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6. Broadband Provider Websites: A Digital barrier to an Enabling technology?

Scott Milne - Digital Media Access Group, Dundee University

Our group, the Digital Media Access Group, or DMAG, is an expert technology consultancy. We specialise in digital media, which means websites, ATM, mobile phones, and these kinds of things. We are based in the Division of Applied Computing at Dundee University. I will mention some of the broad areas of research that have taken place there as well, to put it in context.

We have carried out a review of six of the main broadband providers` websites to try and figure out if they are accessible or otherwise, which is a little controversial. I will talk about the findings of that a little later. Before I do, I would like to step back and put that in the context of the web and broadband, both as a whole, for all of us, and also particularly for disabled people.

DMAG has four full-time accessibility consultants and three part-time support staff. We are directed by Dr Peter Gregor, one of the Senior Lecturers in the Division of Applied Computing. We were established in 1999, which given the lifespan of the web means that we have followed it through some of the major changes that have taken place in its short lifetime.

We are a self-financing group, so although we are based in an academic institution, we do work for clients and we get paid for that. Whether that is commercial companies, other academic institutions, or Government bodies and so on, we have done work for all sorts of groups.

That work includes comprehensive accessibility audits of individual resources, such as websites, or more general workshops and seminars, training people about web access, web accessibility in general, but also specifically with regard to legislation; or to web designers, the technical how-to of designing an accessible website.

The Applied Computing Division has over 30 researchers at the moment developing and researching into communications and information technologies for older and disabled people. Our focus on IT systems for disabled people goes back to 1980, so we have about 24 or 25 years of experience in that field. More recently, in the past five years or so, we have pushed more into the area of challenges for older people specifically.

One of the major projects we are running at the moment focusing on older people is UTOPIA, which stands for "Usable Technology for Older People Inclusive and Appropriate". A project is nothing in academia unless it has a fancy acronym!

We have 200 older volunteers actively involved in our research. Somebody pointed out earlier on that, rather than just paying lip service to the idea of designing accessible resources, it is important to engage with the stakeholders, disabled and older people, to find out their needs. Not just when they sit down in front of a piece of technology and try to use it, but also to ask "why would they want to use it?" and "what is the social context?" We have an extensive database of volunteers whom we are actively working with. By summer 2005 we will have the Queen Mother Research Centre developed at the university which will house these researchers.

Let me talk about the web as a whole and why we think it is a useful and valuable thing. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, was quoted as saying, "The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." That came from the inventor of the web rather than a second, third or fourth party removed, and I am pleased that it did.

As speakers have pointed out, the web gives us access to all sorts of things, either in a new format of something that we could not access before, or new kinds of things that we could not use before. For example, chatrooms and discussion forums. I think the web is, or can be, particularly valuable to many disabled people because of the nature of digital information.

If you think of a newspaper, which is a physical artefact, if you are blind, you cannot read it as it is, perhaps having to rely on someone else to read it out for you. On the other hand, as far as the web is concerned, if that newspaper had been placed on a website, as long as it was designed correctly and accessibly, there is no reason why that information could not be read out over a text to speech device or presented on a refreshable Braille display, for example.

As long as it is designed correctly, digital information can mean accessible information in so many different ways. Another important aspect here is that we can access the web and its services from home, potentially. That is of particular value to many older people, who may be frail and who may be unable to or not willing to go out in the cold of the winter, for example, to get groceries. They can use online commerce services to have those services delivered to their home.

In particular circumstances and contexts of use of the web, it can render a disability irrelevant. If you are engaging in a chatroom with somebody else around the world, they do not need to know that you are deaf, for example, or a wheelchair user, and they probably do not care so long as you have the typing skills to carry on a conversation. In many contexts, the disabilities that we have when using the web are irrelevant for us.

Thinking about broadband, if the web is the "information superhighway", then our means of access is like a vehicle on it. Up until recently, for most of us, connection from the home was through a dial-up connection, which tends to be quite slow, so that for graphics-intensive web pages these can often be quite slow to load. I can remember using a dial-up connection and sometimes waiting for perhaps up to three minutes for a single page to download.

With regard to higher-quality content, like video and audio, if you have a webcam link between two people and you are only able to send a couple of frames a second across this narrow link, then you get this kind of static approach, and it may as well be a series of snapshot images rather than a live link. Similarly, for downloadable video content, although it is feasible to download high-quality files, it will take a lot longer as a result of the slow connection.

