Designs on the Games
Tuesday 7th October 2008
Savoy Place, London
Organised by PhoneAbility and the IET
Getting our act together
by Lord Erroll
Good morning. I am not really sure why I am up here speaking except I have known John for a very long time, as you can see on this slide I have been on the local authority smart standards organisation for a very long time. I used to write software and new developments, I was doing electronics onto smart cards back in the early 90s. That's why out of that grew some of the concepts which will be talked about later on today.
I suppose the reason why I am up here, I notice all the speakers coming later know a lot more than I do, and actually its the technical part you probably want to hear. So what can I add? It's trying to give a little bit of an overview about why, what and things that could go wrong and things that could annoy people.
The Olympics will be very much about the mass movement of people around the place. Therefore a lot of people will get very fed up if they can't get from A to B in a reasonable amount of time. And one of the things that always worries me in some of these things is balance.
On the one hand, you have got to look after people who can't move as fast as others, and equally so if you slow everything down to the lowest common denominator, you just end up with a log jam. You might as well move the ones who can move fast, faster. And actually maybe someone in an electric wheelchair can move faster than people on foot. It's not necessarily obvious which will be the fastest. What you don't want is bottle necks, log jams, things like that.
Having some simple technology to ease that flow for people whether they have a challenge with using some technology or whether a challenge with reading or with listening or hearing or whatever it might be, doesn't matter. Half of these technologies will actually help people who have all their 5 senses working normally or 7 senses.
It's about the balance of trying to think of what will help and help unobtrusively. If we have a lot of hold ups you will get frustration. People are not going to get see the events they want to see. People will get embarrassed, people whether able, or not, are bound to the embarrassed if they are holding everything up. That makes for awkwardness or it can cause confrontation. If someone is really desperate to get there in time, some one is holding the queue up, something is not working properly, then that could end up with confrontation, then what happens? You have a row, the police are called in, then we end up with the lawyers. Because they will be watching trying to figure out how to make a case.
This a classic slide, it's a picture I picked up somewhere and I think I am told it's a couple of hundred years old. In the middle we have a cow being fought over by two skinny farmers, one pulling at the head and the other at the tail. In between is a very fat lawyer milking it, and a very fat judge saying "ah, very tricky case this". And what's changed? Nothing. I suppose, if there are any lawyers in the room, sorry! {Laughter}
Leaving that aside for the moment. What one needs to think about is what is going to cause the bottlenecks, what might cause problems and that's what I got very interested in. For instance in John's project Special Needs Application Programme Interface (SNAPI). A card will tailor terminals to whomever is using it at the time. If you have got a colour contrast, colour blind problem it will make sure it's not in the wrong colours. If it needs slowing up very slightly for you it can slow it up. If it should be in another language instead of having to press buttons to say I want this language, that can be on the card and come up.
Language is one of the most dangerous things. The English language is full of pitfalls, I was very amused this morning when I came in to register and I turned to my left. I had not bothered to read the signs. The ladies at the desk said "no no, you're in the common room". I thought "Lords being sent to common room is very apt!". {Laughter}. Puts you in your place.
Back to issues of language. Poor John was telling me at that at Spanish airport he selected English as his langugae preference and was trying to do the automatic ticketing. It came to the end of the process, he saw the button that said correct, well he thought it said correct. Boom he wiped out what he had just entered. It was actually saying do you want to correct this. Underneath in the corner of the screen was a word “accept”. It's very dangerous thing - language.
When we have got people coming from abroad we need to make sure we have simple clear English on, for example, signs. I think Manchester has gone quite dotty, starting to label things "toilets", "toilets-urinals", they are worried about transgender people. I, too, worry about them. I feel very sorry for them if they get offended, but at the same time there's a lot of people out there who don't have that particular challenge, and when it comes to the Games or something similar - people from abroad are not going to understand the subtlety. In some cultures people will get very offended if they go into the wrong place. This will cause confrontation and fights. We need to get the balance using common sense.
I was listening on the radio, apparently Harrow council has decided to abolish jargon, back comes the "rubbish dump" out has gone the "civic immunity site". They will also have lollipop ladies again, I don't think the lollipop men will be upset. We can quite easily handle saying lollipop man where we see someone who is not a lady!
