The eAccessibility Forum was announced in the Digital Britain Act and is led by officials at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). On its first area of work, regulation, Vaizey said a consultation document would be published in September on the UK’s implementation of the Regulatory Framework for Electronic Communications in the European Union, amended in November of last year, which covers electronic accessibility. The UK is required to transpose the framework by the end of 2011, he said.

The forum’s eventual ‘e-accessibility action plan’ will cover both consumer technologies and website accessibility, Vaizey said. “[This] doesn’t necessarily mean by imposing regulations on bodies. It can be through partnership and persuasiveness as well and working together,” he said.

The minister was speaking the day after UK digital champion Martha Lane Fox launched her Manifesto for a Networked Nation which included the recommendation (in paragraph 9.2) that “Government should close down publicly funded websites that consistently fail to meet its own web accessibility guidelines.”

Note: Further in-depth coverage of E-Access ’10 will be featured in our August issue.

The All Abilities ePlayground was created by the Australian arm of Sonokids, an international non-profit organisation developing technology for disabled people. It was commissioned by Gold Coast City Council in Queensland, Australia, with the state’s Department of Communities (Disability Services).

Access features include a ‘function for children with limited motor skills who can blow into a microphone to control games; and a ‘single switch’ control for children who are only able to use a single button on a computer.

The platform is based on the objectives behind 17 outdoor ‘All Abilities’ playgrounds built by councils across Queensland, as part of a government project.

Phia Damsma, creative director of Sonokids Australia, told E-Access Bulletin the ePlayground was designed to be as inclusive as possible. “In addition to more traditional devices like keyboards, mice and joysticks, the ePlayground is tailored for use with touch screens and low-tech assistive technologies”, Damsma said.

The ePlayground received positive feedback after being tested by special schools and special education units throughout Queensland, and it is hoped funding will be found for further development including personalising the platform to offer relevant local educational information, said Damsma.

“The current ePlayground introduces children to iconic Australian animals such as kangaroos, pelicans and crocs. We invite requests for Sonokids to localise and customise the ePlayground’s design concept to suit other countries, languages and cultures”, she said.

Sutton Council’s website features a ‘SignVideo’ link which connects deaf users to a specialist video call centre staffed by British Sign Language interpreters. The interpreters then contact the relevant council department and act as translators between the deaf website user and the hearing council staff member. This means that deaf website users can instantly discuss their queries with the council from any location with internet access and a webcam, without first having to book an appointment to ensure an interpreter is present.

The system was created by the social enterprise Significan’t. Brigitte Francois, director of interpreting services at Significan’t, told E-Access Bulletin that as well as giving deaf residents equal access to customers services within the council, the system also makes financial sense for the council.

“People are reluctant to book interpreters for a small conversation of 10-15 minutes, because most face-to-face interpreters charge for a minimum of three hours,” Francois said. “Significan’t’s director, Jeff McWhinney, decided that video interpreting would bring a solution to this. Face-to-face interpreting is very necessary – we don’t want to get rid of it – but in some circumstances it makes sense and is more cost efficient to be able to make a short call on the videophone.”

The system has already received positive feedback from residents in Sutton, a borough in which there are around 250 deaf people. Sutton is the only London borough to have been awarded accreditation for accessibility by the Shaw Trust, a charity which assists disabled people to find and prepare for employment.

The theme of the Seventh International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 2010), held in North Carolina in April, was ‘Developing regions: common goals, common problems?’

This provided an ideal opportunity to highlight the limitations of approach taken by the international World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to web accessibility, which is enshrined in legislation in many developed countries, and to argue that developing countries are in a position to avoid repeating mistakes made in the Western world.

One key issue is the importance of understanding the context of the use of web resources. The approaches taken to accessibility in a teaching and learning or cultural appreciation context may be very different from those taken to access to informational resources, for example. The resource costs associated with the provision of accessible web resources also need to be considered, and policies which endorse a view that all resources must be universally accessible to everyone, no matter what the cost implications may be, is naive and, in any case, is in conflict with legal requirements to take “reasonable measures”.

The question of the costs of providing accessible services is becoming even more important in the UK in light of the new government’s budget in which we can expect to see significant cutbacks in funding for the public sector. The economic concerns which we are currently facing will also be shared by those in developing countries.

