Cost 219ter

Proceedings of

Extending Horizons

16th January 2007

Conference organised by COST 219ter

Accessibility to Next Generation Networks

PROF ALAN NEWELL: No! Thank you John! I don't know how to live up to that!
      
I think it's good to start off by congratulating COST 219 in all the little postscripts they have to themselves and what they have achieved over the years they have been working, and made a real difference. It led to I think the introduction of the RIGA declaration which was a tremendous achievement. But much remains to be done, and we have a day during this forum of forgetting that we are singing to the choir as somebody pointed out earlier to me.
      
I'm not sure the message has got through as far as much as some people imagine. And, we have heard today a lot about the future of technology, both from the sublime to Ian Pearson! But, what I want to do is talk about a much more important topic, I want to talk about the future of people. Those of you who follow the news know that the something should have happened – the future is old. We already have more people over 65 than under 60, and the trend is towards an increasingly older population. As I point out older people do include people with disabilities, they include how Ian Pearson described myself as fully functional in some respects! But they also include people with major physical sensory disabilities, people with major cognitive dysfunction, frail people, people with dementia and also an interesting group the long-term disabled people who are growing old. So, we have this situation of old age which is very different from the traditional view of a disabled person as a young highly motivated single disability.
      
We have all got, well those of you of my generation have all got multiple minor impairments and some have got a major impairment on top of that.
      
Also, older people tend to have a rather different attitude to technological innovation, and I say that, not technology, and a very different distinction. This is due to a combination of reduced memory, the lack of reduced ability to adapt, but also to cynicism as a result of a historical perspective on technology.

So, what can the older generation expect from these new services? Can we expect a utopia? Useable technology for older people inclusive and appropriate? Which is the name of a project of ours you will be some of you will know. Is that what we are going to have - a utopia? Or, are we going to have a dystopia where older people and disabled people are disenfranchised by technological advances?  As I have said older people like my good self do have some sort of historic perspective on technology. I remember, we are allowed to reminisce, I remember in 1965 I was working on speech recognition machines, and the engineers said in two years' time they will be working in the laboratory, and in five years' time they will be a great commercial success. Well we heard roughly the same thing said today that speech technology will be working in the laboratory in two years, and a great commercial success. So I have a little bit of cynicism about the advances in technology. But why should older people in particular be disenfranchised? Let's have a look at the history and many older people are scared, confused, unimpressed by software. Internet shopping, I have a friend of mine who is 85, has slight problems with his eyesight, and a bit of tremor, and he got a phone call from Tesco's to say, "Excuse me Sir, did you really want to order 1,111 tins of grapefruit segments?".
      
Internet banking, I don't know about you but I can't remember my user name let alone my password on many of the internet banking sites that I come across. Computer games: do older people really want to play the sorts of computer games that are available to everybody? Do they want to spend the twilight of their lives shooting people?!
      
Virtual socialising - we have heard this before. It's made an amazing difference to many young people. In contrast to what somebody said, I think with some people it can have a therapeutic effect, I can talk about that at another time but not now. But, with the exception the geriatric user on YouTube I don't think there's anybody over 45 who is on any of these social networking sites.
      
Again, a wonderful way I believe in which older people could increase or improve their quality of life, but it's not designed for them.
      
Mobile phones. We heard about all about mobile phones, the Vodafone simply designed for people over 40, so does that include people over 50 I wonder? I think probably not. So we haven't got, with the exception I think of a Japanese phone, we haven't got very many phones that are designed for people like me who can't even use their wife's mobile phone.
      
An even simpler change in technology is cordless phones, I know old people who can't use a telephone now they have got a cordless phone. They pick it up off the thing and assume that's going to connect them and it doesn't unless you are connected and unless somebody rings you. If they ring you, you pick it up it connects you. If you want to ring somebody else you pick it up and have to press a button sometimes, I think! And I lose something like 33% of the calls I make on a cordless phone because I press the button when I shouldn't. So, cordless phones are not a very great change in technology, and those of you old British people will remember the button A and button B. Friends of mine of 80 years old just couldn't make calls after the change from button A and button B phones.
      
VCRs are a wonderful example of technology, and the way you can tell whether there's an old person in the home, the way you can tell whether there's a young person in the home, is whether or not the clock flashes 12 on the VCR! And then of course we have digital television. I'm not sure, I almost say put your hands up if you understand what digital television is, I had one guy who said of course it's digital you use your finger! A man clearly with a Latin education.
      
