‘Moving together: mobile apps for inclusion and assistance’ ( http://bit.ly/yBTdwo ) was written by E-Access Bulletin editor Dan Jellinek with Peter Abrahams of Bloor Research, on behalf of the OneVoice for Accessible IT Coalition.

The report details a number of key issues facing elderly and disabled users of mobile apps, and makes recommendations for improving the accessibility of such apps.

One emerging area in the field is that of apps for assistance which use ‘crowdsourcing’ to assist users, the report found. These are apps which draw on the knowledge base of a group to provide information or help to other users, such as the iPhone app VizWiz, which allows users to take a photo of something, record a question about the picture, and then ‘crowdsource’ the answer from a team of online workers.

Speaking to E-Access Bulletin, Peter Abrahams, co-author of the report, said accessible apps could enable disabled users “to be independent in ways they could not be in the non-digital environment.” However, “if the app is not accessible then the disabled person will be disenfranchised and marginalised. This is morally, ethically, financially and legally unacceptable”, Abrahams said.

Mobile device retailers should ensure sales staff have training in basic disability awareness and use of the Global Accessibility Reporting Initiative (GARI) database, run by the Mobile Manufacturers Forum ( http://bit.ly/reiCg ), to provide customers with accessibility information, the report says.

The report was launched last month at the inaugural Annual General Meeting of the One Voice for Accessible ICT Coalition, a collection of private, public and third sector groups committed to helping businesses and organisations improve their ICT accessibility. At the meeting, coalition members signed a set of principles detailing their commitment to promote and increase the uptake and delivery of accessible online and mobile services.

The coalition has also drawn-up a ‘Seven Steps’ guide to basic mobile app accessibility for app designers and implementers: http://bit.ly/yL8iaZ

All these steps are designed to help overcome the idea that accessibility is too complicated, Abrahams said. “They also emphasise the fact that accessibility is not just about getting the technical coding right, but goes right through the cycle from commissioning to dealing with feedback.”

The joint statement ( http://bit.ly/HzaaBV ) was launched at this week’s London Book Fair 2012, and is supported by a range of organisations, including: the Royal National Institute of Blind People; and EDItEUR, the international trade standards body for the book industry.

While technological advancements have made it easier for publishers to produce material that is more accessible to those with print impairments, the whole supply chain now needs to work together to advance e-book accessibility, the statement says.

“The mechanisms by which an ebook is made accessible involve all the actors in the supply chain from author to reader; no single actor in that chain can solve the challenge of accessibility by itself. Publishers, ebook device manufacturers, platform developers, ebook wholesalers and retailers, and of course consumers themselves all have their part to play”, it says.

Publishers are now looking to work with: developers of e-book devices and platforms; e-book retailers; learning providers and libraries; and readers with print impairments.

The PA is asking organisations in all parts of the publishing supply chain, and others interested organisations, to pledge their support to the statement, which they can do through the PA’s website ( http://bit.ly/I7NIfZ ). The association has also produced its own recommendations on accessible publishing and text-to-speech ( http://bit.ly/ApJbsd ).

Speaking to E-Access Bulletin ahead of his talk at this week’s W4A web accessibility conference in Lyon, France ( http://www.w4a.info/2012/ ), Alan F. Newell, an emeritus professor at Dundee University’s School of Computing, said that he has “every expectation” that today’s young people will face problems using the web in the future, even if they currently have good computer skills. This will arise from their declining abilities (such as poorer eyesight, poorer cognition, poorer dexterity) struggling to cope with constant technological evolution, he said.

To counter these problems web designers must take into account the challenges that face elderly people – which they are not currently doing, Newell said. “Design is all about working to constraints, but web designers don’t see [challenges faced by elderly people] as a constraint they’re prepared to tackle.”

To help tackle the problem web designers should meet older computer users to find out more about the problems they face, Newell said. This would help designers to create sites that are used more easily by older people, which, in turn, would increase usability for everyone, following principles of universal design, he said.

Although older people are commonly seen as technologically inept, it is, in fact, the design flaws of the web which make it unusable by elderly people and other digitally disadvantaged groups, Newell said.

Drawing on lessons from his book published last year, ‘Design and the digital divide’, Newell said the issues faced by older people are different from those faced by younger computer users with disabilities.

“There has been significant work done on accessibility of websites for disabled people, but this tends to be focused on relatively young, highly motivated people with a single disability, but if you look at older people, they usually have multiple minor disabilities.”

Consider this: does having a long-term illness have any advantages?

I’ve been living with multiple sclerosis since age 19. Until recently, I worked for other people, evangelising about the many benefits of web accessibility. Following redundancy in 2010, I found myself at another of life’s crossroads. Should I find another job, or take the road less travelled and start my own business? I plumped for the latter and I haven’t looked back.

