Bridging the Gap? Access to telecommunciations for all people

Chapter 4. Future strategies

Pier Luigi Emiliani, Constantine Stephanidis

4.1 Introduction

New developments in information technology and telecommunications are considered the most important factor currently affecting the way people lead their lives. Fundamental changes brought about by technological innovation concern not only the organisation of the education and work environments, as was the case until recently, but also in the way people organise their social activities, keep in contact with other people, interact with the environment and entertain themselves. This has an important impact on the possibilities and modalities of socio-economic integration of the population at large, but is particularly critical for people who have difficulties in communicating and accessing information, due to their lack of necessary sensorial or motor abilities (i.e., people with disabilities) or sufficient cognitive resources to cope with the complexity of the emerging environment and the control of new technology (e.g., older people).

Technological developments are not good or bad in principle, but their impact depends on the way technology is used. In the case of current technological evolution, its impact depends on how technology is made available and accessible to all potential users. If it is accessible, it can in many instances contribute to fundamental improvements in interpersonal communication and access to information (an example is the improved situation of blind people in reading and writing, which has been made possible by computers). If it is not accessible, however, technology may be the cause of increased segregation.

This chapter discusses some of the challenges that need to be addressed in the context of the information society. It does not aim at exhaustively reviewing current developments in technology and foreseeing in detail the likely outcomes of these developments, but rather at looking at the emerging situation from the perspective of the citizens, trying to figure out, at the extent to which this is possible, the main features of the new information and telecommunication environments that people will have to interact with, and what is needed to make such an environment accessible.

The main focus in this chapter will be on the impact of technological development. Other important aspects, such as the impact of legislation and standardisation, are analysed in chapters 3.5 of this book.

4.2 Historical background

When the interest in telecommunications for people with disabilities started, the situation was relatively simple: the main service for interpersonal communication was the telephone, and information was distributed using radio and television. Computers were mainly stand-alone units used in closed and specialised communities (e.g., scientists and businessmen).

In principle, the telephone was a fundamental problem only for profoundly deaf people. For all other groups of people with disabilities, solutions were within reach with relatively simple technological adaptations. Blind people needed only keyboards with an easy identification of the layout (a simple tactile sign on one of the keys was normally enough). Visually disabled people needed only enlarged keyboards, which could accommodate also most of the requirements of motor disabled people. Viva-voice equipment was able to accommodate people who had problems in using the receiver. Simple images on the keyboard, e.g., the pictures of the mother and other relatives, could support cognitively disabled people in connecting with the persons represented in the images. The technology used for implementing the telephone lent itself to the possibility of capturing the signal (electromagnetic induction) and then amplifying for hard of hearing people. Even the problems of profoundly deaf people were facilitated by the telephone system itself, when it was discovered that the telephone line could be used to transmit digital data (characters) with suitable interfaces (modems). It is true that these simple adaptations are not normally widely available, not only for market reasons, but also because, very often, decision makers are not aware of the related problems and the available solutions. However, in principle, most of the problems in accessing telephones have simple technological solutions.

Radio was an important support for the diffusion of information. In principle, radio can be a problem for deaf people. But amplification is inherent in a radio system, therefore problems occur only for profoundly deaf people.

Television was the first example of a service that used the combination of the visual and acoustic modality, not redundantly, but for conveying different types of information. Being more complex, television could create more difficulties for people with disabilities, but it had inherent capabilities to overcome some of the problems. It is evident that television can create problems to blind, visually disabled and deaf people. On the other hand, the fact that additional information can be transmitted, exploiting the available bandwidth, allows support for people with disabilities to be added to the standard service. Therefore, programmes can be subtitled for deaf people and scenes without dialogue can be verbally described for blind people. The latter service is not very simple to implement, due to perceptive and psychological difficulties, but is technically feasible and has been recently implemented partially - but successfully, in many countries. In addition, text services can be set up (e.g., televideo, teletext) solving some of the problems related to access to information by profoundly deaf people.

Television is a simple example of a general situation. An increase in the complexity of a system or service increases also the number and extent of problems that such a system or service can create to people who have reduced abilities with respect to the majority of the population. At the same time, technical complexity often implies additional features to recover from this unfortunate situation, and the possibility of using the same technology in an innovative way to solve problems not yet addressed.

