Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. For those of you who haven't met me before, my name is Guido Gybels and I am the Director of New Technologies at RNID, which stands for the Royal National Institute for Deaf People. My talk today will be about the challenges local and national governments face in delivering eServices that are fully accessible and usable by everyone, regardless of people's abilities and preferences and why this is such an important issue. I'll also try to give some hopefully useful pointers on how to achieve this.
But before I kick off my presentation, I thought it would be helpful to spend a few moments talking about the organisation that I represent. RNID, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, founded in 1911, is the largest charity representing the interests of the 9 million deaf and hard of hearing people in the UK. We are a membership charity with well over 34.000 members, employing over 1.300 staff and we spent 42 million pounds during our last financial year trying to dramatically improve the lives of deaf, hard of hearing and speech-impaired people.
Our mission is to achieve a radically better quality of life for deaf and hard of hearing people. We do this of course by campaigning and lobbying, by providing information and raising awareness, but also by delivering training courses and consultancy on deafness in particular and disability in general. In addition, we are the largest single communication support provider in the UK and our services include sign language interpreters, lip speakers, as well as speech-to-text operators and note takers. RNID has also various educational programmes seeking lasting change in education for deaf and hard of hearing children and young people. Furthermore, we run comprehensive employment programmes to help deaf people into work and we operate care services for deaf and hard of hearing people with additional needs in care homes throughout the UK.
RNID of course also manages RNID Typetalk(*), the national telephone relay service that was founded in the late eighties, allowing textphone users to communicate with voice telephone users by translating text into voice and vice versa. More recently, we have established a Video Interpreting service that uses video conferencing technology for the purpose of remote sign language interpretation and currently we have extended this into a pilot BSL relay service.
RNID Sound Advantage is the main UK supplier of equipment and products for deaf and hard of hearing people and we have extensive and unique programmes for social, medical and technical research.
My own department is a research and development team consisting of engineers, scientists, computer programmers and research assistants. We pursue every opportunity to harness information and communication technology to tear down the barriers to opportunity and fulfilment that sadly enough still exist in our modern world.
Before I go into the specifics of eGovernment services, I need to take a step back and frame the development of such services into their historic context in order for us to understand the dramatic scale of the changes human civilisation is experiencing as a result of the evolution towards a technology-based society.
I have spoken on many occasions about how the development of the Information Society has dramatically changed the way we live, educate, work, but also entertain ourselves. However, living at the very early beginning of this evolution, we do often not appreciate fully how significant those changes are. I have cast the whole of about 5 million years of human history on a 24-hour clock. Looking at it from that perspective is quite a humbling experience. The start of the clock, at midnight, zero hours, zero minutes, zero seconds represents the appearance of hominoids, our biological ancestors. Homo sapiens doesn't materialise until 12 minutes past 7 in the evening. And all known history, every civilisation we have ever heard of, every historical figure whose name we know, every single documented event in human history only occupies the final 97 seconds of that day.
For the best part of the approximately 4 hours and 48 minutes on our clock that homo sapiens has roamed the earth, they did so as hunter-gatherers, a nomadic existence in which small groups of humans foraged the continents in search of food and with very little change in the way they lived over hundreds of thousands of years.
About 10,000 years ago, a revolutionary change occurred over a period of only a few centuries. This change is known as the Neolithic Revolution, when the nomadic lifestyle was gradually replaced with a sedentary existence. When mankind began farming, domesticating plants and animals, its way of life changed radically. The face of society was dramatically altered from one where the tribal structure of hunters and gatherers made place for an agricultural society and economy. This change allowed people to spend less time on roaming for food, allowed them to start building houses, communities, even nations, allowed individuals within those communities to specialise in other things than food hunting or gathering. We can hardly underestimate the consequences of this change, economically, culturally, socially. Indeed, one can say that this transition laid the foundation for civilisation itself.
For almost 10,000 years, this agriculture-based society remained the basis on which the social order was built. This in fact has lasted until more recently a not less revolutionary change has started to happen. I am of course talking about the Industrial Revolution, which just as much as the Neolithic Revolution, is completely overhauling the way people live, work, educate and even entertain themselves.