I don't think we need to get upset about things all the time, perhaps we can all be reasonable rational human beings and bring some balance into it. Some of the technologies out there to help those of you who have a challenge, with whatever - I can never run a sequence of instructions. If someone tells me more than about 5 things in succession I have to draw a map in my mind. I have got dyslexic children, and therefore some of these things actually can help. One of the things I have noticed in many dyslexics is that I know they are very good at three-dimensional visualisation. I just wish that we had dyslexic designing our tube stations! King's Cross is ... anyway. You know!
But people sometimes don't realise that there are other abilities in there which is a great thing, but at the same time when we're talking about mass movement we have to worry slightly about how we get the bulk of people through as fast as possible and someone who has a challenge with something or other is not going to hold everything up.
There are other things that are complicated in this balance because of course you have got to balance one problem, one challenge, against another challenge. For instance, something John pointed out to me again the other day is the problem of the height of machines like ATMs. A lot of them have been lowered. Another example is lifts, I have a challenge with lifts as well because my eyesight is not as good as it used to be for reading I need to wear glasses. I can't be bothered to wear them all the time because with longer sight I can see reasonably well in the distance so the glass don't work for that. And don't suggest vary focals! Lift buttons, ooh my back! I have got to bend right down to see them and they are very difficult to work out. Sometimes the contrast is appalling. Unfortunately, I don't know how to read Braille and so I can't use that to my advantage.
The ATMs are too low for people with certain forms of vision problems and those who can't bend down. There are huge challenges about how you handle this. You can't take a blanket approach to everything. I think that is one of the challenges facing people who are designing these things today.
How do you cater for the majority, but make sure that the minority don't hold things up, or are not embarrassed, or that it is not a problem for them?
From that point of view there are little things that always annoyed me. Or I have not really understood it. If you look at a contact smart card for instance, why don't they have the notch in one area so you know which way round to put the thing in?
Actually it would be quite convenient for me as I have got 3 or 4 in my pocket. You could feel for the contact one. It can't cost anymore money just to put the notch in the end, yet why don't they do it? I just don't understand the rationale behind that one. It's so simple to do, to make life a little bit less complicated for certain people. I also quite often put the contact card in the wrong way round if I am not looking as the hologram in the other end can look quite like the chip if you are not concentrating. There are lots of little things like that which could make life easier for everyone.
At airports they have stopped making announcements. I think at Luton and Stanstead you have to sit there watching the screen the whole time. If you can't see the screen because your eyesight is not great – I have got problems with huge distance as well - or, if you can't see the screen at all, how do you find the airplane? How do you know when it's come up? Even for people who have perfectly normal vision it would still be an in convenience.
Some of the new technology is going to help with that because you can have location based services, you can have things that are sensitive. There will be technology or there is technology around that could give you personalised messages to warn you then things are happening. That will be of general use to the whole population. It will also help with people with certain specific challenges.
I think those are the sorts of things that we should be looking at.
I think one of the big problems as well is going to be how do you handle it when things go wrong because thats the crisis. I am quite sure with this Games we're going to see first of all, that because of the number of people around, the public transport as it is, will incur some breakdowns. So how do we tell people what to do, how do you instruct the people who can't tell which way to go? There's no clear easy way of telling them which way to go.
Now fortunately most people are helpful in life. Fortunately, the world is not full of bad guys out there all trying to be difficult, most people want to help. There are one or two people who couldn't care and one odd person out there who deliberately causes problems. But on the whole, most people are there to help. That's what these people who are stuck rely on, but should they?
Again clear communication, how are you going to communicate with people who have come from abroad with different languages? It could be done through mobile communication in various ways.
There is technology coming along for mobile phones which will automatically translate for people, there's all sorts of stuff out there, some of which I probably don't know about.
Anyway, getting people out when they are stuck, or, for example, involved in a disaster. That will be one of the big challenges. We are bound to have a few terrorist scares because the automatic reaction to the fact that someone says "there's a bomb somewhere", is to close everything down, seal it off and go into a panic state.
