Opening introduction
by Dr. John Gill
Good morning everyone. Welcome to this seminar on Designs on the Games jointly organised by PhoneAbility and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. My name is John Gill and I will be chairing today's session.
Before I start, we've got the inevitable little bit of housekeeping.
Fire precautions. There is no plan today for any fire practice, so any fire alarm is for real, and the fire alarm is a continuous ringing of the bell. There will be IET staff wearing yellow vests to help guide you out of the building, and the official meeting point is beyond Waterloo Bridge by Somerset House.
The other inevitable thing, a request, is please turn off your mobile phones! It is a bit annoying.
And today we are most grateful for a large number of organisations which have supported us in helping to get this event going. I am not going to read out all their names because they are into numerous, but the list is up on the screen and it's in your information pack.
I am going to start just by giving you a little bit of background as to what it is, and why we are here. Obviously all of you have heard of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, even if you are an older person like me who still think of it as the institution of electrical engineers, but the chances are you haven't come across PhoneAbility, whose previous name was a rather handful, the COST 219 UK liaison group, COST standing for co-operation in the field of science and technology and project 219 was originally the future telecommunication and teleinformatic facilities for disabled people.
But PhoneAbility has evolved. It is now a registered charity and it's concerned with accessibility of information and communication technology. It is pan-disability and covers as well the needs of older people. What it does is it organises seminars, produces reports and comments on regulatory matters.
Enough about PhoneAbility. Let's talk about who are the consumers we are talking about today. If we look at the UK, if we talk about people with special needs, we are talking about approximate figures, we are talking about 20% of the population who are under the age 6 of 16. About 16% over 65 years. The last published Government figure was 15.9%, so fair enough to round it up. About 10% of the population who are disabled with respect to information and communication technology. I will come back to that in a moment.
The official Government figure for our population is about 5% whose primary language is not English, but that was some time ago and the Government has not released more recent figures. And definitely it would not apply to an event like the Olympic Games where we would expect many more people to not have the ability in the English language, and about 10% of the population are left-handed.
When we come to the disability area, you've got a number of different figures. This is because there are different ways of measuring it. First of all, there is a medical method of measuring impairment. When you go to a clinic, you may get your visual acuity measured, for example. A year later, the medical staff can re-measure it and see the progress of the condition. Very useful for our purpose.
Not very useful at indicating the day-to-day practical problems these people experience. Therefore, there are a range of functional definitions. These are based on who has problems doing a certain task. If you define the task differently, you get very different figures, but this is a much better practical indication.
Then there is a third set of figures, those produced by fund-raising departments of various organisations and perhaps I could say they have a possibly questionable scientific basis.
So going on to the functional definition, if I use functional definition of those who have problems using information and communication technology - these are very approximate figures - there's about 0.4% of the population who are wheelchair users. About 10 times as many cannot walk without an aid.
So what does this mean? When they go up to an ATM and cash dispenser, one hand to operate the machine, another hand holding a bag or something and they need a third hand to hold their walking stick. So they lean the stick against it, and what does it do? It falls over.
If you go to the railway station today and look at some of the newer ticket machines, there is a slot for the walking stick. It's relatively simple things to make it easier to use this sort of ICT. Going down the figures, about 2.8% reduced strength, 1.4% reduced coordination.
When we come to things like dyslexia, we have a problem where there is lack of decent scientific data. So you hear some enormous figures for dyslexia and it depends on the degree. Here I have calculated about 1% of the population have dyslexia, such they cannot remember a four-digit PIN number in the correct order, or dial an 11-digit telephone number without getting timed out.
You've got about 3% of the population who are intellectually impaired. 0.1% who are deaf, such that they have to use non-auditory methods of communication. Things like text telephony and the like. 6% hard of hearing, such that have problems in using an ordinary telephone. If that telephone was in a noisy environment like a railway station, that figure would probably be closer to 10%.
0.4% are blind such that they have to use non-visual methods to acquire information and 1.5% have low vision such that even after optical correction they have a severe visual problem.
What we don't do is add these numbers up because multiple impairments are the norm, not the rarity.
We have increasing number of people with impairments, predominantly among the older population. It's not a homogenous population, that's to say you get two individuals who appear to have the same combination of impairments but the effect on those individuals can be very different.
So what are the requirements for disabled travellers? We need to find information about the event or venue, plan the journey, purchase a ticket, undertake the journey, possibly if it's in London with service disruption; you need to find the venue and you need to get around the venue and facilities.
That's very different for a disabled person to an able-bodied person, but there are differences in how you can achieve that.
So what is different about a major event? A major event, be it the Olympic Games or other things, you are going to have a large number of visitors, who will include people with disabilities. It will be for most people an unfamiliar environment. There may be technology and many of the users will have not seen that technology before, so they have to learn it. There will be queues of people around them, and in the case of an international event, you may have people with a limited knowledge of the English language.
So today you are going to hear from different people about a whole range of possible technologies which are being planned for use by 2012 in this country.
The crux is how you integrate all these technologies and how the service they deliver - it's not so much how they work but it's can they deliver the service to the user.
So these technologies offer extremely exciting possibilities of helping people with disabilities. If you are bringing in the technology, you should also be able to design in from the outset facilities which also help people with disabilities.
It's going to involve the integration of some quite diverse technologies, which historically have been developed separately.
You are also going to hear today about what we mean by "accessibility", or what is meant by the different speakers - it will be slightly different - in this context. Accessibility built-in, where you have ramps et cetera, is reasonably established standards. Accessibility of websites again is well established.
Accessibility of this sort of technology is not well established. It's new, it's different, and therefore there aren't established guidelines.
That means it's going to be a great problem, how do you check for conformance? If you make a contract with the Government or whatever, that I want an accessible ticketing system, how do you measure that? That's going to be quite important. And who will actually ensure that it happens?
So there are going to be possible barriers which people will be discussing today. There are a few of them here. Lack of communication between the various stakeholders. Inadequate or incompatible standards; inconsistent user interfaces; possible lack of interest from user organisations.
The main message, hopefully, we are going to be getting out today is that good design for people with disabilities is actually going to be frequently good design for everyone.
That's as much from me. Now I am going to pass over to Mr Chris Earnshaw, who is the new president of the IET. I think he was elected last week. This is his first official presentation in his new role.
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