For example, transmission of data through a telephone line opened the possibility of new services, both of general use and specifically for people with disabilities. The fax service, for example, has been very important particularly in the business environment. Several attempts have been made to use it in the Assistive Technology field, for example for transmitting written or graphical information by blind people for remote reading or description. These attempts have not been very successful, probably because the fax has not reached such a diffusion to make it available everywhere, and its use may imply being considered a "special" user. Text telephones for deaf people, allowing real-time interactive written communication through the telephone line have been also produced and distributed worldwide with a varying degree of success according to the country. One factor that had been holding back greater usage of text telephones was the lack of an international standard. However this has been addressed with the introduction of the ITU V.18 Standard. This form of communication also requires that both the caller and receiver have a text telephone, although in a growing number of countries where relay services have been set up, this is no longer the case. These relay services allow deaf or speech impaired people to communicate with people who do not have a text telephone. SMS services on mobile phones are also being widely used by deaf people and whilst it can be an effective means of fulfilling many communication needs, it can by no means completely replace text telephones and relay services (SMS is not a real-time interactive form of communication).

The situation started to change due to the development of computers and technology able to increase the bandwidth of communication channels, which ultimately contributed to create a completely new environment for communication and access to information, as will be briefly described in the following section.

From the user's perspective, the first important innovation was brought about by the introduction of personal computers. Immediately, personal computers were seen as a new and very important possibility of supporting people with disabilities in communication and access to information. Unfortunately, they were not directly accessible by some user groups, such as blind people and people with motor impairments of upper limbs. However, the possibility of encoding information instead of printing it on paper was immediately perceived as of paramount importance for blind people. Therefore, personal computers had to be made available for them. Adaptations were investigated, and through the synergy of new transduction technologies (mainly synthetic speech) and specialised software (screen readers), capable to "steal" information from the screen and make it available to an appropriate peripheral equipment, coded information was made available to blind people [e.g., Mynatt & Weber, 1994]. Blind people could also read information retrieved from remote databases, and write and communicate using electronic mail systems. Adaptations for motor disabled people (special keyboards, mouse emulators) and for other categories of disabled people were also made available.

From the short description of the traditional ways of communicating and accessing information some characteristics are relevant in the perspective of the subsequent analysis:

Services with predefined characteristics have been available;
These services use single or combinations of media (e.g., television);
There was a clear distinction between interpersonal communication and access to information;
Systems for accessing information were mainly transmissive in nature, and non interactive. Simple interactive services for accessing information became available using computers, but their interactivity was limited and normally took place through predefined interaction patterns.

When interest about accessibility by people with disabilities and elderly people became wider, the use of such equipment and services propagated. The situation asked for adaptations of existing systems, which were becoming slowly available with long delays. Subtitling for deaf people and description of scenes, for example, started to be made available a few decades after the introduction of television transmissions. Changes were faster with computers. Screen readers for blind people, for example, were made available a few years after the appearance of personal computers in the market. But computer technology was moving very fast. Text screen readers became obsolete when Windows substituted DOS. They were substituted by Windows screen readers, but again with a delay of some years.

As a preliminary conclusion, it can be said that the relevance of telecommunications and information technology for the socio-economic integration of people with disabilities and elderly people was recognised, and the worldwide technological scene was dominated by a set of established services. The only available possibility at the time was to try to adapt them to be accessible by people with disabilities and elderly people.

4.3 The emerging situation

4.3.1 Fusion between Information Technology and Telecommunications

In the background of the commonly available and employed technology, a revolution was being prepared. The Information Society, which has a direct impact on the everyday life of everybody. The first component in this revolution is the development of computers, and more generally of digital technology. In the digital world, audio, pictures, video, text, etc., are no more present as individual physical signals with unique characteristics (e.g. bandwidth). Numbers can be freely transmitted and stored on computers. Multimedia systems are a reality. Not withstanding limitations of bandwidth for transmission and memory for storage, all the different components (audio, images, video, text) have equal possibility of representation and can be freely intermixed. Although digital technology has been around for some decades, difficulties impeding a real take up of digital multimedia systems and services have arisen, on the technological side, from lack of sufficient bandwidth and storage capabilities, and on the user side from an insufficient diffusion of the concepts of network connectivity, interactivity, combination of different media, and mixing of functions of interpersonal communication and access to information.

Recently, many users have become familiar with these new concepts through the widespread use of the Internet. Correspondingly, technology for broadband communication has been developed, and is expected to reach the general market in the near future, pushed by the need for high-speed interactive Internet services.

