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'GUIDELINES FOR THE ACCESSIBILITY OF ICT SYSTEMS'

Notes of a PhoneAbility/RNIB Seminar on 15 November 2002

Tony Shipley (Vice-Chairman - PhoneAbility) welcomed participants and pointed out that the COST219 programme 'Access to Telecommunications for Disabled and Elderly People' had moved on from the stage of developing technical solutions and had long been engaged in promoting their implementation. With technology for achieving accessibility now readily available, the issue was to persuade commerce to use it. The principle of inclusive design, recognising a wider range of abilities among users, provided one means of realising this objective at the least cost to all parties. The Seminar would be exploring that theme.

Dr John Gill (RNIB) began his overview by noting that published access guidelines were readily available for the built environment, transport and even the Web. ICT in general was much more difficult to address because of the dynamics of the technology and the individuality of the end-users. He cited examples from the converging cultures embodied in ICT. Most terminals relied upon keypads, for which there were standardised layouts - sector-specific and incompatible. Icons and function labels were not standardised, and often used concepts from manual typewriters. Access technology that was readily available was often not used. Public Access Terminals could configure to the user's needs, from preferences stored on Smart cards that would indicate the preferred text font (or voice output), menu presentation, time-out and other factors. At present, even the use of a marker notch to identify card alignment was not uniformly adopted, so the introduction of contactless proximity cards was to be welcomed. Touch screens presented many problems for users with vision or dexterity difficulties, so a means of confirming a selection was essential. Automatic gates and public telephones were further examples of ICT equipment where detailed consideration was essential if access was to be extended.

Digital TV was expected to open new areas of information provision but it was not yet ready to replace analogue services in the UK. Although targets had been set in the Communications Bill for sub-titling, audio description and signing - but not clean audio - the means of delivery had not been thought through into the design of receivers. In telecommunications, mobile was overtaking fixed line and SMS had moved from an add-on to a mainstream service, but with access problems because it was not planned as such. Developments like the electronic purse had the capability for reducing the need to obtain and handle cash, but could prove exclusive and inaccessible to the people whose independence should be enhanced - if they were not very carefully planned. The possibility of a common wire-free interface between ICT devices was now close, but the life span of technologies such as Bluetooth or the IEEE interface was shorter than the time scale for universal adoption. Effective standardisation was therefore an imperative, but of what and how?

Dr Mark Magennis (National Disability Authority, Eire) described the ICT Guidelines which had been prepared for the Authority, available on the Web at accessIT.nda.ie. With the help of a video, he demonstrated that access is hampered when there is an absence of a user-centred design approach. The Irish ICT Guidelines had been developed to overcome the problems of inadequate briefing for designers, which had been seen to result in unsatisfactory outcomes and a loss of accessibility. To achieve the objective of ensuring that all operable parts of ICT equipment were reachable, various situations had been studied from the user's perspective in drawing up the guidance. The resulting Guidelines were addressed to designers and specifiers of ICT equipment and were structured to meet their information needs, according to the type of technology under consideration.

Jan-Ingvar Lindström (EVERYCOM, Sweden) referred to Swedish ICT Guidelines which were at the stage of proposals for discussion. The aim in Sweden was to develop Government services as a model example for other service sectors. It was the objective to achieve the more crucial aims by 2005, with the others reached by 2010. An underlying theme was the promotion of a shift away from viewing disabled people as patients, towards emancipating them as citizens. The Guidelines had followed the basic principles of Design for All and mainstream accessibility and set out the processes which should be adhered to by local authorities, who to a large extent provided public services in Sweden. The document covered activities such as telephone procedures, written information, film and video presentations and conferences. It included guidance on call centre operations and relay services and contained a section on the developing concept of Total Communication.

Prof. Jim Sandhu (Inclusive Design Associates) described the CEN/ISSS work on Design for All in ICT Systems. These Standards bodies had established a Workshop on Design for All and Assistive Technologies in ICT - 'WSDfA'. Its task was to draw up ICT sector-specific DfA guidelines for the preparation of standards by the end of 2002. ISO/IEC Guide 71 had provided broad advice and check-lists for standards Committees, to help them ensure that the products and services covered by their specifications would be accessible to users across a wide range of functional abilities. The work had been given an impetus in Europe by two EU Mandates, 273 dealing specifically with ICT and 283 with a more general coverage for disabled and elderly users. The Mandates were addressed to all three European Standards bodies, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, and called for sector-specific activity to supplement the general guidance. The international Guide 71 had therefore been taken as the general basis and the Workshop was co-ordinating activity between the European Standards bodies on the ICT theme. It was working closely with ETSI in particular, to avoid duplication of effort in preparing guidance on standards for telecommunications systems. Good practice examples were being selected and check-lists would be incorporated.

Joyce Blow (CEN Project Team) spoke on Accessibility of Card-reading Systems. CEN's work on machine-readable cards included a Working Group (WG4 of CEN224) looking at the man-machine interface. It was assembling data on topics such as the acceptable force range required for the opening of doors, on preferred lighting levels, etc. More study was required on the range of variations of user attributes, such as shape, size, reach, manual strength and dexterity. Much of the traditional anthropometric data had been gathered from studies on student volunteers and young servicemen, and was inappropriate to an older or less able population. Once a data set more representative of the general population had been assembled and published, it would still be a major issue to demonstrate the commercial feasibility of inclusive design for a wider range of attributes. Some of the driving force in this respect might have to originate from Governments.

Knut Nordby (ETSI - Human Factors), speaking on 'The Role of Standardisation' described the move to an e-Society. This carried the supposition that all citizens would be able to access the Information Society, which would not be the case unless the Standards had been very carefully prepared. He described the stages in accommodating a higher percentile of users, noting that there was a boundary between what could be achieved in mainstream design and the next level, which was that of extending commonly available products and services by means of adaptations for particular groups of users. Beyond this was the level of assistive technology, where specially designed products were applied to cater for special needs - these then had to be interfaced with mainstream devices. If assistive technology could not reach, resort to man-power resource was needed in the form of a human intermediary, but this would apply to relatively few people with the most severe lack of function. In moving away from the mainstream level and towards the stage of reliance upon a personal assistant, the numbers of users decreased considerably at each successive boundary.
The objective of Design for All could be summarised as moving the first boundary outwards by improving accessibility, so steadily reducing the numbers in the population who were excluded from using mainstream designs. The role of the Human Factors group in ETSI was to support this process by influencing the content of mainstream standards. The current activity was described and could be found at www.etsi.org/.

Prof. Jan Ekberg (STAKES, Finland) contemplated The Future. He reviewed a number of developments that would come to have an influence upon ICT systems, noting particularly miniaturisation, multi-modal and multi-media systems as destined to have a major impact. Advances in biometrics and the understanding of ways in which humans acquire, process, store and output information would dramatically simplify the ergonomic pathways through which we all interact with ICT devices and networks. This would lead in turn to the development of customised communicating devices that would optimise the use of active user functional abilities, and minimise reliance upon impaired pathways. We should expect to see ICT devices and networks becoming able to retrieve stored user profiles that would trigger a local re-configuration to the type of user interface that was most appropriate.