Even though science and technology have existed for a very long time, it's only since the Industrial Revolution that they have become the main drivers behind our changing societal order, with an ever-increasing impact on our daily lives. In our time, we have seen the emergence of information and communication as the aspects that govern our world. We call this new way of life the Information Society, and it means that in order to fully participate as individuals, in order to work, to shop, to learn, to entertain, we need to have access to ever increasing amounts of information and to the products and services that deliver it to us.
And now information and communication technology is also starting to change the way we interact with government, locally, nationally and even globally. Most of us will recognise these changes, but do we all fully grasp the impact on individual citizens, especially people with different abilities and preferences?
Never before in the history of mankind have we had access to such a wealth of information and communication as today. Never before in the history of mankind have we had such an arsenal of communication tools, products and services to our disposal. And never before in the history of mankind have we been so reliant, so dependent on all these information and communication facilities in order to fully participate as a citizen in society.
The implications of this huge shift in the way we organise our life, our economy, our culture are enormous. It is undoubtedly true that new technologies have brought great benefit and advance to our world. But at the same time, there are also clear and present dangers that this ever more technologically dominated world might disadvantage certain groups of people even more than they were before.
As with so many other aspects of human life, science and technology have two sides, a virtuous one and a dangerous one, to them. Technology by itself is neither good nor bad. It's what we do with it that decides which side of the coin we face.
So, let me show you the good side first. Technology has effectively great potential to enhance the lives of citizens everywhere in the world. From a government perspective, the establishment of eGovernment services to provide virtual portals could potentially significantly enhance access for people with disabilities and thereby increase their potential to participate in and contribute to society. In the virtual world, a number of previously thought absolute, unbreakable barriers to opportunity and fulfilment, can effectively be lowered or removed altogether.
If wheelchair users can visit a government agency on the Web, then they don't have to make the difficult journey into its office. If eGovernment services are online, then a sign language user doesn't have to wait 3 months to get an interpreter just to carry out a basic government transaction. With speech recognition, we could give voice control over an eGovernment website to severely dysarthric speakers, allowing them to carry out government transactions independently for the first time in human history.
However, there is also this other, darker side of technology. What we have learned, all too often through bitter experience, is that unless the needs of all people, regardless of their abilities and preferences, are taken into account, there is a very real risk that emerging new services in general, and eGovernment services in particular, confront large groups of people with increased and even completely new barriers.
And while I am at it, I might as well debunk another popular myth too: accessibility and usability barriers are not just an issue for people with disabilities. Yes, our world is increasingly developing into a two-tier society, with a digital divide that separates citizens in "haves" and "have-nots", in those who can and those who can't. But that digital divide has many different facets to it, other than just the distinction between people with disabilities and the rest of society.
There is an economic aspect to it: access to information and communication comes at a price, so those at the lower end of the income spectrum often, even if they would want to, can't really use them and benefit from it as much as higher income groups can. So, as a provider of eGovernment services, how are you going to see to it that your constituents who might not be able to afford the latest computer technology, will have equal access to these services?
How about the cultural and educational divide: the youngsters of today might in general be more imbued with computer skills and less afraid of using them, but what about those citizens that struggle with these new devices and paradigms and don't want to use virtual access, but prefer more traditional interaction? And of course the youngsters of today are the elderly of tomorrow. How will they fare when their hearing loss has diminished? When arthritis has made their hands more shaky, affecting their use of mice and other pointing devices? When their memories have become less reliable with age?
And yes, there is also the dimension of those who are prevented from full access to eGovernment, and to the devices and services that deliver these, because of accessibility and usability problems. People with disabilities are amongst the most heavily impacted group in this respect, but they are by no means the only ones.
The Disability Rights Commission's report on Web Accessibility that was published earlier this year illustrates this point very well: inaccessible websites did not just disenfranchise people with disabilities, they also significantly lowered usability and efficiency for non-disabled users.