This new technological situation is often referred to as to the fusion between information technology and telecommunications. This fusion must not be seen from the trivial technological perspective that telecommunication networks are now built using computer technology (a telephone exchange for example is really a specialised computer) and that computers are normally networked. What is really interesting is that computer intelligence is progressively being transformed into a distributed function. A computer is not any more conceived as a stand-alone system working on its own data, but as an intelligent agent able to cooperate with other intelligent agents (hardware and software) on distributed data. Communication is not considered any more as an additional functionality of computers, but as an integral part of their hardware and, particularly, software systems. Moreover, interconnected computers are starting to be embedded everywhere: in cars, hi-fi systems, kitchen equipment, clocks, shavers, etc. Interconnection involves the equipment they are controlling, as well as the outside world. Two different circumstances contribute synergistically to this development. The first is that computers are now one of the least expensive technologies, due to production scale. Even in a simple system that needs an elementary control, it is normally less expensive to embed a general purpose CPU than to design a special purpose control circuit. Once intelligence is in the system, why not use it for incorporating additional functionalities? Complex systems such as cars, for example, are evolving to be largely computer-controlled systems. It is foreseen that by 2005 about forty per cent of the value of a car will be in electronics, and mainly computer-based systems. These computers will be interconnected in subsystems and wired into a complex network. The need of transforming such a network into a node of a distributed communication system therefore arises. When a computer network is in the car, why not connect it to the producer network to download new versions of software, or to the workshop computer to check the status of the different subsystems? Moreover, once the driver is in the car, why not provide information or entertainment?

Networked intelligence is supposed to be a new and very general characteristic of our living environment. One of the main practical limitations for the take up of this new technology, namely wiring, is going to be solved in the near future. In a car, for example, the weight and space required for conventional wiring are being reduced through the use of optical fibres. Walking through a European city, one can see roads dug wiring the whole city. New generations of mobile systems are being deployed that will allow interconnection with the digital communication environment even when a broadband network is not available. Concerning houses, there was some scepticism on the possibility of wiring all old buildings. However, new wireless de facto standards (e.g., BluetoothTM(1)) are emerging that will make possible an interconnection of house equipment without physical wiring.

(1) http://www.bluetooth.com/

4.4 A possible scenario

At the end of her working day, Jane once again checks the situation of the project being carried out by her co-operative team. The co-operative work system allows her to have a report of the day's work. She checks whether it was organised in such a way that all the components could be smoothly integrated. Apparently work progressed satisfactorily, apart from a short delay in the graphical component. The drawings to be produced were more complex than foreseen. She decides a slight rearrangement of tasks and flow of information for the following day. The new plan is automatically reflected on the individual plans of her fellow members of staff. With everything settled, she can now go home.

Jane is travelling home in her car. The children are camping out with her husband and she can relax. Her hands-free car-compatible mobile telephone rings. It's her brother John calling. He suggests an excursion during the next weekend. She agrees, and after choosing a destination, they instruct their Internet agents to look for flights and hotel accommodations. They grant the agents permission to access the relevant part of their digital agenda. This allows the agents to decide about departure and arrival times. The agents have also access to information concerning their preferences (seat on the aircraft, class of hotels, main facilities of hotels, etc.). While the agents are exploring the network, Jane decides to listen to some music. The hi-fi system in the car, which is aware of her preferences, explores the network for new releases of her preferred singers. A new release is available and the system asks her whether she prefers to listen to it or to buy the record. As she is driving, interaction takes place through voice commands. She tells the system that she wants to listen the record before deciding. A MP3 version of excerpts from the record is sent to the car. After having listened to them, Jane decides to buy the record. She asks for a copy of the record to be sent to her computer at home, so that it can be recorded onto a CD locally. Her buying agent looks for the less expensive dealer, and forwards the order, authorising the dealer to charge the price on Jane's bank account. A secure (encrypted) channel is opened between the music shop and Jane's bank for the money transfer, and a high-speed channel is opened between the shop and Jane's house computer for transferring the record, and from the shop and the car for the transmission of a high-fidelity version of the same record.

Unfortunately, traffic is very heavy and a traffic jam is foreseen on the route Jane is following. She is alerted by the car navigation system that is connected to a traffic service centre. A new itinerary is chosen. She is asked whether she wants to be guided with voice advice or inspect the new route and possible alternatives. She stops the car and asks for a map to be shown. She chooses an option that is not optimal, but gives her the possibility of stopping at a shopping centre. She asks to be guided through the chosen route. Before starting up the engine again, the web agent tells her that there are some minor problems in organising the trip for the weekend, because apparently the schedule of the most convenient flights conflicts with an appointment in her brother's agenda. A video telephone connection is established with her brother. They can inspect in a window opened on the screen the programme set up by the web agents. It seems very exciting. John decides to try to postpone the appointment. A short negotiation between his agent and the agent of the other party is able to reschedule the appointment and the travel plan is accepted. The agents are instructed to book flights and hotels using the credit card data in their secure databases. When travelling home, Jane switches on her oven. She wants to eat immediately upon arrival, because after dinner she has an important meeting with her younger daughter's schoolmaster.