Particular problems that this can have for people with disabilities include the fact that, for many assistive technologies, like text to speech devices, it is inherent in the use of those technologies that it will take longer to browse web pages than for someone who is able to browse visually. Those who browse visually will quickly scan the content of a page and look for key indicators like the size of text or the use of an exclamation mark or colour. If you are listening sequentially, it takes longer to browse with some assistive technologies.

Although this is not a direct comparison between dial-up and broadband, it is more a case of pay-as-you-go or flat-rate charges. If you take five times longer to browse a page than someone would visually, that translates, if you are paying as you go, to a cost of five times the same amount as somebody else. The user is at a disadvantage here.

For many disabled people, for example deaf people, a quality video link might be crucial, not just a luxury. It might be a crucial thing if they need to be able to communicate remotely by signing, for example.

Broadband is a more effective vehicle for access to the web. It is faster and always on. You can have lots of graphics and it can be fast to load. It enables people to download higher-quality video content. Live links become more fluid because more frames per second can be pumped down the line. For downloadable files, it is feasible to ask for the higher-quality versions rather than the poorer quality.

For people with disabilities particularly - again this is more a comparison between pay-as-you-go and flat-rate services - browsing with assistive technologies no longer needs to translate into a higher cost. Also, video becomes of sufficient quality for things like signing remotely and for those with visual impairments who may not be blind, but who, if they were able to download higher-quality image or video, would be able to look at it closely enough to be able to make some sense out of it, whereas they would not from a smaller or poorer-quality one. Although broadband itself does not make web content more accessible, it makes reaching accessible content more feasible for many disabled people.

I will say a bit now about legislation in relation to web accessibility. The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995 states that service providers must take reasonable steps to avoid unjustified discrimination against someone on account of their disability. So, either failure to provide a service or the provision of a poorer service could be seen in a court of law as unjustified discrimination. At that time, no example of a website was placed in the DDA.

However, since then, the DDA "Part III Code of Practice" has been updated with an example of a service i.e. a website covered under the DDA, which involves an airline selling tickets for flights online. It is not too huge a jump to think that, if an airline selling tickets online can be considered a service, then a broadband provider offering online access to information about broadband and registration for broadband could also be considered a service. I am not a lawyer - that is just a personal opinion - but it does not seem like too big a jump for me.

The Government also sees broadband and digital television as a means of enabling access to e-government services. If that is the case, we have to be very careful that this digital revolution does not result in greater discrimination and exclusion.

What are some of the access barriers that people commonly face? The four access barriers described in Fig 6.1 were all found in the websites that we looked at. I will discuss them in the context of the findings rather than repeating myself.

Fig 6.1 Web Accessibility - Access Barriers

Why broadband provider websites? Why not do a review of user websites or e-commerce websites? That is fine if you have access to the web and broadband, but what we are concerned with here is how can people get access to the broadband. Can they get access to information about it? Can they sign up to it?

The way I put it is, "If we want to demonstrate that broadband can be an enabling technology for disabled users, where better to display its potential than at the showroom, and if the showroom is inaccessible, what message does that send about the web as a whole?"

We did a review of six broadband providers: Wanadoo, BT, Virgin, Telewest, NTL and Tiscali. It was not one of the comprehensive audits we normally do. We looked at access to information about the packages and what could be signed up for. The slide shows (Fig) the technical things detailed further in the report, which I can make available to anyone who wants a copy.

Fig 6.2 Methodology

We had three steps. We used an automatic checking tool, which was pointed out as being insufficient in its own right. Although an automatic tool can run through a website and pull out accessibility problems, like the absence of alternative text for images, it cannot look at examples of alternative text that have been given and determine semantically whether it is an accurate description of an image. That must be followed up with an expert manual check.

We used three browsers: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and the Lynx text-only browser. Not many people use Lynx in practice. However, because of the way it organises information linearly or sequentially, it is a good indicator of how someone using a text to speech device would interact with a website. Also, it does not have support for some of the more advanced features that get plugged on to websites, like Java script. If content is designed so that it relies on Java script and is not accessible otherwise, we can find that through Lynx. That was done in the context of the guidelines, which were pointed out earlier as being the recognised guidelines for designing accessible content for the web.