I happen to know that 97% of us die of a disease - heart attack, stroke, cancer. And that very few people get killed by terrorist attacks, other accidents and doctors mistakes. So actually I am not going to spend my entire life being terrified of being blown up by a terrorist. I also know statistically that the very chance of me being within range of the thing when it goes off is again incredibly low. I would rather get on with life.
Not a lot of people are like that, I know that. I know that an awful lot of people would rather take a safety first approach, but sometimes we go overboard with it and this brings everything to a halt. I think we must make sure it doesn't bring everything to a halt. Also if and when it happens that it doesn't cause a huge impact over a wider area than is necessary. Because suddenly the system is going to be overloaded, the system can't cope. Suddenly that channel which was for the use of people with a certain disability is opened up to everyone so the person who needed a lower machine to get through or whatever it is can't use it anymore because they are channelling thousands of people who don't need that particular specialised access ramps (or whatever it might be in an emergency) down it.
We have got to sort funny things like that out. People don't think about what you do when the system goes wrong. The other reason people might do it is to get into the event. The best way of trying to get into a building which has got all the wonderful high-tech security lock downs, is to set off the fire alarm. What happens the moment the fire alarm goes? All of the doors' fail safe locks open. Anyone can walk in. That's security!
But there will be some very unexpected consequences if we don't think things through. In a complex system it's impossible to produce rules for every event. And very often it is better, rather than having a central control that tries to dream up the answers to every situation, if you give people sufficient information so they can make decisions based on what they can see in front of them. This is often a greater help, rather than trying to assume that people are idiots and sheep. Most people are not.
I find that the worse thing is standing there at the tube station when they announce delays are expected on the Victoria line. Hang on. I actually want to know if the trains are running slower, in which case by approximately how much? Or are the trains just running at longer intervals. I can then make a more informed decision as to the route I take. They use the term "delays" for both things so it is unclear to the traveller the proper meaning.
So having proper messages which can give people the information on which to make informed decisions is essential. Again, there are lots of ways of using mobile devices so we could communicate information to an individual level. I think we should start looking at those things because we can start tailoring to specific needs of people. I think that's a thing people are not thinking enough about. Going back to John and his SNAPI concept, if we provide that to other things, we can tailor whatever message sent out to you, you can make an informed decision about what you should be doing.
Now, I seem to have talked for too short a time. But that will give other people longer. Is that alright? I have got another quarter of an hour. The problem is I don't know what else I can say really {Laughter}.
One can waffle on for hours, but I think most of the points I have already gotten across. It's probably better to let the day go ahead and people to talk more. Unless anyone has got any questions about what we do at a Government level, which a very different thing.
Ive still got about 5 minutes of things to say, one of the big problems is I'm a great believer in independence, and freedom and people's right to choose. Therefore of all the things that I worry about and think about in that way. I am old-fashioned libertarian. It's why I am not a member of either political party. They both like telling us what to do. I am afraid I don't like that really. Giving people independence and freedom of movement is very important whatever they have got. At the same time we have got to balance that against other people's rights to also do what they want to do, you have got the challenges of what's practical, what's possible, within financial constraints and things like that.
There are an awful lot of things that actually don't cost a lot of money to do. Some things just become ridiculous, and would be cheaper to have someone stationed there to give everyone a hand or to do something for them that they might have difficulty with. Sometimes, you can put in a device or something, a machine how to do it. But I think its balancing that. And the trouble is people who like organising things, tend to like having processes, procedures, they want certainty of outcome. That doesn't work in complex systems the whole thing's too difficult. But they think they can do it. They have a duty to protect that they take very seriously they want to tell everyone what to do because it's in their own best interests. Actually, I think I can make my own mind up about what's in my best interests. I don't know about you lot, but some will agree some may not. But I'm afraid that's where I come from. That's why there's always a challenge in Government.
I think there's a huge confusion actually. One of the problems is trying to understand who makes what decisions where. It's like a great jelly fish. You prod it somewhere, you find it wobbles, you are actually meant to be prodding somewhere else. But I expect that will become clearer today.
You are about to discover exactly who to talk to about what. That's the problem so many different people to talk to.