Upon arriving home, Jane switches off the engine, and her security code is transmitted to the house system. Lights in the garden and in the house are switched on, and while she approaches the house she is asked whether she wants the door opened (for security reasons an additional identification is necessary). A speaker identification system checks her voice and then the door is opened. The home hi-fi system, connected with the car system, starts to play again her music from the point when the car system was switched off. The signal is transferred to loudspeakers in different rooms, while she walks through the house. The house communication system tells her that she has a video message from her mother, who wants to speak with her. The system is told to call Jane's mother and the communication is switched to the screen and loudspeakers of the kitchen, when Jane enters to check the oven. The hi-fi system is muted when she accesses the message and speaks with her mother. While speaking with her mother, who on the screen appears tired and concerned, Jane is able to look at information displayed in her computer and to the most recent report from her mother's medical record, that her mother is showing. The problem is not serious and she is happy to see that her mother is really relieved towards the end of their communication. In the meantime, the pizza in the oven is ready, and the communication system has been switched to the news channel that Jane listens to every night. There are commercials during the news, but Jane's agent is able to spot them and mute the system. During a break, the refrigerator informs her that she is short of milk and butter. It has already sent an order to the shop, but she can also add other missing items.

After dinner, Jane moves to the drawing room for the scheduled virtual meeting with the schoolmaster. The entire school community, parents, teachers as well as students, when necessary, can participate. The majority of members can now attend since meetings started to be held from home. Physical meetings also take place, but when there is a problem to be urgently discussed with as many participants as possible, it is very convenient to hold the meeting virtually. Virtual meetings are not based on the old videoconference systems. A virtual community is created, where all participants are interconnected, having also access to the school information system.

4.5 The Emerging Environment

This is only one of thousands of scenarios that can be imagined, and not a particularly innovative one. Most of the functionalities described in the scenario are indeed already available, even if not completely embedded in commercially available systems. The above scenario is not meant to attempt a realistic picture of the foreseeable future, but only a support for understanding some of the issues under consideration.

Some features are immediately evident:

There are no clearly predefined services. Services are reconfigured in real time to accommodate different needs in different contexts of use;
There is no clear distinction between interpersonal communication and access to information. Different components are interconnected to allow a free intermixing of these functions, using different media;
Services are highly interactive;
Post services are inherently multimedia;
Interaction is often multimodal, i.e., different sensorial and motor abilities are concurrently used;
Co-operation is a new important aspect, i.e., communication and access to information are concurrently used to cooperatively solve common problems;
Co-operation may be among the users themselves or among representatives of the users (agents and avatars), which can be assigned variable degrees of trust;
Contexts of use are more varied than with current services, and become more important;
Access to information and communications are not any more the task of an individual and a contact between two people respectively, but extend to communities of users, who have at their disposal common (sometimes virtual) spaces where they can interact.

A detailed analysis of the possible impact of these emerging environments on people with disabilities and elderly people is very complex, and has been already carried out, at least partially, in several projects funded by the European Commission RACE, ACTS and TIDE Programmes. More information on these projects can be found in [Stephanidis & Emiliani, 1999]. However some general comments can be offered here. As it is normally true with technological development, the impact can be positive or negative as a function of how technology is used. Multimediality, for example, can be an enormous improvement for people with disabilities, if redundancy is used in the systems and services, i.e., if the same information is represented using different media. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), an integral part of the W3C Consortium, has prepared a set of recommendations for the construction of accessible Websites(2). In these recommendations the concept of redundancy is used to suggest complementary representation of the same information (e.g., for blind people every image should be complemented with its function and/or description). The problem is that these recommendations are very seldom used (the majority of web designers are not aware of these recommendations). If redundancy is not used, multimediality will create new serious problems for people with disabilities. Interactivity can also create problems to people who do not have the capability of reacting within the expected time constraints, or do not have the sensorial or motor abilities necessary for the required interaction.