Two examples from disability studies illustrate the value of applying critical theories to support more holistic approaches to web accessibility: ‘Aversive disablism’, and ‘Hierarchies of impairment’. Aversive disablism is illustrated using a comparison with race theory: aversive racists are not anti-black, but pro-white. There is a need to understand how approaches to accessibility might be based on pro-non-disabled assumptions. Such considerations should be understood from the context of ‘Hierarchies of impairment’.

The City University academic Mark Deal argued the need to be “focusing attention on impairment groups that face the most discrimination in society (i.e. those ranked lowest in the hierarchy of impairments), rather than viewing disabled people as a homogenous group”. In the context of web accessibility, the focus of attention is often the needs of the visually-impaired, with the needs of users with learning difficulties having been seemingly marginalised in the development of accessibility guidelines. We conclude that “Critical research into accessibility for such groups is therefore recommended before standards can be invested”.

In light of such concerns, should we simply shrug our shoulders and abandon any commitment to addressing the challenges of enhancing access to web resources? On the contrary, rather than ignoring WAI’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) altogether, we should treat them as just that – guidelines, which are useful in many instances but can be disregarded if they are ineffective.

And rather than looking for an answer in a set of guidelines, which, in the case of WCAG 2.0 are relatively new, we should be looking for patterns of emerging best practices.

One example is the use of networked technologies in ‘amplified events’, in which Twitter ‘back channels’, access to speaker slides on SlideShare and video or audio streaming can enhance access to people not physically present at an event. We should regard this as providing many accessibility (and environmental) benefits – indeed it might be argued that a failure to use such affordable technologies to provide event amplification could be regarded as discriminatory.

So rather than regarding WCAG conformance as a mandatory requirement, WCAG should be regarded as guidelines, which may be ignored if their use conflicts with other requirements, so long as steps are taken to address the potential exclusion that may result. It should be noted that UK legislation that requires use of ‘reasonable measures’ to ensure that users with disabilities are not discriminated against unfairly, provides a legislative context for this approach. A policy based on ‘seeking to make use of WCAG’ will provide the flexibility needed. This would not be possible with a policy which states that all resources must conform to WCAG.

‘Reasonable measures’ should also include identification of costs of conforming with accessibility guidelines. There should be consideration of the trade-off between financial savings and usability issues.

If it is too costly or difficult to conform with accessibility guidelines, the provision of alternatives that are equivalent may be an appropriate solution. It should also be noted that the alternative need not be web-based: for e-learning resources, equivalent real world learning alternatives may be used.

A requirement that all resources conform to WCAG is a ‘just-in-case’ solution. This may be an appropriate resource for widely accessed informational resources, but may be inappropriate if resources are expected to be little used. There may be advantages in delaying provision of accessibility solutions to allow development of technologies which can enable more cost-effective solutions to be devised.

The need to ensure that disabled people are included in the design and development of web solutions must also be emphasised. And finally, there needs to be a focus on ‘accessibility’, rather than ‘web accessibility’: the benefits of web or IT solutions to real world accessibility difficulties needs to be considered. As described above, amplified events can address difficulties in travel and access, even though the technologies used may not conform with accessibility guidelines.

NOTE: Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus at UKOLN, a digital information management research centre at the University of Bath. This article outlines the ideas presented in an award-winning paper for W4A 2010 by Kelly with Sarah Lewthwaite and David Sloan: ‘Developing countries; developing experiences: approaches to accessibility for the real world’.

The association, a charity formed last year, refined its work programme for the next two years at its annual general meeting in London earlier this month.

This included setting suggested minimum acceptable standards for large print, Braille and audio formats by the end of 2010, followed in 2011 by work on standards for synthesised speech, electronic books and other digital formats.

All standards will be aimed at content and service providers; transcribers; and end users, Alan Matthews, the association’s public relations officer, told E-Access Bulletin following the meeting. “The goal is to set out an achievable minimum UK standard that everyone can work towards, so the odd producer out there who is not quite hitting the mark would have something to aim at, service providers would have minimum requirement for end users, and end users would have minimum standard they could expect and service providers could not say they can’t do it, because of technical issues,” Matthews said.