Obviously, these various dimensions of the digital divide coexist, often in a causal relationship with one another. To give an example: the barriers that result out of lack of access to online services in a world that is increasingly centred around them, can in turn result in economic disenfranchisement for the user in question, for example because it pushes them out of employment. As a consequence, they could end up at the lower end of the economic scale, which in turn would prevent them for cost reasons from using potentially enabling technology like broadband, a truly vicious circle.
If you look at the problem from this angle, it should become clear very quickly that the root of the problem is not the fact that different people have different abilities, but rather that it's an issue of design and environment. It's not the deaf, blind or physically impaired individual's fault that they can't access your eGovernment portal. It's the fault of those who designed and implemented it in an inaccessible way. Yes, I put the burden of guilt not with the individual that faces the barrier, but clearly and squarely with those who have conceived and constructed these services and products, and in the process of doing so have failed to meet the requirement of full inclusivity.
In the end, that is what legislation like the Disability Discrimination Act is all about: it's saying to the world: we do no longer, as a society, find it acceptable that you would discriminate against an individual based on their abilities. Ladies and gentlemen: the message is clear: it is the law that you make your services fully accessible and usable.
Fortunately, despite the existence of this stick, there are plenty of carrots offered as well. In fact, it is my sincere opinion that designing and building eGovernment services as fully inclusive provisions is practically and economically beneficial to you as well. I referred already to the Disability Rights Commission report into web accessibility. That report showed that the experience improved for all users when designers and implementers build their sites with accessibility and usability in mind, not just for users with disabilities.
Online technology offers eGovernment providers the potential to deliver more individualised, more responsive and more user-centred services. It can, when done correctly, reduce red tape and offer greater citizen input into decision-making and the democratic processes. That aspect is surely of interest to policy makers trying to keep citizens engaged in our democracy.
Technology in general has allowed many people to overcome barriers resulting from disability and other constraints, and similarly eGovernment could increase access to and availability of relevant government services to everyone, making people more involved, less dependent and at a more equal level with the rest of society. This addresses real social and economic needs and therefore would bring benefits to the whole of society.
There are other benefits beyond the ones that focus on user integration, equality and fulfilment. The proper use of information and communication technology in government service delivery can also make services and institutions more efficient and effective. Transparency and accountability could benefit too, and operational costs could decrease while at the same time offering an improved service.
So, what then is the problem? Why are there so many unfulfilled promises in information and communication technology in general and eGoverment in particular? Well, a few reasons spring to mind. In the past, efforts have often not been coordinated very well and early attempts to bring eGovernment services online suffered from lack of analysis during the design phase, leading to unsatisfactory implementations. When accessibility was an issue, it usually only came into the picture fairly late in the process, which means that the cost and the effort involved in achieving accessibility was disproportionate to the anticipated results.
Accessibility and usability are not bolted on. They have to be included from the earliest stages of design and implementation.
Fragmentation results in a poor user experience and in waste of resources and knowledge. So, providers keep reinventing the wheel, but every wheel that comes out of that process is slightly different from the one produced by the neighbours, so none of these wheels fit any other carriage than one's own.
There is no proper certification and accreditation mechanism, which in turns deprives the procurement process of a very valuable tool. If procurers would be able to use a unified taxonomy for the definition and evaluation of accessibility and usability, maybe we would see more deployment of accessible and usable eGovernment services. Designers and implementers have great difficulty in assessing their own expertise in this field and can't really offer potential customers an objective reference. There can be no informed choice for the procurer without a proper accreditation and certification scheme, yet government has so far failed to address this shortcoming, thereby ironically enough raising a major barrier to fulfilling its own key policies of inclusion and equality.
These are of course all fairly generic aspects of eGovernment, relating to the use of information and communication technology in general. However, eGovernment, by its nature, has a number of additional challenges that it must address if it is to fulfil its promises.
