Here are some additional contributions to the discussion we are having today, on behalf of industry, to try and pick up some of the points that were made by Jeremy and Guido Gybels at the beginning and explain why industry is backing the Alliance for Digital Inclusion and by extension the eInclusion charter which we are very pleased to see launched today.
I just wanted to touch on really 3 concepts: KISS, keeping it simple, convergence and capacity and those are really 3 major planks of the approach.
In terms of keeping it simple: this is a fundamental part of the design rationale in industry for the agenda that we are talking about today. There is plenty of evidence that shows that websites, for example, that meet accessibility standards are better websites for all users. Technology loves complexity and they love to demonstrate products have endless functions and options, but users don't like the same level of complexity and that goes right across the board. So, keeping it simple is good design from a product point of view. From an industry point of view, keeping it simple means lower maintenance and support costs and all the thrust of product design in the IT sector is towards objects that can be put together in simple pre-defined ways like a flat pack house. I was going to say like an Ikea product, but hopefully slightly better than that, so that the interfaces are simple, the product is simple and we can look after it.
Secondly, convergence is a critical concept at the moment. Convergence is a revolutionary force within the ICT sector. At one level, it means that you can watch your Big Brother on TV or a website or a mobile phone, which may be a blessing or a curse, depending on your personal cultural tastes. But more fundamentally, what it means is that the same content can be delivered over a range of different platforms and the cost of moving it from one to the other is now a fraction of the cost some years ago.
Now, clearly, from a media company point of view, that is a great opportunity. But also from an inclusion point of view it is a fantastic opportunity because the costs now of transmitting material in different formats are significantly reduced. Of course, we need to be aware of that and take advantage of it and there are examples of difficulties for example with the move towards multi-media teletext services from text based teletext, where the rich multi-media teletext that includes video may be less accessible - unless we think about the design - than the old text based teletext which could be put through a screen reader.
The final point is the one of capacity, which is both social and personal capacity. In the ICT sector most people who are in it believe that ICT is a fundamental enabler. In our case networks, in the case of other people their products, their mobile phones, the PCs, the systems that they design. They believe that fundamentally they enable us all to access educational and public services, our work and to access information in ways that we couldn't do before. What we want is for as much people to be able to access that as possible, because that builds personal capacity but also builds social capacity and an accessible society is a stronger and wealthier society.
From a business point of view, we have looked at it in things like the products we make. We make network products and we have gone through them and said: who can work on those network products? Are we accessing the full employment pool? If we are, that is good for us. It is good for our customers and good for the individuals who can find employment. It is not just the end user, but everything in the chain, all the way along, so people can access this as an employment opportunity as well. And it is the right thing to do, which I think many businesses believe quite fundamentally in. So from a business point of view, from an ADI point of view, we welcome the eInclusion charter and hope people will sign up to it. We welcome the way that it clarifies the different responsibilities that we all have and encourages us to collaborate together. Enjoy the rest of the reception.
Thank you Jeremy and those who hosted today.
Speech given by Richard Allan, Cisco Systems, at the Houses of Parliament on 15 May 2006 at the occasion of the launch of the eInclusion charter.