And people are not bowled over by 100 channels and don't understand the metaphor of programme guides, yes. And they need their long distance glasses to read the programme guide if not the binoculars, and they need their reading glasses to use the remote control, and a little bit of tremor, and by the time they have changed their glasses they have forgotten with a they are supposed to be doing yes? And, in a recent report by our regulators Ofcom, they report that 65% of the over 65s voluntarily exclude themselves from the new medium. What a wonderful phrase. I was thinking about this and wondered if a new chain of restaurants were to open where there was no menu unless you paid, and that the choice of food was very great but perceived by many to be all rubbish, and there were 300 steps up to the restaurant, and the room was in half darkness and the menu was in 6 point type and you had to use chopsticks. Now, if a review was done of that restaurant would the management say oh well, all these old people have voluntarily excluded themselves from our restaurant we don't have to do anything except try to persuade them to come to our restaurant or would they have a radical rethink?

Fortunately I don't have to do this very often but I came in on the tube at 9.00am this morning, and I wondered whether wheelchair users and the claustrophobic voluntarily excluded themselves from the tube. Or perhaps blind people voluntarily excluded themselves from the print media. And it did strike me that voluntary exclusion is a wonderful way of getting around the Disability Discrimination Act isn't it? You don't have to make things people can use, you say they voluntarily exclude themselves. The other thing we know about assistive technology is most of it is abandoned very, very quickly and those are a couple of figures, 50% is quickly abandoned and 15% never used and another survey said 90% was discarded. So voluntary exclusion, and discarding assistive technology, why?
      
And, I don't believe that designers and manufacturers wake up each morning and say how can I exclude more people today from my equipment? They might act as if they do, I don't believe that they fundamentally want to do that. It seems to me that there are a number of possibilities. They, the designers, the 25-year-old whiz-kids have got little knowledge of older and disabled people's characteristics and much more importantly their needs and their wants. I draw a great distinction my house is full of things I want and almost nothing I need and it's not going to change as I grow even older.
      
Poor requirements gathering, not finding out what old people want. A medical model of disability, we have produced equipment which is just going to correct the faults of these poor people rather than support them. And a patronising design approach. There was a wonderful example the Guardian did a review of a new mobile phone I can't remember which it was, it was designed to be simple. Simple phone for old people! In fact it was five-year-old technology which was really crap but because it was, it looked as if it was old they thought old people would buy it. I can assure them we are wiser than that!
      
Poor aesthetics. There's clearly a view amongst designers that once you reach the age of retirement you lose any aesthetic sense whatsoever, and therefore you could have any old crap design in your house. A friend of mine tried to get a grab rail for her bath which didn't turn her house into a hospital and found it almost impossible.
      
Now what we have, one of the things that has been movement and COST 219 has been about is design for all, universability you name it. And it's done a great deal. It was a very important phase that we went through. Particularly because it's all about design. And design for all is a useful concept. I have some problems however, and I have been talking to designers, and they say everyone is a useless design brief. I need to know who, if I'm a good designer, I need to know who my user is. So everyone is not a particularly good design brief. It was mentioned before that accessibility can often override usability. So you can have wonderful websites and which are absolutely accessible, and completely unusable.
      
It can encourage design for the impairment. So let's forget about the user and let's just design about the impairment, and you don't have to think about them as real people. It can produce the concept that we have got this thing that works for all reasonable people, let's just move it a bit so we can include one or two other of the poor guys that can't use it at the moment. So a sort of add-on. And, the last point is that, and you will be noticing, and those of you who have known me for a long time will notice in me, there's a major challenge in cognitive function as people get older. And this isn't rarely approached in the design, the traditional design for all ideas, and actually what they usually do. I'm being unkind. Why not? What they usually do is provide accessibility on the base of much more increased cognitive load. And I mean the example is if you have got poor eyesight we give you a speech synthesis machine, and there's a significant cognitive load involved in understanding speech synthesis. If your cognitive ability has declined you won't be able to understand the words you will be able to hear them and decode each one you might not be able to understand the sentences that's my problem with design for all.

This is the design for all ideas. I suggest we want to move away from design for all to design focussed on older and disabled people. This has been mentioned before – a primary focus on the users.

I believe the way forward is trying to work in what we in Dundee call mutual inspiration. The older people work together in a creative mode rather than the designer developing something, seeing how a person operates it and goes away and does something else. We need to find innovative ways of interacting with users.

Last but by no means last – most important – is that we need designers to develop a real empathy with older people as real people and not just another user group. As has been pointed out, all the designers are 25 – and God help them when they get to our age! We have been looking at that problem in Dundee.