(2) http://www.w3.org/WAI/Resources/#gl

The "disappearance" of computers, i.e., embedding computers in everyday life equipment, is bringing interaction back to metaphors that people are familiar with, and can be an important step forward. For example, many people would not be very happy to interact with their kitchen using a computer screen and a mouse, but may be happy to interact with an environment where intelligence is hidden and they can use a natural interaction pattern, such as their voice, for example.

With reference to the previously described scenario, the main potential problem is the complexity of the resulting environment. It is not evident how many people would be able to handle the interaction tasks that would need to be carried out. Apart from cognitively disabled people, most elderly people and people who do not have a specific training in the use of technology could face some problems. The acceptability of the entire environment will probably rely on a careful trade-off between the intelligence in the system and user's capabilities and required training. This trade-off is the main challenge posed on system and service designers for producing an information society accessible, and ultimately acceptable, by the majority of the population.

4.6 Strategies for the Future

The new emerging intelligent environment, incorporating functions of communication, access to information and environmental control, needs a renewed in depth study of the way information is collected, stored and distributed, and of the way people interact with information systems. So far, irrespective of the platform used (Apple, Windows, Unix), the availability of a screen, a keyboard, and in most cases a pointer has been taken for granted. Information is presented in windows on the screen and interaction is organised through direct manipulation. Now the situation is expected to change. It is impossible for people to interact with the Internet or other information sources using a screen and a pointer while they are driving. It is unlikely that people will accept to interact with their oven to cook dinner using a computer screen. Interaction with the intelligent environment will be finely distributed and diversified and will not be easily amenable to a single standardised interaction paradigm using a screen. It is commonly thought that this new environment will be accepted only if computers disappear into the background, and interaction will be organised according to already known metaphors (e.g., using voice commands).

The traditional approach of rendering applications and services accessible to people with disabilities is to adapt such products to the abilities and requirements of individual users. Adaptations facilitate access to the interface via suitable mechanisms, such as, for example, filtering (e.g., [Mynatt and Weber, 1994]), dedicated interaction techniques (e.g. scanning, [Savidis, Vernardos and Stephanidis, 1997]), and specialised input/output devices (e.g., tactile display, switches, eye-gaze system). Typically, the results of adaptations involve the reconfiguration of the physical layer of interaction, and when necessary, the transduction of the visual interface manifestation to an alternative modality (e.g. auditory or tactile).

The reactive approach to accessibility, although it may be the only viable solution in certain cases, [Vanderheiden, 1998] suffers from some serious shortcomings, especially when considering the radically changing technological environment, and, in particular, the emerging information society technologies [Stephanidis & Emiliani, 1999]. Firstly, reactive approaches, based on a posteriori adaptations, though important to partially solve some of the accessibility problems of people with disabilities, are not viable in sectors of the industry characterised by rapid technological change. By the time a particular access problem has been addressed, technology has advanced to a point where the same or a similar problem re-occurs. The typical example is the case of blind people's access to computers. Each generation of technology (e.g., DOS environment, Windowing systems and multimedia) caused a new wave of accessibility problems to blind users, addressed through dedicated techniques such as text translation to speech for the DOS environment, off-screen models and filtering for the Windowing systems.

In some cases, adaptations may not be possible at all, without loss of functionality. For example, in the early versions of windowing systems, it was impossible for the programmer to obtain access to certain window functions, such as window management. In subsequent versions, this shortcoming was addressed by the vendors of such products, allowing certain a posteriori (reactive) adaptations on interaction objects on the screen.

In the information society there is an additional difficulty for any reactive adaptation approach. The emerging environment is too complex, not well defined and changing too rapidly to be made accessible with adaptations. When the main interpersonal communication system was the telephone, the system was stable and relatively simple to adapt. Now, telecommunications is dealing with multimedia information, and services are re-configurable; therefore, a posteriori adaptation in a conventional sense is very difficult to carry out. Moreover, systems and services are too many and too complex to deal with.

Due to the above shortcomings of the reactive approach to accessibility, there have been proposals and claims for proactive strategies, resulting in generic solutions to the problem of accessibility (i.e., universal access) [Stephanidis, 1995; Stephanidis and Emiliani, 1999; Stephanidis (ed.), 2001]. Proactive strategies entail a purposeful effort to build access features into a product as early as possible (e.g., from its conception and early phases of design). Such an approach should aim to minimise the need for a posteriori adaptations and deliver products that can be tailored for use by the widest possible end-user population. Proactive approaches to accessibility are typically grounded on the notions of universal access and design for all. The term design for all (or universal or inclusive design, the terms are used interchangeably) is not new. It is well known in several engineering disciplines, such as for example, civil engineering and architecture, with many applications in interior design, building and road construction, etc. However, while existing knowledge may be considered sufficient to address the accessibility of physical spaces, this is not the case with information society technologies, where universal design is still posing a major challenge. Universal access to computer- and telecommunications-based applications and services implies more than direct access or access through add-on (assistive) technologies, since it emphasises the principle that accessibility should be a design concern, as opposed to an afterthought. To this end, it is important that the needs of the broadest possible end-user population are taken into account in the early design phases of new products and services.

