Cost 219ter

Proceedings of

Extending Horizons

16th January 2007

Conference organised by COST 219ter

Accessibility to Next Generation Networks

PROF PATRICK ROE: Thank you, John, for that and proposing this title. I learned today from Alan Newell that I should not pay attention to your suggested titles! I thought it was a useful piece of information! Also, I asked Ian Pearson if he could, for my second presentation, change my appearance and voice so you would think it was a different speaker! So I’m afraid you’re stuck with me again to close this conference.

I propose, with this 20 minutes or so – I hope to finish on time, John! – to try to look at the technological environment very briefly. I think a lot of people have done it today and are much better qualified than me. I will bring a few strands together to try to summarise some of the thoughts that have come from today. I also want to look at future COST 219ter work and, just in very practical terms, how we might put some of the ideas that have come out of today into our remaining year, and also look at the possibilities for the future.

I want to conclude with pointers from two interactive management workshops that we ran in Cyprus and Seville. This gave us some interesting pointers as to where we might focus our attention in the future. So I will go through the results of those workshops, some of the emerging technologies and services.

I think you are probably saturated with some of the things that are coming out. Nevertheless, I just wanted to flag – I haven’t left my book all day, or our book all day – chapter 2, which has a whole chapter edited by Julio Abascal and Robin Hollands, who contributed to this book and this particular chapter.

It gives a good snapshot of where we are today, and some of our existing services and some pilot studies. It will give you a good flavour of what is possible and emerging.

The first one has been mentioned today: safe navigation with wireless technologies. We want to be able to get from one place to another, know where we are, how to get there and have help. I think Sir Bert Massie said how useful it was to have help in that area. So there is a part of chapter 2 which is devoted to these kinds of services and possibilities.

Also emerging are the novel broadband services. Some examples are: service centres for people who are deaf-blind, distant education for different groups of people, digital distribution of talking books, which can be very useful to blind-users, broadband for people with intellectual impairments, and mobile video communications for people who are deaf.

This also can lead to access to video relay services through pocket interpreters. The idea being that if you are a deaf person you can go about your daily life; if you need to communicate with a talking person, you can access a video relay service through your 3G mobile phone and use sign language to have the interpretation you need. It is a pocket interpreter.

Relay services exist in many countries. They are continuing to adapt to technology, and I think they will continue to have a useful role in years to come.

We also have an example of an SMS-based emergency service from Finland. We’ve often said that SMS could not be used for emergency calls because they are not immediate. There is an example here from the Finnish regulator Ficora, and chapter 2 mobile and IP-based telephony.

Another area has to do with speech technology. It has been mentioned several times, lots of promises. We have given some indication of some of the possible applications, and I think we learned from Alan Newell that we have to take this with a pinch of salt.

I invite you to chapter 2. The area to watch, specially in the near future, is regulation and standardisation. This is clearly, for COST 219ter, something we have to monitor very closely over the coming year or two. I think I can safely say that we will continue monitoring both regulation and standardisation, and I very much welcome the invitation to focus our attention and participate more in ETSI work.

I think tomorrow we will look at how much we could focus our resources and go even further with the collaboration. I very much welcome the invitation.

There was an invitation from Gregg about the work going on in the United States, and this is a welcome invitation, something that we should make sure we take up and do. There has been regret from some people during the coffee breaks, saying they have seen the words “ambient intelligence”. They are not sure what it means. I’m not the best person to respond to that. There is a good chapter in the book about this. I think it is emerging as a very important area. We’re going to have walls that can talk to us. We are going to interact with fridges. So at least we have the possibility to do it. Whether we actually choose to do it is another matter – whether it is something that we really want or something people think we need.

Nevertheless, there are opportunities, and we have to look into these scenarios and identify the opportunities. Smart-house environments, clearly with the ageing population, is another very key area that we will keep monitoring and need to work on.

Smart interfaces. I was lucky enough to be one of the last to finish his presentation. Sometimes it has benefits. The benefit I had was – oh, I don’t get a picture! (Picture is not showing on slide) That’s wonderful! There is obviously some kind of smart thing here.

What I was trying to show was the Smartphone from Apple, which came out last week. For some reason, it is not showing up. You have to trust me! It is a Smartphone. As you know, Apple are bringing together an iPod, which was mentioned earlier, with a new mobile phone. Why it is interesting is that they have taken away all the keys. It will be a touch screen, touch-sensitive phone, with no keys on it.

Now, I tried to go on to the Apple website to find out whether blind people could use this phone. I didn’t get any information, but I did find other people who were looking for the same information as me. They said, “We don’t know whether it can or can’t.” It may be that they have thought of it and built it into the MAC operating system. I don’t know. But this potentially could revolutionise mobile phones. It is why we have to be so vigilant, keep monitoring, try to get through to industry: to make sure that when market-changing interfaces come out on to the market they really have thought about these issues. Specially from a company like Apple, which prides itself on usability. It may be that they have thought about it. Anyway, that was my example.

Time scale: COST 219ter will end, as I’ve mentioned, in one year’s time. We have one year to go on this particular cost action. We will be putting forward – I’ve had quite a few questions about this – a new proposal for a cost action, and it will go through the normal process for selecting cost actions. Just to mention it, you have to go through a transparent selection process. You put in a proposal, first of all a short proposal, then a longer one. If you get accepted, then a certain amount of cost actions get accepted. Of course, there is no guarantee that we will get accepted, but we will be making a proposal. So that is the time scale, in a very concrete way.