“For example, if I work for a utility, and I know I should provide accessible formats, and I want to write them into a tender but I don’t know what standards to use, I could come to UKAAF. Then I would know what I am asking for is reasonable, achievable and what the end-user is expecting.”

Ultimately, the association would like its standards to be included in government regulations relating to accessibility, he said. “If we can be talking to government within five years, it would give our work a stamp of authority.”

The association will also be looking at how current law in this area, including the new Equalities Act 2010 and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 with its provision for ‘reasonable adjustments’ to services, affect the way organisations need to take account of format accessibility.

The meeting had been due to pass an emergency motion on whether to endorse Unified English Braille (UEB) as the “preferred” Braille format for UK use, in the face of US moves to endorse the alternative Unified Braille Code. However the meeting decided to delay a decision pending further deliberations.

Three appointments were made to the board of UKAAF: Michael Lewington, Director of Calibre Audio Library; Richard West, former chair of BCAB and Sheila Armstrong, text transcription co-ordinator at Torch Trust. The association’s president is former RNIB chairman Lord Low of Dalston.

Delegates at the ‘smart living’ seminar heard that although many pilot schemes were already testing components of next generation home systems, there was little co-ordination between the sectors involved including architecture, engineering, building, health and care, energy, communications, transport and bodies representing disabled and older people.

“Without such a plan, the situation in five years time is likely to be as fragmentary as it is today,” said Professor Patrick Roe of the European CARDIAC project (Coordination Action in R&D in Accessible and Assistive ICT: http://www.cardiac-eu.org ), which aims to create a ‘road-map’ to co-ordinate research in this field.

Martyn Gilbert of ‘UK3.0’, a private-sector-led project to create “next generation” homes, said the barriers to progress lay not with technology but with organisational cultures.

“All of the substantive technology necessary to help older and disabled people live as they wish in their own homes is here, and has been here for several years. The obstacles are entrenched behaviours in the public and private sectors. They are obstacles of convention, ego and unwillingness to co-operate in good will with other stakeholders.

“The nation can no longer afford the luxury of such behaviours… it makes societal, business and national sense to collaborate to bring about the widest installation of these technologies in people’s homes.”

UK 3.0 is attempting to co-ordinate private and public sector services to smart homes including intelligent energy and water management and health promotion, with a target of contributing £100 billion a year to the UK economy by 2019.

‘Smart Living – the way forward for disabled and older people’ was hosted by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in association with the accessible ICT charity PhoneAbility ( http://www.phoneability.org.uk ).

Conducted on behalf of the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, a survey by Sensus – a Danish consulting company specialising in accessibility, IT and disability – assessed 226 government websites against international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0)

The results of the survey are another setback to the goal set at a ministerial conference of EU member states in 2006 of all EU government websites becoming fully accessible by the end of 2010. It is now expected that not one state will hit this target.

The Danish ministry now plans to launch an e-learning tool in 2011 featuring guidance on creating more accessible websites and documents.

In the UK, guidance from the Central Office of Information on ‘delivering inclusive websites’ ( http://www.coi.gov.uk/guidance.php?page=131 )
in 2008 stating that all government websites should have conformed to international ‘AA’ standards by 2011. However, the public sector Society of IT Management’s annual ‘Better Connected’ review of every UK council website, published earlier this year, found only 32 of 479 sites achieved even basic accessibility levels (see E-Access Bulletin, March 2010
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=400 ).

One of the last pieces of legislation passed earlier this year by the UK’s outgoing Labour government was the Digital Economy Act 2010, which, among other things, extended the Public Lending Right to audiobooks and ebooks in libraries.

This transfers out of copyright both physical hardcopy audiobooks in libraries, and audio/ebooks downloaded to an mp3 player or ebook reader on library premises; authors receive a payment from the government for each loan based on a rather complicated formula. The US does not currently have a similar scheme, following a failed attempt to introduce one in the 1980s.

The UK legislative change represents an attempt to simplify the model of lending non-print material in libraries which had hitherto occurred under a licensing regime which had never really functioned properly. This had made librarians reluctant to build up large stocks of such material, although interestingly customers seem to welcome audiobooks: the global electronic book distribution platform OverDrive has been extending its business in the US, and in 2008 there were 11 million loans of audiobooks from UK public libraries. Statistics for the year 2009 will soon be available. There are also some avant garde librarians who regard ebooks as key to making libraries relevant to younger members.