As a summary of the above discussion, it is clear that the main challenge lies in the need of coping with diversity, both from the perspective of user groups and contexts of use. The notion of context of use is very interesting, because it is clear that many problems traditionally considered as important for people with disabilities start to become important also for the population at large. When people are driving and want to access the Internet, they are situationally blind (they cannot look at a screen) and motor impaired (they cannot use a pointer or a keyboard).

Finally, it should be emphasised that the fundamental problem of design for all in the information society, as opposed to the same concept used, e.g., in architecture, is technological in nature. When guidelines for constructing buildings accessible to all are available, the problems become essentially economical and political. In the case of information society technologies, it is clear that a single (optimal) configuration of systems and services and their interfaces suitable for the requirements of all potential users is a utopia. The goal is to produce an environment that has enough intelligence embedded to be easily adaptable, automatically or with a minimum of intervention, to the requirements of individual users. Whether technology is mature enough for this and how this can be obtained is currently the key point of discussion (see, for example, [Stephanidis (ed.), 2001]).

4.7 Research Strategies

As already discussed in the previous section, accessibility in the information society must be tackled with a more generic and systematic approach than adaptation. It has also been clarified that this is a complex problem, which cannot be solved employing only guidelines and recommendations, but needs technological innovation.

The related research problems have been widely debated in a set of meetings of the International Scientific Forum "Towards an Information Society for All"3. The result of the activity of this international working group has been published in two White Papers as a set of general recommendations and specific suggestions for research activities [Stephanidis et al., 1998; Stephanidis et al., 1999].

4.7.1 General recommendations

The first set of recommendations is related to the need of promoting the development of environments of use, i.e., integrated systems sharable by communities of users, that, in contrast to the traditional notion of computers as productivity tools, allow for richer communications, and signify the progressive integration of the computing and telecommunications environment with the physical environment. They should provide unobtrusive means for supporting social activities. Consequently, they should be conceived and designed as community-centred, sharable, expandable, co-operative, collaborative and responsive media, catering through user and environment monitoring, for a broad range of human needs. This implies the identifications of:

Properties of environments of use. To facilitate the construction of such environments, studies are needed to identify their respective properties and characteristics, as well as the prevailing norms that characterise their operation;
Novel architectures for interactive systems for managing collective experiences. Traditional interactive software architectures do not account for several of the properties of environments of use, such as interoperability, adaptation, co-operation, intelligence, etc. Actions are needed to introduce new architectural models that can address the new requirements of such types of systems and facilitate the broad range of computer-mediated human activities which will emerge;
Architectures for multiple metaphor environments. The fusion of
multiple metaphors into an integrated system will allow such systems to adapt to different user requirements and contexts of use. Actions are needed to determine how multiple metaphor environments can be constructed and how they can provide the technology for building systems exhibiting desired usage properties.
Multi-agent systems and components to support co-operation and collaboration. Environments of use are supposed to depart from the desktop embodiment of the computer to distributed "intelligence" in the living environment; this, in turn, will necessitate a departure from the traditional direct manipulation approach in using a computer environment, to more delegation-oriented activities, and to be based on co-operation and collaboration, so that humans will be able to seamlessly perform joint activities, independent from geographic location, specific characteristics of the software and hardware used, differences in language and culture, etc.
Individualisation and user interface adaptation. This is necessary to ensure accessibility by all users to community-wide information and communication resources, as well as to satisfy experiences in the use of systems that carry out a broad range of social activities.