Of course, a lot of the ideas that we’re getting today will help us formulate what we think are the important points that we need to be working on. We have gone through in Dublin in our previous meeting, to identify some of the areas that we could be working on over the next year and what we could put in a proposal. Again, standardisation legislation is already mentioned. Regulation is an area we want to be looking into. I won’t go through all these points. I think a lot of them have been mentioned today.

Maybe the only one I could pick up again is the review of the electronic communications directive. We have to be active in this area. I very much liked Gregg’s new thinking on how to help industry guidelines and not stifle innovation, to give helpful information. Maybe we, as COST 219ter, can try to put some thinking into that as well, to explore strategies that could induce organisations to adopt inclusive design. There are some people in industry today who have been keeping a very low profile. We have to deepen that dialogue and very much welcome the participants of industry who are here today. I think we need to hear from them how we can help them, how we can better explore strategies for communicating with industry. This is a possible area of work, to continue analysing a wide range of scenarios and the implications that they will have for people with disabilities.

In the book, currently the analysis is on the ISTAG scenarios. There are many other scenarios out there, and it would be interesting to make comparisons and to try to get a picture of what the implications would be for the populations we are looking into. Then, to co-ordinate input into specification of the next generation networks and beyond. We all know that it’s too late once the specifications have been made for the fourth and fifth, or whatever it will be. So we need to be very aware of what is coming and make sure that we get any user needs and specifications, or user needs where the specifications need to be taken to account. The user needs to be active in this area.

The newer area is the role of ICT in the management of chronic medical conditions. This would be an area that COST 219ter has not looked into so specifically but certainly something we could expand into.

In terms of activities, one activity that we have not yet had within COST 219ter, or COST 219, is a summer school, an opportunity to train young students in a specific subject. A suggestion was made to have a summer school on testing for accessibility. This is a tool within cost, something that we will be investigating, whether we think it is worth focussing our attention and resources.

We have already committed ourselves to participating in a COST 298 conference –  "The Good, The Bad and The Unexpected": looking into broadband usage in general and usage. It is important within this conference to raise this issue of people with disabilities and elderly people. We welcome being able to participate in this conference, taking place in May in Moscow. We intend to have a final conference in January next year. We hope that many of you will be able to attend. We have not yet defined the subject. We need to go away and take it on board, a lot of the things that have been said today, in defining a conference. I already have quite some ideas, and I know a lot of the COST 219ter members have some ideas.       

Now, to the final part of my presentation. It is to do with the results from the interactive management, IM workshops that we held. Basically, you have a triggering question. In our case, it was considering the availability of powerful broadband technologies and the development of relevant scenarios. What are the obstacles that prevent us from producing practical applications? So I would very much like to thank Yianni Lauris, Mario Michaelides and Christoph for lending us the software for this particular interactive management workshop. Before I present the results, I need to briefly explain how it works. It is a brief summary.

First of all we had the triggering questions sent out to all the members of COST 219ter. Before the meeting we gathered, or Yiannis gathered all the responses. We had I think 64 responses of obstacles what we thought were the major issues, then once we got to the meeting, we discussed all these factors. They were grouped into different groups that were similar, and then we voted. We voted on what we thought were the most critical issues, and important issues. We each got five votes and posted our little stickers on what we thought were the most important factors.

Then we selected the factors that got the most votes. In our case we took 24 of these factors. Then you go to the second phase where you look at connections between the factors. If we resolve say issue (A) will it have a substantial effect on resolving issue (B) you debate it amongst the participants and when you get a two-thirds majority in one way or another you feed it into the software.

It's quite a long process as you need to look at all the different links between all the different factors, then you get the result which is this- which I think is quite difficult to read I'm going to split it up into two to make it a slighter easier.

I want to just show the overall picture so you have all the factors, all the 24 factors where we tried to find links. What's interesting the way to look at it is the factors at the bottom are the first factors that you need to tackle. So they might not be the ones that you thought were the most important but gives you a sort of road map of which are the issues and in what order you need to tackle them. As it so happens, the factors that we had voted as the most important are in fact mostly in the top half of this tree. So they are not the first ones that need tackling, but if I take for instance factor 42, this was I think the fourth most important factor it's towards the top. There's a lot of other issues I need to resolve before we resolve that one. That's how to interpret it.

Then what's also interesting is if we go to the bottom the foot of the tree, we have a lot of factors that are to do with for instance factor 14, poor connection between statements of user needs, and specific design requirements. This has come up today and comes up very often we instinctively always knew what the difficulties, we know what the user needs are, and how do we translate that into meaningful statements of requirements to the industry. This is something we still haven't yet cracked and need to work on. Clearly it's an issue that's going to block if we don't resolve this, we are not going to get higher up. And, for instance factor 31 which is in the middle this particular foot of the tree was the one that got the most votes, the weakness of legislation and standards make it very difficult to motivate the mainstream industry. This was actually the factor that got the most votes. But you are not going to resolve that until you have resolved the issues below it. I think in tomorrow's discussion of which areas we focus on I think we should take account of these findings. It is a very interesting methodology that's given us some scientific basis that can guide us in our future work. So thank you very much Yiannis for introducing this particular methodology to COST 219ter.
      
I'm drawing towards the end, and I would like to, before closing, I would like to first of all thank British Telecom for allowing us to use this wonderful Conference Centre, and providing all the back up staff for everybody in such a helpful way. Thank you very much BT.
      
I would particularly like to thank John Gill, Fiona Miller, and Tony Shipley who have worked very hard for quite some months on providing the programme today. Thank you very much.

Of course, all the speakers who were willing to give up their time to come today thank you very much.

And the Sign Language Interpreters, and the Palantypists (Speech-to-Text Reporters) thank you very much for your work.
      
Finally, I would like to thank you the audience for coming, thank you very much.

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