One of the other things about a lot of these technologies that will help every spectator, those getting to the Games, and others who are perhaps trying to get to work past the Games. Some of you may not be going to the Games but just trying to travel around the place. So I think we should be looking at helping them avoid the clogging up and congestion and all the other problems that go on, or they may get caught up in the problems too.
There could be a legacy to do with how you personalise help, or help personalise information that helps people help you, helps you help yourself, and all that, whatever is encompassed by that term.
I think the thing that I also took from John's - very much from John's talk, which is extremely comprehensive and I could go into much more detail - is that it's the business that's accountable. Who's doing what? Certainly, when in a local authority we were trying to get the adoption of something as simple as the notch on the contact cards that were being churned out a few years ago, no-one seemed to want to take the decision to do it. I couldn't understand why the manufacturers didn't just do it, but they weren't doing it unless someone else did it, and the whole thing, someone somewhere thinks that someone else is going to do the thing that enables you to do this. But actually it's someone elses job or responsibility, or they are not the person who takes the decision.
It's very difficult to nail down where decisions are taken in large bureaucracies. It's very frustrating, I find, because sometimes you also find the decision has bubbled to the top, and when you ask people at the top, "Why did you take that decision?" they say, "We didn't. It actually appeared in a paper" or something that came in front of them for rubber stamping at a committee meeting. You say, "Who did that?" and they say, "We don't really know."
You find in these big organisations, it's very strange how decisions are taken. I hope that doesn't happen at the Olympics. I hope some sensible and brave decisions are made about how we are going to run things smoothly, how we are going to get people around fast, get people around the place, how we are going to get people out of trouble when there is trouble.
That's why the people coming later are far more important than anything I say. All I say is let's get some balance in it and get the single issue pressure groups together, so you can all agree, you each have a slice of the pie. You have each got what you need for yourselves but you are not trying to rule out someone else. You are thinking about how they cope with theirs as well.
If you want the ATMs at a particular height, worry about the people who can't handle it at that height as well, and think about how to combine the two things. Rather than having two organisations going head to head trying to fight each other so they have won. This isn't about winning and losing, it's about enabling to help things happen.
The biggest danger is going to be trying to find the right person to make the right decisions, to try and help this happen, because I don't know who the people are at the moment. I just hear an awful lot of acronyms running all over the place, and I am looking forward to discovering who it is at the end of the day.
I am not sure I can add very much to that. Thank you very much for listening to me, and let's have an interesting day. (Applause).
John Gill: Thank you very much. We have time for a few questions. First of all, the mechanics. In the arms of the seats or alternate arm rests, you will find a microphone. You must use a microphone.
To operate the microphone, there is a button. Press it and the red light will come on in the arm rest. When you have finished please press the button again and it will switch it off.
Are there any questions for the Earl of Erroll?
NEW SPEAKER: I have one question. It's going to be a fascinating day, I am sure, but from a political point of view, the area that concerns me - and this is not really to be resolved today - but you have given us an extremely good canter through all sorts of issues.
But where I am concerned is that government doesn't seem to me to be prepared to invest in research. Now whether that is research to help technology and engineering improve things, or whether it's clinical, that avoids separations happening.
So I just wondered what priority you would give to this?
A. It's a very thorny problem. The Government seems to pump out huge amounts of money through a huge diversity of bodies. I sometimes think that the purpose of all these bodies is to absorb as much of it in administration before it gets out the other end - that's the cynic speaking.
The challenge comes, if you centralise it too much, that you will get the problem that particular areas will get selected and a lot of blue-sky research gets ignored. That's one of the problems with peer review, which I realise can be a very good idea in some ways, but the problem with peer review also is it can entrench the thinking of yesterday and the great and the good who don't like ideas being challenged by someone else.
We have actually done a certain amount of work on that. There are various committees that have reported on it and looked at it. The trouble is it comes along, someone criticises it and then someone comes up with another idea of how to fund it again. It's not an area I've got stuck into because it's so thorny I don't think I would ever get anything else done.
You are right, and I think we do it very inefficiently. Maybe if we had spent less time worrying it went to the right place, and just accept the fact that some of them will be wrong and it doesn't really matter.
