, if it needs one, that's a safety test on the car. So the internet becomes both the global and local marketplace, and in sales most high street shops, supermarkets, even specialist outlets have gone online. Similarly customers can find out about goods and services and buy from each other and businesses from all parts of the world. One estimate has suggested that by 2009, 25% of all shopping will be done on the internet. And with accessible technology more disabled people have the opportunity to get what they want delivered to their door, and that opens up more opportunities for living independently.

Of course the downside is people who are so shy they don't even get to the shop and meet people it's not all good even then. And, this technology now is already providing greater opportunities for disabled people to play their part in choosing who runs the country, and the services, and methods such as online voting. This has now been developed in the UK by voting online and given that a shameful number of polling stations are inaccessible even now, that this is probably a good thing. But actually, we are now thinking of suing local authorities who don't make their polling stations accessible and thus denying democracy of disabled people.

Public services are going online, I have mentioned already car tax. But the targets set in 2000 to ensure that nearly all public services are online by the end of 2005 were very nearly met. The Government's committed nearly £7 billion over ten years to upgrading IT in the National Health Service. Now I gather it's not been a huge success. In fact according to the newspapers it's been a bit of a disaster but nonetheless the principle is there, and there will be new online booking systems, e-prescriptions and fast computer networks between NHS organisation. I will believe it when it comes. Anyway that's the idea. But when it does happen, it could actually help many of us a great deal.

But do disabled people benefit? One of our research bodies, the Social Exclusion Unit did some research on this, and noticed that of those who receive disability living allowance, 37% have never used a computer. Never mind never ordering online they have simply never used a computer. A paper for the DRC "Changing Britain for Good" noted that ITC use is lower for older citizens. Even after accounting for the age profile many disabled people are in the older group.

So in this short time, of the World Wide Web, and its global reach of versatility and the huge impact on the way we work, live and study, how has it been allowed to exclude so many disabled people?

If a company offers services through a website in this country, it is required by-law to ensure that website is accessible to disabled people. If they don't, any disabled person who can't use it can come to the DRC and say we want compensation from this company. If the company doesn't do it we can sue them and make them change their website.

So, we wanted to see first of all at the DRC just to what extent websites were accessible. One of my fellow commissioners, since died, Michael Burton led the study for us. We commissioned City University here in London to conduct the research for us, and they examined the home pages of a thousand websites. They actually looked at over 29,000 web pages in both the private and the public sector, and we assessed them against the WAI guidelines. Fewer than one in five websites, in fact it was 18%, conformed to even the lowest priority checklist for accessibility.

Although many of those companies said they are aware of the needs of disabled people and catering for them, when you looked at their websites there was frankly no of evidence of that. And of course the people who devised the WAI guidelines themselves readily acknowledged that the checkpoints themselves were not a guarantee of userability, and that websites need to be user-tested by disabled people. So, we established a panel of disabled people with different impairments that include blind people, partially-sighted people, people with dyslexia, physical impairments, people who had poor hand coordination, and hearing impaired people. And they looked at a selection of 100 websites from the thousand, and the results were that just over three-quarters of the tasks could be completed with difficulty. But 24% of the tasks were complete failures. This success rate was unequal depending on the panel member's impairment. For example, there was a higher success rate with people with physical impairment or hearing impairments and that's 85% of the tasks. The rate of people with dyslexia was only 2% lower but partially sighted people only 76% succeeded with the tasks, and that dropped to 53% for blind people.

Even when the task was done successfully there was another issue. It was the time it took blind people to use the websites. So, we did a control study of non-disabled people and we put them onto accessible websites and inaccessible websites. When they used an accessible website they did all the tasks a third quicker. Now think about that, in your office, how long do you spend on the websites? If the websites were accessible for every three days you are on it, it could be for two days, for every three hours you are on it for two hours. Now can you name one area in any of your companies where you could achieve a productivity increase like that and it costs you nothing? All you need is an accessible website.