Recently, I was asked to address a networking meeting attended by local entrepreneurs. Never having had the desire to scale a mountain or swim with sharks, some ‘thinking outside of the box’ was required.

What is ‘good’ about have a chronic condition and are there any reasons why having a long-term illness might make a person a good entrepreneur? I came up with seven of them.

1: Illness sets parameters.

One of the hardest things about working for yourself is learning to focus on your goals without a boss standing over you. Living with a long-term illness is all about focus – focusing on what you can do, not what you can’t. Having periods of ‘down time’ when I cannot work places a premium on the time when I can work and ‘good time’ is never wasted.

2: We’ve learned to forgive ourselves.

It surprises me how difficult some people find it to forgive themselves for their mistakes. Business is all about learning from mistakes and moving on, so if you struggle to forgive yourself for making a mistake, the chances are you will also struggle in business. When you live with a chronic condition, a major feature of which is crippling fatigue, you learn pretty fast that time and energy spent feeling guilty about it is time and energy wasted.

3: The 4-hour week is no longer just a dream.

‘Work smarter, not harder’ is the entrepreneurs’ mantra and they dream of achieving the elusive ‘four-hour working week’. I joke a little here – many of us with chronic conditions can only manage four hours of work a week… and you’d be amazed how much you can pack in when that’s all the time you have (Parkinson’s Law)! I call this ‘living the dream’.

4: We never waste time.

People procrastinate. I’m sure you’ve worked with someone who can’t make a decision. Making decisions is something I find very easy. They may not always be the right decisions but in business, that’s not what’s important. If you get something wrong, dust yourself down and try again. Time is a precious commodity – don’t waste it through indecision.

5: We work hours others won’t.

I work when I’m at my most lucid and alert, which tends to be in the afternoon and evening. Being happy to work evenings means I can pick up work others find less convenient.

6: We deflect hurtful remarks.

People let things other people say get to them far too often. Everyone with a chronic condition has had to deal with stupid remarks. Learning to deflect crass comments without being negatively affected by them is important, as time spent ruminating would be better spent doing just about anything else.

7: We say ‘no’ without guilt.

Guilt is exhausting. Learning to accept our limitations and say ‘no’, so we can say ‘yes’ more often to the important things, is just good business sense. If every entrepreneur did the same I reckon they would be more successful for it.

I bet there are more reasons why people with chronic conditions can make great entrepreneurs. Isn’t it time to celebrate what we’re good at and remind ourselves of our numerous strengths, even – or maybe especially – in the face of adversity? The entrepreneurs I spoke to seemed inspired: job done.

NOTE: Julie Howell is Managing Director of Giraffe Sense Mentoring.

After switching on the function during installation, text-to-speech will be present over a wide range of tasks in the televisions, including speaking the channel number and name of a programme when switching channels; the time that a programme begins and ends; and whether other accessibility features such as audio description are available for a programme.

Text-to-speech assistance is provided on connecting to a Wi-Fi network through the TV, and users can also to scroll through a TV’s electronic programme guide and listen to the list of programmes, timing information and a synopsis of each programme.

Speaking to E-Access Bulletin, Nigel Prankard, IPTV and digital TV solutions centre manager at Panasonic, said a lower implementation cost of text-to-speech in recent times had enabled the company to offer the functionality

“If you asked us to introduce text-to-speech [into our televisions] two years ago, the extra cost would have been significant, but with the onset of activity in the IT world, the implementation costs of text-to-speech have come down, enabling us to put it into the TVs without passing on the cost to customers”, Prankard said.

Panasonic worked with the Royal National Institute of Blind People to build the text-to-speech function, undertaking user-testing with a prototype before gathering feedback and making improvements to the final design.

Prankard said he hopes to further improve the functionality and add more features if there is positive feedback from the initial models, possibly looking at how text-to-speech could work for internet-connected TVs. “The W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] are trying to make more regulatory requirements for web accessibility, so we may have to think how TVs could handle [web accessibility requirements] if we give them the full ability to go to websites”, he said.

Speaking at the sixth European Forum on e-Accessibility in Paris ( http://bit.ly/wHNjGf ), Rob Sinclair said: “The time has come for accessibility to transcend its origin and become an internationally recognised profession.”

Specialist expertise groups have helped the security and privacy sectors become valued fields of interest over the past decade, said Sinclair, and a similar group could perform equally important functions for accessibility, such as: creating and maintaining a globally-endorsed set of educational resources; training and certifying accessibility professionals; building a global community of experts; and helping related efforts around the world co-ordinate work.