It's like everything else statistically. If you throw enough mud against the wall, some of it will stick. I think we are worried about making too much of it stick and not throwing enough mud about the place.
NEW SPEAKER: Just a question more than an observation. London 2012 has already said that they are not interested in the R&D component, because they have actually said it's on time and on budget and they only have three-and-a-half years to go. So actually in response to the other gentleman, the research issues are actually put thoroughly off the agenda anyway.
I notice there's an ODA representative here. How do you respond to that situation? I was in an Australian presentation. We asked about R&D because it was a big part of our Olympic Park delivery but we were told it's been put to one side, because they are on time and on budget. That seemed to me to present a fundamental problem in three-and-a-half years' time.
A. My immediate reaction to that, as I said earlier, about people who run things tends to be averse to risk and wanting to deliver certainty.
So therefore they will stick with what works, on the whole, rather than having something a bit adventurous that doesn't work.
What I don't know is some people who come up with some good ideas in the meantime, to what extent they can incorporate those if they are proven to work in something later on, or whether things are set in concrete. But I expect we will hear a little bit more about that in a moment.
My own gut feel would be to spend money on original R&D at this stage is probably running it a bit late. But to incorporate stuff that other people are doing as you see it coming to fruition would be very, very sensible. Because the world will move a long way in three years, and to try and suggest one should go just with technology that's today, to me, would be dotty.
One always tries to produce something that would work quite soon, but you left hooks in there for what you thought the world was going to do next, so you could keep rolling forwards in a continuous bit of development and modification so you could keep on improving things.
NEW SPEAKER: Hello. My name is David Cormby.
You mentioned several times about ATMs and the height of ATMs. Now, we have had accessible talking ATMs in America for quite some time. Who is going to make sure that we have accessible talking ATMs in London for the Olympic Games?
A. I think I will have to leave that question probably to Barclays Bank or the British Banking Association. Which means probably not! That's the frightening thing. They tend to move extremely slowly and I think they did their last technology upgrade, which was the chip and PIN, five years ago, so that will keep them quiet. They will feel they have done it for the next ten years. It's a totally inadequate token. Very little has happened.
That's me being cynical. The answer is you need to get a group of you, a whole lot, to put in some pressure, but that's not the Olympics.
NEW SPEAKER: But you are going to have lots of people over here who are going to be used to accessible ATMs and we have a responsibility to actually provide the service that they require over here.
A. It's an extremely good point, and maybe the answer - what someone needs to think about doing here is how you gear up your influence via the ODA, or one of the Olympic bodies, into the banking organisations, to say, "This needs to be sorted out". That's probably the route to do it. A gear-in factor. You lot probably won't be able to get the banks to listen properly so use the Olympics to get the banks to listen properly. So gear up on that.
John Gill: The last question.
NEW SPEAKER: Yes. The point I would like to make hear is what can we do to make all these devices open so that the information is there, so that if I want to translate the messages, my device can translate. If I want to know where I am or what's going on, my device can take information from other devices and use it, rather than creating separate silo applications over and over and over again.
A. Some work is going on in this area. This is working on mobile translation for all mobile phones, but the idea is you key something in and it automatically translates stuff and it will do speech to text and text to speech and all those. Some of that is already out there.
I think that's going to come from people who are doing research and innovation from commercial things and it will become available anyway through the mobile network.
The question is whether you can encourage moves in that direction by the commercial operators. I don't think that will come out of the Olympic people.
But if it's there, and it's possible, that's the point where you have to put pressure on the Olympic people to make sure they are delivering information through the right channels to make use of that technology, if we can get it on to the mobiles in time.
I would have said that technology will be on mobile phones in the next three years. I would be very surprised if they aren't there because there's so much work going on in presence computing and all that stuff we will hear about later.
That's going to be a commercial thing. The important thing is to make sure that the Olympic people are communicating information, or the people worrying about how you handle a disaster, etc., do have hooks into that and use it properly. That's where you need to apply the pressure, I would have thought.That would be my own view.
JOHN GILL: Thank you very much, Lord Erroll for a stimulating and interesting presentation.
We now move on. I welcome Dr Stephen Duckworth, the chief executive of Disability Matters and a board member of the Olympic Delivery Authority.
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