To have an inaccessible website for your company is an act of absolute madness. The time people spend looking at your pages is in seconds or milliseconds. If it's not right they move on. So the message for industry is by not getting it right for disabled people you are driving away billions of pounds of custom. That is bad management. If any Managing Director, Chief Executive wants that for their company they should be sacked because they are blowing it for their shareholders magnificently, and for a public authority, the same public who can't use your websites are paying your salaries. Think about them.

So our investigation enabled us to identify the problems different people experienced using websites. Blind people were frustrated by the incompatibility between screen reading software and web pages, so assistive technology that was available to them was unable to detect some of the links and proved impossible to highlight from text to text-to-speech. They couldn't use the sites that were cluttered and complex.

Partially-sighted users complain about an inappropriate use of colours and poor contrast. They identified incompatibility with web pages and software used for magnification. Poor layout of pages. Predictably, graphic and text sizes were too small. That caused problems. With my specs, I have reasonable vision. But I despair at the number of websites I see with pale on paler blue: I think here is a company who does not want my business. I move on. I’m not prepared to spend the hassle of trying to master the home page if they don’t have the decency to design it properly. Some impaired users could not get their mouse to the box they needed. People with dyslexia could not navigate round the sites.

Now, when you talk about web design, and you actually recognise that the worldwide consortium guidelines are not sufficient, you have to ask, well, what do you do? The people who design these websites – of course, this group grew by anarchy, there was no guidance at all – are young whiz kids, by and large. They have perfect vision, perfect co-ordination. They design for themselves. So how do you get through to them?

We used the British Standards Institution, which is linked into ISO. They produced one of their documents, PS78, which is a publicly available specification. So you can download it. It has drawn together all the advice we could put together with other key stakeholders. It gives recommendations for management on the process and the guidance of upholding the current W3C guideline specifications. Crucially, it involves these people in the process, using the current software to assist with that. There is a lesson there for all of us.

I remember some years ago the French company Devro designed a lavatory. It was to be used in Britain. We had a specification. I contacted them and said, “We cannot get into this thing. We need proper lavatories.” They said, “We hadn’t realised, what can we do?” I said, “Your door opens automatically for a start, we need more time.” He said, “We will have to put on longer music!” So we suggested Handel’s Water Music would be appropriate!

They designed the new loo taking into account disabled people's opinions. They got a new toilet out. Non-disabled people prefer that as a toilet to use. We know which part of the anatomy we have to take into the lavatory but also the elbows, shoulders and everything else.

When you design new telephones, try to talk to disabled people. I remember years ago BT, whose building we are in today, decided, as a charitable gesture, they would produce a mainline telephone with large buttons. They didn’t think it would sell but they would do it as a charity for visually impaired people. It is one of their best-selling telephones.

They designed for disabled people and everybody said, “Ah, yes! An uncomplicated telephone: you can press the buttons, you simply make a telephone call on it.” Quite a good use for a telephone!
I find with some of the mobile phones I simply cannot use them. The buttons are too small. I just cannot see what is on the screen. I don’t buy them. So, if you want me as a customer, start talking to people like me, people of my age, and then you might get the right sorts of products.
We need to ensure that everybody designing websites knows what is needed. That is what the guidelines are out there to do.

It is also quite clear that just relying on people to do things – and asking them to do it nicely – is not good enough. Back in 1970, we had a law in Britain, which said that, in so far as reasonable and practical, all new buildings should be accessible to disabled people. Guess what, it was never reasonable or practical.

In 1985 we changed the rules. We said, “Unless you make new buildings accessible, you cannot build them.” Suddenly, it was reasonable and practical. Strong laws. If you have strong laws, you need to enforce the laws.

So now in Britain, increasingly, the built environment is accessible. Look around Britain, we have buildings 200, 300 years old. The Tower of London, 1,000 years old! You can understand those buildings being inaccessible. The web is 15 years old and already we are building in the same problems King William built in when he invaded Britain in 1066. It is outrageous we should be doing that in a technology only 15 years old.

The danger, as we go on with new communications technology, is we build in the same problems we built into our physical environment because we don’t think about all the population who are expected to use them. That is why we discovered in Britain, and across Europe increasingly, you will need strong laws. Many European countries don’t have the accessibility laws we have in the UK, but already the European Union has passed laws on employment of disabled people, and this has to be followed. It is already the law in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and many other countries. The European Union will almost certainly go on to requiring goods and services to be accessible for disabled people. The wise companies, the wise developers will anticipate that and start working towards it.