A second group of recommendations is related to the need of supporting communities of users, with the emphasis on social interaction in virtual spaces. This is supposed to enhance the currently prevailing interaction paradigms (e.g., Graphical User Interfaces [GUIs] and the World Wide Web ) to support the broad range of group-centric and communication-intensive computer-mediated human activities. Correspondingly, there is a compelling need to study and understand how such communities (e.g., the virtual city) are formed, evolve, grow and intra- / inter- operate. This includes:

Individual / collective intelligence and community knowledge management. Increasingly, users find themselves associated with various virtual / on-line communities to attain professional and social goals. Knowledge, therefore, no longer constitutes an individual's asset, but a community-wide resource, which can be shared and articulated by members of that community.
Methodologies for collecting / analysing requirements and understanding virtual communities. Novel methodologies making use of analytical and developmental approaches to human communication need to be developed to provide prescriptive frameworks for the study of communities of users and to support the broad range of computer-mediated human activities. Suitable models should facilitate effective protocols for collecting / analysing requirements and understanding on-line virtual communities.
Accessing community-wide information resources. Information generated and captured by virtual communities of users should be stored and accessed in a manner that is effective, efficient and satisfactory for the individual members of the community. Actions are needed to facilitate human interactions with large information spaces (and concurrently with other humans) and to provide technological solutions, which will make community-wide information resources accessible, scaleable to new generations of technology, persistent and secure.
Social interaction amongst members of on-line communities. A primary characteristic of the emerging broad range of computer-mediated human activities is their inherently group-centric and social nature. In order to facilitate the development of "sociable" interactive environments, it is important to enrich the currently prevailing practice with concepts that have a social focus. New models are needed to facilitate social awareness, social immersion and social navigation in large virtual spaces.

A third set of general recommendations is connected with the integration of users in the design process and the evaluation of results and it is based on the concept of extending user-centred design to support new virtualities. Detailed recommendations include the identification of:

Foundations for designing computer-mediated human activities. In view of the trends in technology, it becomes evident that in order to provide the required support for the design of the broad range of computer- and telecommunications mediated human activities in the emerging virtual spaces, user-centred design, as a philosophy, should be extended to provide a more prescriptive design framework. To this end, actions are needed to apply, refine and extend existing techniques and tools of user-centred design with concepts from the social sciences, so as to provide a broader foundation for HCI design;

Metrics for important interaction quality attributes. Metrics provide a powerful instrument for measuring different aspects of an interactive system. Actions are needed to (a) extend the available range of metrics to cover additional quality attributes such as accessibility, adaptation, intelligence, etc, likely to determine the outcome of computer-mediated human activities in the emerging Information Age, (b) embed such metrics into tools for automatic evaluation and measurement, and (c) establish (technology-independent) protocols for measuring quality attributes of systems, taking account of the various contexts of use and the new virtualities that such systems are intended to support;
Computational tools for usability engineering. Usability engineering has been traditionally conducted by experts without the assistance of computational environments or tools. Computational environments to support usability engineering have the potential to lead to both cost-justification and improved usability practices, as they may automate certain tasks, guide designers towards usability targets or provide extensible environments for capturing, consolidating and reusing previous experience;
Requirements engineering methods to facilitate the elicitation of requirements in novel contexts of use and different user groups. Existing techniques (e.g., brainstorming, scenarios, prototyping) have only been used in traditional contexts of use to elicit requirements of average / typical users. It is, therefore, important that existing techniques are refined and extended to facilitate requirements engineering in novel contexts of use and for user groups with radically different requirements;
Protocols for effective user participation in design activities. User involvement in the design of computer-based interactive systems has long been a challenging issue. The existing wisdom offers very little in the direction of involving different user groups with diverse abilities, skills, requirements and preferences. Therefore, actions should be undertaken to refine and extend the available instruments in such a way that they can effectively guide the design of new computer-and telecommunications-mediated human activities.

A fourth set of recommendations deals with support actions as: articulating demand for design for all, supporting the industry, as well as promoting awareness, knowledge dissemination and technology transfer. These activities are of paramount importance to real take up of the technological developments that are needed for the creation of a really accessible information society. However, their discussion is outside the scope of this chapter.

4.7.2 Specific Research Lines

As examples of the type of technological developments that are considered necessary to contribute to the accessibility and usability of the emerging information society, a list of specific research topics, as reported in the White Paper [Stephanidis et al., 1998], is reproduced here:

Design Process, Methods & Tools
- Short term
  - Consolidate and disseminate available wisdom on universal design
  - Establish criteria that take account of accessibility and usability
- Medium term
  - Use methods, tools and results from disciplines focusing on people and communication
  - Promote use of methods within a user-centred design process
- Long term
  - Advance new prescriptive instruments to facilitate design for scalability and modality independence
User-oriented challenges
- Short term
  - Study variety of user contexts and address requirements of tail population
  - Build upon and expand existing techniques from participatory design and ethnography to promote user involvement
- Medium term
  - Develop standardised methods for eliciting end-user requirements
- Long term
  - Develop an empirical science base for the study of users