One of the things we’ve put into our new building is a user centre where we have a cohort of over 200 seniors, as they say in America, who work with us to design equipment for them. We also work in dementia day centres, residential homes and so on.

In answer to somebody’s question, that is part of the training for students. We don’t give them a formal course on accessibility and usability and so on, but they are introduced to older people during their research, during their time in the department, and we’ll work with older people to design a bit of software. By God, that doesn’t half make a change to their views!

There are, however, some challenges in communicating with this group of users. There is language and experience barriers. Half the people we’ve talked to over 65 don’t understand what a scroll bar is. Half of those think it ought to move in the other direction. Yep, because a scroll bar controls your eyes and they expect it to control the paper. They also can’t see it, because their peripheral vision has fallen away. They don’t understand the term “boot-up”.

When they were in their formative years, the “knob” that controlled something was connected to a piece of stick. It was direct. Menus remove that concept completely. Jargon, concepts and metaphors. In my day, for example, a “stud” was a thing you held your collar on with, and “going all the way” meant taking the bus to the terminal! “Hardware” was hammers and nails. “Software” didn’t exist.

There are significant issues with user-testing. We are a bit wary of just saying to engineers, “You talk to users, do your experiments on them.” The people we work with have got very little self-confidence in their use of computers. The last thing we want to do is destroy it. It is so easy to destroy that last little bit of self-confidence.

Brilliantly, if you show an older person – I’m generalising – the piece of equipment you developed, they will say always that it is good. If they can’t use it, they will always say it is their fault. There is no concept that it is the equipment that is absolutely no good.

Negative self-image and confidence makes the communication between engineers and designers difficult. For the sake of the industrious within the audience, it is time-consuming, expensive and therefore difficult to organise.

Allegedly, lacking in cost-effectiveness, a term always used by people who don’t understand that cost is easily measured and effectiveness is a different dimension, more difficult to measure. It is a wonderful way of trying to stop things from happening. We have been looking at ways in which you can help people, designers and users, interact. It is all about the communication of ideas.

What we did was look at whether there were any powerful tools for communicating ideas in a very powerful way. We decided to use theatre because theatre is about transmitting ideas in a really powerful way. We believe and have shown that the use of theatre encourages interaction between the players, the users, and the audience. Rather than what we tend to do in our design studies, which is just observe users doing things.

Therefore, we decided we would have a new building, and we wondered about having a usability lab. You sit the user on the other side of a two-way mirror and you observe them. What a wonderful way of destroying any possible interaction between the user and the designer.

So we decided we’d use theatre. That encourages interaction between people. It forms a focus for discussion. So what do we do?

Looking at the use of theatre in requirements-gathering, a professional script-writer researches the issues, both talking to researchers and to older users. They then develop dramatic scenarios which raise the questions that the researchers want answering. Then, crucially, these scenarios are performed by professional actors and can be done on video or live theatre. They can be used to facilitate discussion.

I was rather hoping that we would be able to put on live theatre for you today, but we were not able to do that. What I’m going to do instead is show you an example of this. What is on the screen in front of you is the studio theatre which we have in applied computing. I think we must be the only computing department in the world to have a studio theatre as its laboratory and a script-writer theatre director as an artist-in-residence.

You can see on the screen the theatre, and that is the audience watching the play. There are a couple of professional actors, a television screen and a facilitator. What appears on the television screen also appears on the screen behind you for the audience to see.

One of the projects we have used that for is looking at the potential of interactive television for older people. They don’t know what it is, so it is rather like Henry Ford being told if they want horses with longer legs…!

What we want to do is set up some scenarios and get the audience to discuss this. Next we have a short five-minute clip showing a bit of theatre and the audience discussion.

(VIDEO PRESENTATION FOLLOWS)

(VIDEO DRAMA)
GIRL: I think you have to point it at the telly!
GRAN: L, E, W. Where is “W”?
GIRL: Just there in the corner.
“Lewis at Blue Yonder dot com”!
GRAN: Now, do I press that one there?!
(Grandson appears on television)
GRAN: Oh, look! Oh! It is Gavin! That is great! Hello, Gavin!
GIRL: I don’t think he can hear you. Switch the sound on.
GRAN: Hello, Gavin! Say hello to your Gran!
GAVIN: Gran! Flippin’ heck!
GRAN: Don’t speak to your Gran like that. It’s digital, my TV. It lets you tune in and talk to you.
GAVIN: Gran, you are in the way, I’m watching TV!
GRAN: Oh, sorry!
GAVIN: Sorry, Gran, it is my favourite programme. Great to see you, but can you come back later, do you mind?
GRAN: OK, I will try later. Are you in this afternoon?
GAVIN: Yes, but I will be watching the match!
GRAN: Oh, well, I will try again some other time! How do I switch it off?
GIRL: Try pressing the camera button again.
GRAN: Damn thing! I will switch it off!
(VIDEO DRAMA END)