Since libraries have always been the key source of income for audiobooks on traditional media such as cassette or CD, at least in the UK, the change in the law has been broadly welcomed by advocacy groups for people with impaired vision. However, there are those who are critical, for example objecting to the fact that audio- and ebooks accessed remotely via download are not covered by the Public Lending Right (government lawyers said this was impossible because such activity was covered by the authors’ right of communication to the public). Many, not least the UK Registrar of Public Lending Right, feel this is a significant gap because they do not think most people download ebooks or e-audiobooks on library premises. Nevertheless, it is a step forward.

Such issues are only going to gain in importance. In 2009 for the first time the sales of ebooks were significantly higher than those of audiobooks in the US. Many of the most passionate advocates of audiobooks are moving to positions in companies associated with the download market, and Audible.com expanded its catalogue of unabridged audiobooks from 20,519 in October 2009 to 26,113 titles in May 2010.

Where does this leave issues relating to the accessibility of e-books to people with disabilities?

The recent disputes over the Kindle’s text-to-speech and over the read-out-loud function of Adobe ebooks in public libraries only makes sense in the context of an audiobooks industry fearing that in some sense the future is slipping away from it, whether those fears are justified or not.

If downloads are the future, particularly of unabridged audiobooks narrated by a human voice, then securing access to the internet and to computers in general for the visually impaired becomes of ever-greater significance. It would be a real tragedy if, just at the moment books become available in non-print formats in large numbers, a lack of access to technology in general and/or to the internet or mainstream ebook readers prevented us from reaping maximum benefit.

In this regard, ensuring internet accessibility, whether through enforcement of guidelines or through user testing, is critical and making media players that visually impaired people already use capable of playing ebooks and protected audio downloads is as important as capturing access to a mainstream e-books reader.

Guy Whitehouse is a PhD research student at Loughborough University, UK.

The concept of ‘digital exclusion’ might seem simple enough, but it is actually a highly complex field to define and analyse, and academics and policymakers are divided on the best ways to address it, a City University, London seminar heard last week.

‘Digital inclusion and social exclusion: is there a relationship and what are the policy implications?’ was addressed by Ellen Helsper, lecturer in media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Across the UK, and the whole developed world, the proportion of people not using the internet seems to be levelling off at between 20%-30%, Helsper said. Academics had developed four broad theory types covering the effects of digital exclusion, and how important a factor it is in social exclusion more generally, she said.

The first is that it has little or no effect, although this was not a widely-held or popular theory, not least because if true, it would render large swathes of government policy and academic research meaningless, Helsper said.

The second, ‘equalising’ theory holds that the reduction of digital exclusion reduces disadvantage by engaging people more in areas like education. “Sadly, there is not much evidence for this”, she said.

The third theory is that of ‘neutralisation’. This suggests that technology use in itself cannot significantly improve people’s social situation, but for those who do not use it, the social gap will widen, so digital inclusion is needed simply to maintain “the status quo of inequality”. There is more evidence for this theory, Helsper said.

Finally comes the bleakest theory of all: that of the ‘vicious cycle’. According to this theory, “Even if we engage everyone with technology, the way in which we engage is so different that the gaps will still widen, because the socially disadvantaged will not use the internet for uses such as education but for uses like gaming, so the gaps get bigger and bigger.”

Whatever the implications, it is clear that over time, the relationship between social disadvantage and use of the internet has remained stable, so patterns of internet use closely track patterns of social deprivation, she said.

Across Europe, we also find that areas of low take-up and use are poorer areas, and so the main theories relating to causes of digital exclusion (rather than their effects) tend to revolve around cost, Elsper said.

However, if you talk to people in these areas, you receive a more complex response about the reasons for their non-use of the internet such as discrimination faced by certain sections of the community. Theoreticians and policymakers are therefore now trying to look beyond the economic indicators, she said.

It is also becoming clearer that different types of access are better for different types of excluded groups, for example that home access is better than access in a library or other public place, because people have time to play around with it more.