First of all, government is there of course for all citizens, not just for some. It is a key principle of our European democracies that we do not discriminate against our citizens and that we offer all of them the same opportunities to participation and fulfilment. So, government institutions, and therefore also eGovernment services, have an obligation to meet the needs of all constituents, whether or not they happen to be blind or deaf, young or old, with a higher education or not, etc. eGovernment services are a major instrument for the realisation and implementation of public policies. They should be the enabling platforms that allow the public sector to deliver more and better services and to realise inclusion and equality policies. In the light of what has been said earlier about the digital divide in its many incarnations, this aspect of eGovernment can be really challenging. The key instrument to deliver it is what we call inclusive design, I will come back to that in a few minutes.
Secondly, eGovernment is not just about unidirectional information delivery to citizens. Carrying out transactions is a major feature. So, the need for security and privacy is absolutely vital. Users of eGovernment services need to have trust and confidence in the system. There can be no real free choice for the user if they feel that the security and robustness of the system is less than 100% trustworthy. Security, by the way, is an end-to-end problem and therefore the total security is only as strong as the weakest element in the chain. In addition, the problems of security have as much to do with people's attitudes as with the technology used. That is why for example the eEurope 2005 Action plan calls for the development of a "culture of security". For people with disabilities, security also means that they can be sure that their specific profile of abilities and preferences is not unduly disclosed and that the system won't compromise their choices because of a different manner of interaction.
Thirdly, eGovernment services do not exist in isolation. Governance is by definition a problem of total delivery, and interactions between various levels of government, between all the stakeholders, indeed between the public and the private sector, are essential for it to be successful. Paradoxically, development of eGovernment services has often been hugely fragmented with widely differing levels of quality and functionality. Interoperability has to become a basic design feature, rather than just a last minute attempt to make fundamentally incompatible systems speak to each other, as is the case today. This is important from an inclusivity point of view as well because only proper interoperability will allow fully functional use of assistive technology and it also plays a key role in allowing content and services to be syndicated across information providers and stakeholder groups. At a national level, the UK has made great progress towards fully integrated eGovernment delivery, with direct.gov as a very good example of a major step forward. I would strongly urge local governments to look at the underlying principles of direct.gov and use them. Please, no matter how well-intended it might be, don't try to reinvent the wheel again. Rather, use these established principles, benefit from them, add your own specific knowledge and expertise to the pool and thereby contribute to progress and development.
This notion that eGovernment services don't operate in isolation also has repercussions for how government manages user expectations. Precisely because eGovernment services are public services and are there for all, not just for some, citizens generally have higher expectations of them in terms of quality, functionality, availability and cost. Meeting such higher expectations could be extremely challenging. Once again, user centred inclusive design principles are the key to success.
And finally, since eGovernment services are a public resource and are created and operated with public funds, they are subjected to the public's scrutiny: the demand to deliver the best possible quality for money while at the same time delivering these entirely accessible, fully available, highly secure and totally interoperable services sets the standard very high indeed.
So, how do you do it? What are the fundamental principles that you should adhere to in order to create accessible, usable and efficient eGovernment service delivery?
The number one principle, the top of the list, has to be inclusive design. Some call it design-for-all, others refer to it as universal design, it's a much used, but often also misunderstood notion. At its core sits the principle of human-centred, user-focused design. It is not creating an amalgam of different services or portals, badly integrated and with lots of bolted on, clunky functionality. It is not an esoteric, highly expensive, practically impossible utopic school of thought. It is simply an approach to the design of mainstream products and services that are accessible to, and usable by, as many people as reasonably possible without the need for special adaptation. At the heart of it lies the involvement of users: involving them, from the earliest stages of design and implementation, in the definition of user requirements, in testing of the systems, in making decisions about the interfaces, execution paths and any other aspect of the system. Inclusive design decouples functionality offered from the input and output modes used; Inclusive design means that we engineers develop systems not based on what we want as designers and technicians, but based on what people need as users.