On to the findings. Disappointingly, all of the sites we looked at failed to meet even the most basic of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) check points relating to the accessibility guidelines. They are split across three priority levels but none of them succeeded in meeting even the first level of priority.

The reasons for that included a lack of equivalent text alternatives for some graphics or inappropriate text alternatives. Quite often we found the alternative was simply a file name of the image. If you were listening and you heard, "Image 1, JPEG, Slide 2, GIF", a visually impaired person would not pick that up. There was reliance on scripting technologies like Java script. Java script is probably one of the main culprits for the dynamic and often confusing and complicated aspects of the web.

The basic language of the web, HTML, is fairly static. Things load up and sit there quite nicely. By adding Java script, you can add features, for example, so when you move your mouse over a link, a further series of links drops down. While that can add a lot of value and enhance the web experience for advanced users, designers need to be careful they do not implement such features to the detriment of the accessibility of the site for all.

We found numerous cases where it was used at the expense of usability. Some links on the websites were provided with Java script and could not be operated without it, which does not make sense. A link should be something that the text-only browser can operate, but for some unknown reason the designers had used Java script to programme these so none of them could be forwarded beyond the home page, so the rest of the web site in that case was inaccessible.

Other web contents simply did not appear because of reliance on Java script. Navigation bars, for instance, were non-existent. Designers tend to rely on users using the mouse as their form of input device, but for many people that is either not practical or simply not possible. Somebody listening to a web page being read out is not using a two-dimensional environment, so they would use a keyboard traditionally instead. On most of the sites, keyboard navigation was inefficient and lengthy, quite often because of the sheer volume of the information on the page that could not be scanned.

We finally discovered problems increasing the size of text. If you use this and make a decision that text should be a particular size, it should allow users to resize it if they need it. We found cases where text could not be resized, or where it had been crammed so closely together that, when it was resized, it started to overlap so you could not read it anyway. There were some worrying findings.

It looks as though some of the broadband providers may be excluding a sizable customer base. If for no other reason than the economic incentive, there ought to be something done about that on the company's behalf to try and ensure they can reach more people. Ironically, I would suggest, many disabled people may find it difficult or even impossible to sign up for this potentially enabling technology without help from other people.

Action is required. We have already heard from BT, which is encouraging, about the initiatives they have in place to try and raise the level of accessibility of their resources. Let us hope that continues and let us hope other broadband players start taking note of that and initiating policy change themselves.

Crucially, as I suggested before, disabled and older users needs to be involved in the process of consultation and design and evaluation of websites; not just broadband provider websites, but all of them. That is a lesson which a lot of the providers should be trying to learn.

Discussion

NEW SPEAKER: Another technology you may have left out is the extensive use of flash. If you cannot read it, you cannot do anything.

SCOTT MILNE: Flash is largely animation-type technology. It is not part of the standard language of the web, HTML, but it is something people add on top of it. I have seen pointless and ridiculous uses of flash in the past. The most common one, which we are moving away from, was the use of splash screens at the start of a website, so that designers could show off the wonderful animations. You had to wait for five seconds or longer before this thing would finish before it would offer an option to bypass or skip it. There is a serious usability and accessibility problem here.

Also, because flash is animation technology and depends heavily on graphics, again, that is not always accessible to people with disabilities. The company which developed flash have tried very hard to make it more accessible, but anything which involves animation and not being static is inherently inaccessible for some people. In cases where flash is used, we would advocate providing an accessible alternative to that as well.

VIVIENNE POZO: I would like to ask a question, or rather to make a statement as a hearing impaired user, which is that I have no problem using broadband - it brings a lot of benefits to me - but I do have huge problems when it crashes, and I find I have to use the telephone helpline to get help. It is a problem and it takes up your point of having to depend on other people to access the service for you.

SCOTT MILNE: Yes. I should have pointed out that, although I did not describe any of the results, we also looked at the help pages on the websites and found on many occasions they were insufficient for a lot of the questions that people would typically want to have answered, which would mean that you would have to phone somebody up.

That goes back to what I mentioned at the start, about being aware of the social context of the use of technology as well. Sometimes technology cannot solve a particular problem and there needs to be an element of support in there for people who have needs beyond technology itself.

NEW SPEAKER: Would anyone from BT care to comment on the fact that they have failed this test?

