IT for the socially excluded, 27 February 2006 Articles / Past meetings: Reports & speeches Date: Feb 27, 2006 - 11:55 PM The disabled can be and often are excluded from the world wide web, even if they have a computer. Dr David Kreps, Professor of Informatics Research, Salford University, and David Morriss, Trustee Abilitynet. Dr David Kreps The disabled can be and often are excluded from the world wide web, even if they have a computer. This is not a trivial problem. In the EU, 45 million people are disabled. 9-10% of men in the UK have some degree of colour blindness. Other impairments preventing easy access to the World Wide Web are blindness and deafness. Three million Britons have hand tremors. Others have repetitive strain injury or Parkinson’s. Cognitive problems also inhibit access to the Web. There are 5 million dyslexics, for some of whom black text on a white background bounces about. And, of course, disability in one form or another often comes with old age. Technology helps, with “assistive technologies” developed in the 19990s shortly after the web itself, with Text-to-Speech, Screen Readers and Voice Browsers for the blind. For physical tremors, there are track-ball mice and head-and-eye alternatives to the mouse. For dyslexics and the partially sighted, cascading style sheets allow the replacing of the normal screen image with one suitable for their condition. This is important: the graphical paradigm must be kept separate from the semantic (text) information, so that it can be accessed by the above assistive technologies. Every web page should consist of two files: HTML with text, and CSS with style. In May 1999, the Web Accessibility Initiative of Sir Tim Berners Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium laid down the Web Accessibility Guidelines, Levels A, AA and AAA, which have been recognized as THE standard. The RNIB “See it right” campaign is based on the Guidelines. The EU’s Lisbon Agenda (2000) adopted the Level AA Guidelines for all its public Websites, and in 2003 proposed a kitemark for its EuroAccessibility project. In the UK, the Disability Rights Commission Act (1999) referred specifically to websites in its code of practice. The Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Act of 2001 included schools, further and higher education institutions. The roll-out of e-government has been a driver for implementing accessible services, and the eGovernment Interoperability framework (e-GIF) has demanded WAI Level AA accessibility. There is now the Disability Discrimination Act, which shifts from a legal framework which relies on individual disabled people complaining about discrimination to one in which public sector becomes a proactive agent of change. There is a business case for fulfilling the needs of the 10 million registered disabled in the UK. 6.2 million are of working age. The value of the disability market in the UK was estimated in the Labour Force survey of 1998 to be £45-£50 billion per annum. Although some progress has been made, more needs to be done. In 2004, the Disability Rights Commission studied 1000 websites, and found that 81% did not even achieve Level A. In November 2005, an EU Study of 436 government service websites across Europe found that only 3% of the websites achieved Level A conformance. David Morriss Providing equipment to the disabled is not a solution in itself. We also need to ensure the appropriate human support and intervention – which means more than just providing IT skills. This is a challenge for the Third Sector as well as the Government as the costs of such provision are increasing and technology of itself cannot close the gap. Some initiatives which are of practical use. Citizens Online. They provide local communities and local authorities with a strong project management and contextual contribution through what they call the Everybody Online Programme. They have also engaged Industry through their Alliance for Digital Inclusion, which includes major companies. The Information Technology livery company, WCIT, requires a team of members to work with projects on a volunteer basis as a condition for funding. Projects include EZ<>IT, supporting children in long term hospital or hospice care; Open Age, working with another charity to help older people make use of IT; and a project with Carers UK, as it was found that carers themselves had their own special needs where IT could be particularly helpful. The Abilitynet charity, often partners with a sector-specific charity such as RNIB or Remploy –where appropriate. Abilitynet covers individual assessments of technical needs, and organises Conferences and Workshops for workers in the field. It provides Consultancy for employers, supply of tailored systems to clients and technical support. Recent initiatives include “My computer my way” –how to tailor standard supplier system products to meet individual needs and in a new collaboration with the RNIB linking its web accessibility service with the “See it right” programme to jointly logo complying sites. Another charity in this area is a programme of the BCS Disability Specialist Group,IT Can Help. Volunteer IT professionals give one-to-one advice to disabled people on ICT issues, like “handholding when Word doesn’t work”. Specific charities like the RNIB, Scope, Age Concern or Help the Aged are very involved with IT. Very often a disadvantaged group needs to have a ‘Trojan Horse’ approach to attract clients to use IT. For older people handling digital photography and sending pictures and messages round the family is a good example. A group of IT Industry parties: BCS, Intellect, Business in the Community, Citizens on Line and Computer Weekly, led by the WCIT got together and created “IT4Communities”. To date over 3000 volunteers have signed up and hundreds of organisations have been helped. Despite all this, a test organised by the Disabilities Rights Commission, in which disabled people – not theoreticians – attempted to access Websites deemed compliant to the Guidelines found that none of them worked. This is a challenge for a technology industry, because it is a human problem, not a technical one. But industry is trying to help. Questions from the floor. The Chairman asked where MPs and corporates should go for authoritative and practical advice on how to move their websites to make their websites more accessible. DK suggested that the PAS 78 standard coming from the BSI in March 2006 could be very important. Margaret Ross of Solent University commented that her department had run tests of Websites over several years and had found that only 24% of sites were legal. More alarming was that some companies’ sites, which had originally been legal, had become illegal. She suggested that a software benchmark should be written, to test whether websites were illegal. DK responded that this would be very complicated, and cannot guarantee that the site is accessible. Human checking is also necessary. Richard Barrington, Sun Microsystems, said that he had recently become partially-sighted himself, and had become passionate about this topic. One problem, he found, is the complexity of the technology. Computers are still not a mass-market consumer product, however much some companies try to pretend that they are. We will have trouble until someone comes up with new mass market technologies aimed at particular audiences. The next problem is cultural: language, age gender. “Let’s face it; 98% of websites in the world are developed by young male white anglo-saxon protestants. They do not cater for the wider community.” No one, Richard Barrington claimed, has yet provided an online service for anyone with a disability. “Whenever I touch a network, I have to configure it to suit my need. What I need is to sign on to, say, DirectGov, and it recognises my disability and configures itself to my need. In Sun, our network has this in place, so that I can walk up to any computer anywhere in the world, authenticate myself, and it downloads my configuration in real time.” At the moment, solutions are piecemeal, and because of this there is a perception that there is no mass market. So, nobody addresses the market. Professor Jim Norton asked what could be done by industry or professional bodies to find a way out from the current “valley of death” between the high-price special needs market and the high-volume moderate-cost market that clearly exists. DM agreed that no one was creating a mass market in this area. There is a local government initiative for users of public terminals to use a smart card to configure the terminal to the users’ individual needs. The full presentation by Dr David Kreps can be found at this link. David Morriss’s notes for the meeting, giving further details of the initiatives listed in the above summary are HERE This article comes from PITCOM http://www.pitcom.org.uk/ The URL for this story is: http://www.pitcom.org.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=149