Secondly, maybe it's also time to take a step back from the now almost traditional approach of outsourcing key automation projects to expensive consultants in the private sector, who end up delivering us, like illustrated in the case of the child support agency recently, systems at a price of 38,000 pounds per user, which are even less reliable than a 25 year old, rusty trabant car. Ladies and gentlemen, I have been in the business of software and systems development for 20 years, a career that includes many big projects for local and national governments, and I tell you: create a specialised government systems design agency, staff it with the right people, and you'll be able to deliver more integrated, more stable, more user-friendly, and yes, more accessible and usable systems for a fraction of the cost to all levels of government. eGovernment is a core business for authorities, so outsourcing it seems the wrong choice to me. You don't outsource your core activities. That is accepted common sense in business, so why on earth don't we abide by that principle when eGovernment is concerned?
Thirdly, make sure you have a diversity strategy in place when it comes to delivery mechanisms. Remember, government is supposed to be available to everyone. So, while the World Wide Web is probably the main delivery channel, remember that not every citizen has access to it. The development of an Information Society has seen the proliferation of networks and services, and eGovernment should cover as many of those as possible. That means that mobile and wireless platforms, but also for example digital television could act as portals to eGovernment - and in fact are already been used for that purpose right now. The use of various platforms and a plethora of terminals and handsets to provide access to eGovernment services is not just a nice feature, it plays a vital role in achieving some of the critical objectives that I mentioned earlier, including the requirement to reach as many citizens as possible. In order to really give every citizen access to eGovernment services, there will be a need to at least offer public access points, in libraries, community halls and other public places. And because of the gradual character of eGovernment developments, there will be a need for these new provisions to co-exist in an integrated and unambiguous way with more traditional public service facilities for many years to come.
In practice, what all of this means is that a complete separation between content and presentation is absolutely necessary. Disjointing of content and presentation is a vital element in the inclusive design of information services. It also is a key requirement to achieve interoperability and the kind of cross-network and cross-platform delivery of services that I just mentioned. By adhering to strict separation of content and presentation, you allow blind people to listen to your textual content through a screen reader, rather than reading it in a web browser. Or, it allows deafblind people to read it on their Braille device. Separating content and presentation means removing assumptions on what input and output mechanisms users actually are going to use and therefore contributes significantly to accessibility and usability.
In between content and presentation sits metadata. With metadata, you can provide context, you can link relevant items together and you allow syndication and aggregation of the content across platforms and devices. Metadata would allow for example a British Sign Language video clip version of some information on your website to be linked to the English text, so that your web server can serve up the appropriate version depending on what the user wants. It would also allow the content management system to flag up dependencies between the English and the BSL version, so that when one of them is changed, the content provider is prompted to change the other one as well, keeping both of them in sync.
The content itself should be well-written and clear, and the presentation of it should be through user-friendly, adaptive and easy-to-navigate multi-modal interfaces. When systems are accessible and user-friendly, they are also more efficient: it will lower the task completion time for every user, they will need less support and the overall cost is reduced, while efficiency increased. Some uninformed people complain sometimes that inclusive design is more costly than other strategies. That is however a rather misguided point of view: of course it is more expensive to go through a proper phase of user requirement gathering and to design a system with all such features as separation of content and presentation, multiple, equivalent modalities for in- and output, etc. than if you would simply quickly botch up something. But the total cost of service delivery, including support, maintenance of code and other developments will clearly benefit economically from inclusive design techniques, on top of the benefits in terms of accessibility and usability that they impart.
Finally, the importance of design-for-all is underlined again through the eEurope 2005 Action Plan in the form of the European Commission's communication to the Council from 26 September 2003, where "inclusive access" forms the first and foremost element in the critical issue section.
In conclusion, I want to reiterate once again how important your task to deliver fully accessible and usable eGovernment services is. You have a great opportunity to use this virtual world of electronic service delivery to bring about real change, to benefit real people in the real world. If you take up the challenge, maybe one day historians will not just refer to this era as the beginning of the Information Society, but also as the dawn of the Inclusive Society. A world where every individual, regardless of abilities and preferences, is able to fully participate as a citizen and to realise their full human potential.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Speech by Guido Gybels, given at the British Library, London, UK on 24 November 2004.
(*) The UK's relay service has since been renamed to Text Relay