But levels of home access are again linked to all traditional indicators of social exclusion such as disability, Helsper said. Among the disabled population, 59% do not have home access, compared with just 29% of the general population.

Accordingly, the focus of analysts has switched towards models that go beyond access and use into areas like skills, confidence, attitude and motivation, she said.

“People have started thinking differently about skills: they are not just asking how good at it people think they are, but are looking at things like critical online skills – whether people know how good an information source is – or creative skills, can you create content online?”

When it comes to confidence levels, we find that people with disabilities have lower scores, Helsper said. And the same is true for attitude and motivation, which looks at whether people see the value of using digital technologies even after they have the necessary access and skills: the average score for positive attitude stands at 3.1 out of 5 for disabled adults compared to 3.3 for non-disabled adults; and 3.4/5 for disabled teenagers compared with 3.8/5 for non-disabled teenagers.

An even newer measure of exclusion is that of digital ‘engagement’, she said. This measures not just whether people have access to the internet, or have the skills or even the motivation to use it for sustained periods of time, but how deeply they use it and in what ways – do they use it for a wide variety of activities?

“It is a parallel argument to that of education: people are now saying we need to focus on the ways people are becoming engaged. Engagement views activity in a more social environment, geared around technologies – people exchanging information with each other, for example. It is not something that you have to do.”

There are controversies inherent in this kind of analysis, Helsper said, because it often can seem to involve value judgments as to what type of online activity is more valuable than another kind.

“There is a tendency to talk about digital participation, but I don’t really like that term because it comes from the area of civic participation, the old view of the value of doing something active in society, but in fact if kids do gaming or social networks, they may be included.

“But I don’t use digital inclusion any more as a term, either – what I tend to be talking about now is digital engagement.”

The opposite – disengagement – may sometimes be related to the fact that not much content is available for some social groups, “because the internet was created by stereotypical white middle-aged men”. For example the types of jobs some people may be looking for may not be widely advertised on internet job sites.

Ultimately, of the three main popular current theories mentioned at the opening of the seminar – equalising, neutralisation and vicious cycle – it is fair to say that all are true in some measure or other or at some time or other, depending on the type of engagement, or type of group you are looking at, Helsper said.

There are other encouraging signs, however, such as ‘proxy use’: research shows that one third of non-users have somebody else who uses the internet for them, so they are part of networks which allow them access to the technology, she said. People with disabilities tend to rely on children for proxy use, whereas people without disabilities tend to rely on friends or colleagues. “In the health and social service sector, this is an important finding”.

Another possible hidden positive is that the benefits of have digital access or being engaged may not be easy to measure because they may accrue in areas unrelated to the specific activity, Elsper said. “So if you use technology in a geography class, it may not necessarily improve grades or attendance in that class, but it could boost confidence in a completely different area.”

In this and all areas relating to digital exclusion, empirical research is “very much a work in progress”, Helsper said.

In discussion at the end of the seminar, one delegate summed up a key shortfall of any public policy that attempts to address digital exclusion purely by providing more people with access to the internet.

“If you build hospitals in poor areas, and provide lots of doctors in them, it will not necessarily improve people’s health in that area, that has been shown to be true. The same is true about giving people access, it won’t necessarily mean they are more digitally included.”

The best practice guide on e-book accessibility was produced for the publishing industry by the Publishers Licensing Society and JISC TechDis, the disability and technology advisory agency for the education sector. Findings in the guide – which form part of a lengthier full report on the research – are based on the results of accessibility testing of e-book platforms carried out in 2009 by disability charity the Shaw Trust.

Disabled technology users tested a number of platforms for compatibility with screen-readers; voice recognition; keyboard commands; and colour contrast and magnification.

Alistair McNaught, senior advisor at JISC TechDis, told E-Access Bulletin two of the research findings are particularly significant. “The first was how tantalisingly close we are to solutions; there are still barriers on many platforms but most of these are legacies or oversights that could be easily fixed in subsequent developments.

“The second was the positive engagement from the publishers and their responses to the feedback. Good accessibility leads to good products and the opportunity for disability organisations to be ‘expert partners’ can only benefit everyone.”

The best practice guide and full report are available at:
http://www.pls.org.uk/news/Pages/goodpracticegudeebooks.aspx?PageView=Shared .