(VIDEO PRESENTATION CONTINUES)

(VIDEO DISCUSSION)
NEW SPEAKER: Let’s go back to the discussion, including Peggy and Joe.
NEW SPEAKER: I think it would be awful if your privacy was invaded. It would be awful if somebody just pushed the button. All sorts of things could be going on!
NEW SPEAKER: Yes, it raises some questions!
(LAUGHTER)
NEW SPEAKER: Who knows what you have been doing!
NEW SPEAKER: The instruction is not clear enough then.
NEW SPEAKER: Well, that is a good question. If you have this facility, what sorts of things would be necessary as part of that facility?
NEW SPEAKER: Presumably, you would be able to switch the webcam off anyway.
NEW SPEAKER: Yes, you would have the ability to switch it off.
NEW SPEAKER: You would see a message coming through, and the choice is whether or not you accept it.
NEW SPEAKER: Yes, some sort of message asking whether you want to receive it. If you were in the middle of Coronation Street, you would possibly say no!
NEW SPEAKER: Someone was trying to get through to your TV, they would get a response back, like Gavin did.
NEW SPEAKER: You could spend your entire waking life in front of the television set watching programmes you have recorded from this source. If you are out in the evening, you have these programmes. To sit into the early hours of the morning, trying to see the daft things – one would have to be selective about what you were recording and what you wanted to see. We live on earth for one time. You would sit there watching the programme. Most of them are rubbish!
NEW SPEAKER: You always have the offer. You brought up the question of what happens if someone sends a message, like a pictorial message and you are recording something. Do you want that on your video? That is an interesting one. Any other comments? Any general feelings? Obviously, you have raised a lot of technical problems about how it would have to be organised to protect privacy, to make it easy to use, to make it clear to use.
If I go through this sequence of buttons, if something goes wrong, you could be completely lost. You don’t understand how it works.
NEW SPEAKER: The comment about one-to-one was so important, if somebody shows you what to do, because you are blindly pressing buttons. I mean, what you are saying, you are saying that you don’t know this stuff. I was a radar person in the army, I would put things back together again and it would work. I don’t understand this stuff which they use in computing.
 
(END VIDEO PRESENTATION)

PROF ALAN NEWELL: That was, I thought, was a wonderful line on which to end for those young people who think that in 40 years' time you will be able to use all technology because you can use it now.
      
And be that a warning to you!

So that was a five minute clip that we produced. I think for that series three ten minute scenarios, and a complete session of two hours, and I hope that gives you an idea that we were getting really very useful information, which I don't think we would have got in any other way without the actors.

We have used the same thing with students and engineers, and we have evaluated it does make a significant difference to their views about designing for older people. So, if I come back to the title which I was given and haven't followed! The new service provision it seems to me, needs to be focused on communication with the user group, proper requirements gathering, and novelty and beauty. We need beauty in our designs and we have very, very little of it at the moment. I believe there's a wealth of useable, and appropriate new services and we have talked about them before and will they be a utopia for old and disabled people? Or will all these things be designed in such a way that people like myself will be more and more isolated from the mainstream due to the inappropriately conceived and badly designed technology which we have grown to know and hate?

Thank you.

DR JOHN GILL: Thank you very much Professor Newell, amusing as always and hopefully stimulating, and we have time for questions anybody? The man in the back row there?
      
MR BRADLEY BRADY: Thank you, Bradley Brady from Ofcom I wanted to follow up on voluntary exclusion, and just to say at Ofcom we didn't take that at face value and say fine they don't want to be part of this we are doing more work to understand what's lying behind voluntary exclusion and what are the barriers there, and presumably they are ease of use is a large one for older people and we are doing more work to follow up on that to reassure people, we are doing more work on usability to put a framework around the work we are doing so it it's based on user needs and priorities rather than react on projects coming to us. Hopefully later this year when we report on consumer experience you will see work that's developing on that line.
      
PROF ALAN NEWELL: Thank you for saying that I never allow the truth to spoil a good joke! I do appreciate the problems, and I think the, you will agree that the research was done was on today, and it wasn't looking at what the future might hold. And I'm more than happy to work with you to discuss the possibilities of how design for the future can be made more accessible, more useful.
      
DR JOHN GILL: A question right over to the extreme side. Can you wait for the microphone please?
      