KEITH LAWTON: Yes, we would. That is why we are here today, unlike the other 150 other service providers who are not.

SCOTT MILNE: BT is an enormous company and it would be expected to move in that direction, and I am very glad to see that it is. We can provide a copy of the in-depth results of the study to you for analysis, but essentially this was a snapshot review, not an extensive study. If problems were uncovered, even in a small study like this, that is obviously very telling.

CHRIS AVER: Which actual portal did you look at? Which site did you look at?

SCOTT MILNE: We looked at bt.com, where the basic BT Broadband, BT Yahoo! and Premium services were all offered. That was the starting point.

CHRIS AVER: So it was bt.com. Did you look at the BT Broadband start page, for example?

SCOTT MILNE: I would need to go over that with you, perhaps in the break.

CHRIS AVER: That page has recently been relaunched, as of last week, because of the accessibility. If you do take the basic no-frills product, the landing page has been relaunched to address the accessibility issues.

CAROLINE JACOBS: I am from Ricability. I wondered if you could tell us how these compare to other sites in Europe and in America? I do not know whether broadband accessibility issues are more advanced there?

SCOTT MILNE: I do not have that information with me. I brought a report to read by the American National Institute for the Deaf. A gentleman there has done a study called "Broadband and Americans with Disabilities". I have yet to get past the executive summary of it, but it looks as though there is something there to use as a kind of comparative study.

One of the things I did pick up on is that he is suggesting, as a percentage of the total population, there seems to be an equal number of people with disabilities signing up for and using broadband as those without, so that is encouraging. What is less encouraging is the percentage of older people using broadband and signing up for it.

MAGGIE ELLIS: I have done research with the Department of Health over time looking at equipment from both high street manufacturers and specially designed equipment for people with disabilities. The one thing that became clear in those research projects was that, the bigger the market for the manufactured product, the more likely it was that they had their own proper way of checking what users wanted.

In general, there seems to have been a shift in the way we live and the way we address marketing now. I was recently talking to the editor of the Scotsman, who said his advertisers have a belief that his readers are 30 to 45, when actually they are much more likely to be 60 to 75. He finds it very hard to get his advertisers to understand that. I wonder if that is partly the problem; that there is a wished belief that the market is different than it could be.

SCOTT MILNE: I think that is right. There are lots of effects in there, which I probably could not go into even if we did have the time, but I can touch the surface of one of them. The people who design the technology with regard to the websites tend to be young, mid 20s, male, technology-savvy individuals, and so often, without thinking, design technology for people like themselves. They think everybody else can use it, but they do not take into account the needs of every other member of the population.

Even when the users are considered, often there is this approach of, "What`s the largest significant market? It's the young people," and they go for them, whereas in actual fact probably the vast majority of users do not belong in that category but are less easy to define as an homogenous group themselves.

Particularly with the older population, the one consistent finding of our studies involving old people is their sheer diversity. You cannot pin down what it is to be an older person and how you design technology for "an older person". By the nature of ageing, people become more diverse. It is an extension of that problem that, because being young and fit and active and rich is so easy to define, it seems to be at least a starting market for anyone who wants to move into providing services and goods over the web.

KARL FARRELL: I wonder if you would be interested in my unscientific survey of the CDs that you are offered and that are sent to you? I have an unscientific batch here of four. Are they accessible? The first one is from BT. I am sorry, no go; not accessible. I am in the Telewest area, I am afraid that does not seem accessible. It says "Start" but it does not say anything else, so I think it is probably a copy. I have another one from BT. I am pleased to say it is accessible, and it is good for everybody.

I do not know about all the other companies. I suspect it is unfortunate that somebody, or some people, will make a CD that is to be put out into the market, and you would think they would take great care for it to work well and to meet as many needs as possible. Why is it that, up until now, I have only found one that is accessible? I hope the Department of Trade and Industry takes note of that, because obviously a lot of the people who should be aware of it or taking note of it did not come today. Perhaps they are busy sorting out their services!

TONY SHIPLEY: Thank you, Karl. But then there is nothing new under the sun in what you have just said. It does remind me that, years ago, in the days when home film projectors were in vogue, there was a well-known manufacturer who supplied the instructions on how to set up and load the film - on film! I think you are demonstrating the equivalent of that now.

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Last updated: 02.10.2008    © Copyright reserved