Despite significant progress in accessibility over the past two decades, we are far from achieving digital inclusion, Sinclair said. There are various reasons for this, he said, including that most design or engineering educational programmes do not incorporate accessibility into their structure; and that there is a lack of formal qualifications available to evaluate and rate accessibility experts.

The ultimate goal should be for accessibility expertise to be disseminated throughout businesses, organisations and government, to provide customers with a proper support network, he said. “These outcomes are possible, but will require broad-reaching international collaboration and dedicated resources”.

Little has changed in the picture of council website accessibility since last year’s Better Connected, with only a 2% increase in the amount of councils achieving the assessment’s standard rating for accessibility – from 56% in 2011 to 58% (252 councils) this year. Within those 252 sites, only two (Kettering Borough Council and the London Borough of Merton) were rated as ‘Very Good’ under the scoring system, while 30% of websites (130 in total) were rated as having ‘Poor’ accessibility, and 12% (51 sites) were classed as ‘Inaccessible’.

“Accessibility should not be seen as an extra layer of usability to build into a site for a minority of users, however significant”, the report says. “Accessible websites are also easier to use for everyone.”

To rate accessibility in this year’s Better Connected, testers from the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), assessed the home page and other key pages of a council’s website; and how easy it was to complete three ‘top tasks’ for users, such as finding out how to pay council tax, and applying for a council job.

When scoring these tasks, RNIB testers identified three potential website accessibility issues that would prevent them completely from carrying out the task: keyboard traps (when keyboard navigation of a webpage causes a user to become irreversibly stuck on an element of that page); auto-starting audio on a page (with no way of stopping the audio); and flashing content.

These elements are also flagged-up in the latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/ ), which were used as part of the basis for assessment.

The report recommends that all councils should carry out user-testing with groups of disabled people; build accessibility checks into the website publishing process; and ensure that the entire web team understands and practices accessibility.

Better Connected 2012 can be purchased from Socitm: http://bit.ly/HmnwiN

They can’t see their books: maybe this is why they read them with such an extraordinary passion. On average, in Italy, a blind person reads 9.2 books a year, while among sighted Italians only two in ten people read so many. Six blind people out of ten read a few pages of a book at least once a week, while 53.2% of Italians never, ever, read. In short, the blind read much more than the sighted.

“The thirst for knowledge is strongest where there is a barrier,” says Orlando Paladino, president of the Unione Italiana Ciechi (Italian Union of the Blind). Or perhaps, where a barrier falls. The data outlined above from a new survey by the Italian Publishers’ Association (Associazione Italiana Editori – AIE: http://www.aie.it ) would probably have been very different 15 years ago, when it was impossible to read books on a computer, or to have them translated into Braille on a tactile display.

In the recent past, books readable by blind people were very few in number and not very often updated. These were books printed in Braille, the characters formed out of dots that turned even the slim Italian Constitution into a kilo of paper that could only be crammed into an ordinary bag with difficulty. The digital age has radically changed the lives of enthusiastic blind readers. In the era of e-books, their library finally seems to be the same as everyone else’s, including new publications.

Has the problem been solved, then? Can blind people now read what they want? And what do they read?

“I have no preferences,” is the surprising response of some 46.7% of respondents to a new survey, but this apparent indifference can be interpreted as: “There is so little stuff for us to read, I must content myself with what I find.” Clearly, the revolution of books without barriers remains unfinished.

“Most e-books on the market still can’t be read by speech-synthesis software or by Braille translators; some can be read only with enormous obstacles and difficulties, as they have no indexes and hypertext notes, no paratexts, catalogues or directories”, explains Cristina Mussinelli, coordinator of the LIA project (Libri Italiani Accessibili, Italian Accessible Books), which, with the cooperation of the major publishers, will produce and make available to blind and partially sighted people an initial package of three thousand titles within a year, designed to be easily readable by the special access software and hardware used by blind people.

Literature, essays, and handbooks: in fact, blind people do have specific preferences, and they are generally much more demanding than the average reader. AIE launched its survey, which yielded such astonishing results, to find the best way to compose its first specialist catalogue for blind readers.

Since then, much water has passed under the bridge. In 2000, three of the major Italian publishers threatened a legal action for copyright infringement against two pioneering institutions for the blind, the Istituto Cavazza of Bologna and the Galiano Foundation of Catanzaro. Tired of their empty shelves, these organisations had dared to fill them themselves, scanning and putting on the internet a thousand titles in electronic text format, to make them available to blind readers. This was a service that commercial publishing had not provided to what they considered “a small niche” of customers, though, in fact, it is not so small: in Italy, there are 362,000 blind people and one million visually impaired people, and on the whole they love to read, as we have seen.