NEW SPEAKER: Maggie Ellis a member of PhoneAbility, and also an occupational therapist. I think that it's wonderful you have this research Alan, we are all jealous but most of the world can't have either your 200 users or your theatre. So we have to use simpler systems. I would like to guide people to CENELEC guide six which referred to "ability" not disability, and gives guidelines about the needs of older and disabled people which perhaps others will be able to use. So that's one point.

The other point that hasn't been made this morning which is, it's very strange how technology does linger in an old-fashioned way because we still are stuck with the qwerty keyboard. Thank God the mobile phone has an alphabet in the right order but the qwerty keyboard on computing is so old-fashioned as to be unbelievable. And only very special input devices have the alphabet going from A-Z. So please can you do something to influence that?
      
PROF ALAN NEWELL: On the second point the research shows that an alphabetic keyboard is just as difficult to use as a qwerty lay out. And the research also shows that the improvement you get from moving from qwerty to a more ergonomic layout gives you perhaps 10% improvement on a trained user. So the one thing that I am desperately sad about is that when I started a course in when I was in charge of a course in computing, at Dundee and I no longer am, that I had the thought of training all my students to be touch typists. I think I would have made more use for the computer industry by doing that than any of the lectures they ever had from me. I think the qwerty keyboard is not as bad as it is laid out to be.

The second point that I would again not disagree with on this one you will be pleased to know, but my presentation was to say that this is the sort of thing that people in at least in large industries ought to be doing, they ought to be spending money on collaborating with users, they ought to be spending money using my group as consultants, to do the work that they can't do because they haven't got a theatre. And I am not going to let the large industries off the hook by saying all you need to do is read the WC3 guidelines or whatever, because we know that that doesn't work as well as actually talking to real users. Thank you for those comments Maggie.
      
DR JOHN GILL: The man over there...
      
NEW SPEAKER: Hello my name is Brian Seaman I work for a charity called Tourism for All. What I want to tell you about is something that I have noticed personally, my mother is 87, she is losing her hearing, and losing some of her vision and her mobility is not what it was. Nevertheless she still likes to participate as much as she can in society. She currently has an analogue television, and it had a very difficult control which it came with, we managed to source a control which had five buttons on it. One was on-off switch and one was up-down volume, two buttons one for up and down and the other was for changing the channel. So channels up and down. She has finally managed to master that. Low and behold in 2012 I think it was, digital television will be with us in the London and south-east area. Hopefully she will live long enough to see it. Unfortunately it comes with a control which has about 46 buttons. She's only just managed to manage five, so how do we get over that in the future?
      
PROF ALAN NEWELL: At the risk of being even more sad than you are, she won't be able to remember 105 for Channel 5, and 117 for MoreFour or whatever it's called and probably won't be able to hit the buttons fast enough for the system, and this happened to a friend of mine who took cable and had to send it back because she couldn't do it. And what is even more hilarious if you have that sense of humour is that the current idea is for the position on the programme guide to change depending on how popular the programme is. The only thing these people have got going for them is that BBC is at the top and they are going to remove that as well, and I will be talking to the people at Ofcom about these comments of mine, and I will take on board what you have said. I think it's actually potentially more dangerous than you think it is and this will produce more voluntary exclusion I'm sure! Sorry.
      
DR JOHN GILL: Time for one more question... Tony Shipley in the front row...
      
TONY SHIPLEY: Alan, when you were talking about design for all, you put up the preferred alternative of designing specifically for old people for disabled people. But, most of my elderly friends take the attitude no, I don't want one of those things it's for old people and marks me out as different. How do you get around that one?
      
PROF ALAN NEWELL: One of the ways is the way the Ford motor company got around it and the Ford Focus was designed specifically for old people with poor mobility but it's not advertised as that. And, people before me have said how designing for old people can produce things which are good for everybody. There's a difference between the design, and how it's presented. I think that the way your question was going, and I can't find a polite way of saying this it's not an attack on you, that if you get something for older people it's going to be a patronising sort of thing yes? And the advertisers are even more to blame than the manufacturers, and, you very rarely see an advert for older people where they are doing anything you would want to do yourself you know. I as purely research, purely research, and recipient for life of the Saga magazine, and there's a couple of wonderful adverts in the latest one with a guy of, I would say about my age, an old guy, on riding his bicycle on the sand with a somebody as old as my wife leaning on the back both half naked, and I thought yes I will buy whatever that is! Laughter... so, it's a perception thing. And the media is to blame - all old people are doddery and stupid aren't they? He says falling off the stage!

DR JOHN GILL: Thank you very much Alan, and we are dead on time for once...

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