Input / Output Technology
- Short term
  - Speech input
  - Natural language input and processing
  - Multimodal language input
  - Flexible, portable, high resolution, compact displays
  - Haptic devices
  - Voice and synthesised sound
  - Multimodal output generation
  - Computer Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW)
  - Hypermedia
- Medium term
  - Computer Vision
  - Gesture processing
  - High resolution, full page, tactile displays
  - Advanced / alternative interaction platforms
  - Embedded intelligence and agents
- Long term
  - Tools for abstraction, integration and expansion of interaction platforms
  - Building new forms of co-operative structures and virtual spaces
  - Integrated agency models

User interface architectures
- Short term
  - Enhancements to built new interaction facilities such as scanning into existing platforms (e.g. WINDOWS95)
  - Distributed object environments
  - Transportable software
- Medium term
  - Requirements engineering methods and tools which incorporate accessibility issues
  - System development methodologies which take full account of accessibility and usability
- Long term
  - Tools for effort and cost effective integration of access into products
  - Appropriate user interface architectures
  - Architectures for collaboration
  - Toolkit interoperability
  - Architectures for collaboration

While the above list was not intended to be exhaustive, it gives a clear indication of the challenges and the complexity of the issues that need to be addressed by the research community in order to facilitate the development of an information society acceptable for all citizens.

4.8 Conclusions

The emergence of the information society is creating a new daily life technological environment where intelligence is ambient and all citizens will have to carry out new types of everyday activities. This environment may be too complex and diversified to allow the use of the concept of "average user" in the design of its main characteristics; the needs of individual users are catered for through proactive design considerations.

Therefore, requirements of all potential users have to be taken into account, and an appropriate degree of intelligence has to be built and embedded in the environment to make it adaptable and adaptive to the individual users' abilities, requirements, skills and preferences. This will open new important opportunities for people with disabilities and elderly people, whose requirements need to be integrated in the design specifications.

However, this is not only a matter of good will, but of scientific and technological development, because, as it has been elaborated in the previous section, all necessary knowledge and technology is not yet available.

4.9 References

Mynatt, E. D., Weber, G. (1994) Nonvisual presentation of graphical user interfaces: Contrasting two approaches. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '94), Boston, Massachusetts, 166-172, New York: ACM Press.

Savidis, A., Vernardos, G. & Stephanidis, C. (1997) Embedding scanning techniques accessible to motor-impaired users in the WINDOWS Object Library. Proceedings of HCI International '97, San Francisco, USA, 24-29 August, 429-432.

Stephanidis, C. (1995) Towards user interfaces for all: Some critical issues. Panel Session "User Interfaces for All - Everybody, Everywhere, and Anytime". In: Y. Anzai, K. Ogawa & H. Mori (eds.), Symbiosis of Human and Artifact - Future Computing and Design for Human-Computer Interaction [Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI International '95)] (pp. 137-142) Tokyo, Japan. Amsterdam: Elsevier, Elsevier Science.

Stephanidis, C. ed. (2001) User Interfaces for All - Concepts, Methods and Tools. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Stephanidis, C. (2001) User Interfaces for All: New perspectives into HCI. In: C. Stephanidis (ed.) User Interfaces for All - Concepts, Methods and Tools. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 3-17.

Stephanidis, C. & Emiliani, P.L. (1999) Connecting to the Information Society: a European Perspective. Technology and Disability Journal, 10(1), 21-44.
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Stephanidis C., Salvendy G., Akoumianakis D., Bevan N., Brewer J., Emiliani P. L., Galetsas A., Haataja S., Iakovidis I., Jacko J., Jenkins P., Karshmer A., Korn P., Marcus A., Murphy H., Stary C., Vanderheiden G., Weber G., and Ziegler J. (1998) Toward an Information Society for All: An International R&D Agenda. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 10(2), 107-134.

Stephanidis C., Salvendy G., Akoumianakis D., Arnold A., Bevan N., Dardallier D., Emiliani P.L., Iakovidis I., Jenkins P., Karshmer A., Korn P., Marcus A., Murphy H., Opperman C., Stary C., Tamura H., Tscheligi M., Ueda H., Weber G., and Ziegler J. (1999) Toward an Information Society for All: HCI challenges and R&D recommendations. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 11(1), 1-28.

Vanderheiden G.C. (1998) Universal Design and Assistive Technology in Communication and Information Technologies: Alternatives or Complements? Assistive Technology, 10(1) 29-36.

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