Accessible technology is a way to break down barriers. It can open doors to disabled people and create environments to which doors just don’t exist. But the opportunities will be missed unless we start now, start getting it right.

Another tool in the UK came into effect in December. This imposes a duty on all public authorities, every local authority, every government department, every hospital, every school, every organisation – like the DRC – that says certainly we should not discriminate. Actually, you have to do more than that. You have to design your policies so that you actually promote the equality of disabled people in everything that you do.

Something we are looking at is why should public authorities use public money – in effect, my taxes – to buy equipment I cannot use? So one thing we are looking at is for public authorities which spend over 40% of the money in this country to actually start saying, “OK, you can make whatever you want, but we’re not going to buy it.” “You make it accessible and you have a market. Make it inaccessible, that is fine! We have a lot of warehouses in Britain where you can store it, but we ain’t going to buy it.”

Moreover, why should the companies we deal with not have similar policies? It is potentially a powerful tool which is not biting yet – early days – but can transform the way in which we transact our business.

Those of you planning tomorrow’s technologies need to think about this today. You need to be in the market, therefore you need equipment which is going to be useable by all of us.

Last year, the need for improved access to the internet and other technologies was the focus of the UN International Day of Disabled People. It was in December when the UN passed its Convention on the Rights of Disabled People, which is going to impose new rights across the world. But introducing it on the day, Kofi Annan said access to information and communication technologies creates opportunities for all people, perhaps none more so than disabled people, as development of the internet and those technologies takes their needs more fully into account. The bias of prejudice, and infrastructure and inaccessible formats need not stand in the way of participation.

That is why I welcome the work of COST 219ter and the aims of this conference in seeking to deliver this goal.

There was a time when disabled people were perceived as being a minority of the population, just a few wheel-chair users, not enough to justify really doing anything. Providing we care for them, smile sweetly, it will be OK.

Well, let me tell you about disability. Very few people change their gender. You have an age, you have a religion. In my hometown, you have a football team. You can change your religion. Not your football team! Although the way they play sometimes, it is tempting! For most people, you know where you are in life.

But there is one club you will all join at some point: you will all become disabled. Don’t just think of wheel-chair users, think of your hearing going in your early 50s, because of all the discos that you attended when your mum thought that you were at a youth club. Suddenly, you have a heart attack; you can’t breathe as easily. You are involved in an accident. Or that job that you had done for years is suddenly painful because of a thing called arthritis.

It is an inclusive club. You are all going to come and join us. We welcome you. We are very friendly. But when you come and join us, we want you to enjoy life. Now is your chance. Design tomorrow’s technology so it is there for you tomorrow. So it is there for me today. Thank you.

DR JOHN GILL: We have time for a couple of questions if anybody wants to ask. Mr Peter Barker?

MR PETER BARKER: Peter Barker from Guide Dogs and RNIB. You mentioned the effect of legislation, I wonder if there is something more that we should be doing in legislation. Should we require the education of professionals, particularly those who are going to be leaders in IT, to have in their formative years a qualification in inclusion? Should they be required to understand these issues before they can actually practise in terms of designing IT systems?

SIR BERT MASSIE: It is always a huge problem changing courses on people’s training. Of course, the problem with people designing the internet is that most of them have had no training at all. They have sat in their bedroom, acquired a skill, well done them.

We had this difficulty with architects years ago. Architects are highly skilled people. They could tell you how to keep a building standing but not how to get into it! We actually started getting the change when architects were trained in their courses to understand that, whilst they saw steps as being beautiful, not everybody saw them in the same way.

I think inclusion training would be useful because many people see life through their own mirrors, and they don’t see the wide range of human beings for whom they are designing the technology. I think some sort of training would be useful.

DR JOHN GILL: We move on to the next speaker, which is Professor Patrick Roe, from Switzerland. He is Chairman of COST 219ter. He is a true COST person, even married into COST!

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