The ensuing clamor and indignation eventually obliged the publishers to withdraw the complaint. So, eleven years ago it was already possible to fill the gap of access to the texts. Yet blind people had to wait a long time before anyone thought of them as normal readers, or even more devoted than normal. In 2005 the Ministry for Cultural Heritage funded a project aimed at building a digital library for the blind, but in 2011 that project was assigned to UIC and AIE. “There have been incomprehensible bureaucratic delays, against which I raised my voice a year ago, at the Frankfurt exhibition”, says Mark Polillo, President of the publishers.

The trouble now is that due to the enormous delay, the project (conceived when the e-book did not exist) must quickly be updated; it can no longer replace digital publishing, if anything it must stimulate it. “The real goal is to force publishers to consider accessibility for the blind as a requirement of their normal e-books”, Polillo says. “Only then, at last, will the blind will be customers of a library, like everyone else”.

Article reproduced with permission from La Repubblica, where it first appeared on 9 December 2011. Written by Michele Smargiassi and translated for E-Access Bulletin by Margherita Giordano. Our thanks to Margherita.

The independent research report, “Touching the world”, is the product of a two-year specialist fellowship with the Clore Social Leadership Programme funded by RNIB. Based on interviews with 12 blind people, the study was carried out by accessible technology specialist John Ramm, with support from University of Sussex research fellow Frances Aldrich.

Blind people often come across data at work set in tables, graphics, charts and other graphical formats but it is extremely rare to receive such information in tactile form, the report finds. This means most often they rely on descriptions of graphics from colleagues or support workers, which creates a sense of dependency and inequality and are much harder to use.

“The de facto standard at the minute for anything graphical seems to be to write a description of it, which to me is a really feeble attempt at best, because the whole reason for putting it into a graphic in the first place is it makes it easier for people to grasp the big picture,” Ramm told E-Access Bulletin. “Then I have to reconstruct in my head, I can’t just read off information.”

Ironically, in the days before widespread computing when Braille materials were produced manually from steel embossing sheet, the situation for graphics was better because they could be embossed onto the same sheets, he said. More recently Braille production has become automated, with machines outputting it directly from software, but the issue of graphics appears to have been overlooked.

The answer is to develop new software and standards which use automated Braille dots in freer formats to build graphics alongside character cells, Ramm said. “If you have a pie chart and it is only a rudimentary circle shape, that’s fine. For the purposes of a pie chart, it doesn’t really matter, all your want to know is how things split up.”

He said tables could be produced more easily in Braille if there were better ways to abbreviate numbers and put the data into columns. “What most of these bits of software they don’t even try to do anything graphical with tables – they make each row as a new paragraph, with no attempt to recreate columns at all. It’s pointless.”

The study finds some blind people may currently be deterred from applying for some jobs altogether because of the difficulty in accessing tables and charts. One participant said: “I am very put off jobs where I think the content is going to be quite graphical… That would actually make a decision for me, probably, because I think it adds another layer of need for assistance.”

Ultimately however, blind employees may have to resort to legal action to force through equal provision, the study says.

“It is quite possible that some test discrimination cases could be brought to show employers, universities, training institutions and others that the vague verbal descriptions are just not sufficient alternative provision when those who can see have a diagram in front of them,” it says.

“There is a serious disconnect between the colourful, varied, eye-catching, multimedia world of printed material and the bland, text-based, serial Braille material which blind people receive – if they get anything at all.”

The Clore Social Leadership Programme aims to develop aspiring leaders in the social sector through fellowships of up to two years.

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The “Accessible Medicine” project will use two-dimensional Data Matrix square barcodes placed on medicine boxes and packaging allowing people to use an application or “app” running on a smartphone or other mobile device with a camera to link to detailed medicine information online. The information can then be spoken aloud or conveyed in other formats on the mobile device according to user needs and preferences.

The project is being led by Vodafone Spain Foundation with a range of partners including Technosite, the trading and research arm of Spanish national blindness charity ONCE; and the Spanish Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (FARMAINDUSTRIA).

The partners say beneficiaries of the system will include not only blind people and people with impaired vision but also people who have difficulties handling the small folded leaflets currently issued with medicines.

The new trial has been approved following successful phase one trials ending last year. Developments for phase two include expansion of the online drug database from five to the 30 most commonly-used medicines; and improvements to the design interface.

Alongside the trials, ONCE is working with the Spanish Agency of Medicine and Health Products to create a database with accessible information on all available medicines.

According to the phase one report, the system has possible applications in other fields such as information about food and clothing. More information can be found in Spanish only at the project’s website.

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