Goodmorning ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to see so many of you assembled here today. The fact that people from all across Europe, and indeed from beyond, have gathered here today is a clear indication of the importance of the matters that we will be discussing. (Next slide)
To refer to the western world that we live in today as an Information Society is surely kicking in an open door. But do we all fully appreciate what it means? Despite the fact that most of us no longer give much thought to the extend in which computers, mobile phones, the world wide web, and all other information and communication technologies have permeated our daily lives, we still seem unable to detach ourselves from concepts and principles that have been obsoleted years ago. We stick to outdated concepts of assistive technology in the form of non-mainstream devices that are very limited in functionality, come at an appalling cost, yet still offer not even close to the functionality and user experience that we find in mainstream technology. But precisely because access to technology and to the information and communication that it delivers has become so important in order to involve oneself to the fullest extend in society, that approach does not work any longer and groups like deaf, hard of hearing and speech-impaired people are confronted with not diminishing but rather ever increasing barriers to opportunity and fulfilment.
Therefore, our mission today should be to bring together all the relevant parties: user groups, manufacturers, service providers, network operators, broadcasters, standardisers, policy makers and regulators and work together so that we can all understand what the problems are and we can all make a commitment to address them through a unified and sensible strategy. The result should be a more inclusive society, where everyone can participate, something that will be of benefit to the whole of society. (Next slide)
The first step is, as I said, to raise awareness, to make all parties involved in shaping and driving this Information Society conscious of what the problems are. And that by itself is quite challenging. I frequently attend seminars and conferences that discuss the problems that deaf and hard of hearing people face. But most of the time, the people present at those conferences are what I would call "the usual suspects": they are representatives of deafness organisations, the occasional disability manager from a major manufacturer or service provider and some other regulars. But of course, that type of preaching to the converted is not sufficient if we want to achieve real change. That is one of the reasons that RNID wanted to organise this conference, opening it up to all stakeholders, and looking at the participant list, I think it is fair to say that that objective has been achieved.
A major problem of the technology sector is that they are in most cases quite competent and aware of the possibilities and limitations of technology, but often do not have a very good understanding at all about deafness and hearing loss, about the specific user requirements that these individuals have or about the functionality they need. But even amongst deafness organisations, there is still a long way to go in terms of raising awareness. Groups representing deaf and hard of hearing people of course do have a very good understanding of these user needs and requirements, but lack the in-depth understanding of technology. What is clear is that the most important point now is to come together, and join efforts. One of the reasons that deaf, hard of hearing and speech-impaired people have not benefited as much as possible from the advances in technology, is precisely because there has never been such a global, consistent and joined up strategy. Groups and organisations all across Europe have fragmented the efforts, sometimes they send out different messages and there is too much infighting. This can't go on. We need to set aside these petty differences, we need as deafness organisations across Europe to help and support each other, so that together with the rest of society we can carry out the mission that gives us a reason to exist: to dramatically improve the lives of deaf and hard of hearing people, to bring tangible benefits to them. We are not going to achieve that by antagonising other groups or by vilifying everyone else in society. We will only achieve lasting and fundamental change if we can work together, united, to create this better, more inclusive social order. (Next slide)
Before I go into specific detail about some aspects of the Information Society, I need to say that a majority of people often make an appealing, yet seriously flawed assumption about the technological progress that we experience at an ever-increasing rate. I am of course referring to the assumption that because of this technological progress, things by definition always get better. It is the notion that today, we are consequentially better off, we have more opportunities, and individuals are becoming more empowered to be participating and to become happy citizens, because there is technological advance. This is, however attractive it might seem, an erroneous assumption. The reality is that many individuals with specific preferences and abilities have not been served very well at all by the Information Society so far and as a result of that face increasing barriers to opportunity and fulfilment. Unless we all, as stakeholders across the board, urgently and actively address this problem, we might end up with a civilisation where despite all our technological wonders, a great many people will be worse of than they were in the past.
Trying to understand why a new approach, a more integrated strategy is needed, let's look at some of the main features of the Information Society. (Next Slide)
The most notable characteristic of an Information Society is that the predominant economic and social activities become massively dependent on the use of information and communication technologies. In addition, more than half of the population is employed in the tertiary sector where this dominance of ICT is the greatest. That means that if one is unable to actually use the products and the technologies that give access to these information and communication services, it raises an insurmountable barrier to full and equal participation.
This implies that it is extremely important that the technology that plays such a crucial role in shaping society, the technology that people need to be employable, that people need for their education, that people need for every major aspect of life, must be made fully accessible through design that is based on inclusivity. That is by itself fundamentally different from the principle of specialised, non-mainstream assistive devices that has been pertained to so far. Now that technology is so deeply interwoven with the very fabric of human civilisation and society, we have to redefine our guiding principles and inclusive design, making sure that technology is by intention accessible and usable for all people, regardless of their abilities and preferences will be the only way we can prevent huge, and increasing, numbers of people from being excluded from that social order.
And remember, there is more than just the moral and ethical case for making sure everyone has the opportunity to participate in our world: there is a direct economic incentive as well. While I personally believe that the moral and ethical case is by itself justification enough, we are in the fortunate position that inclusive design creates a win-win situation for every party involved. I am amazed how little the industry, service providers and network operators have actually understood that, how little they have realised that they can actually dramatically improve their services and products for all people and extend their user base through well thought through, inclusive design. When hearing people are walking down a busy street, they become hard of hearing too. When they can't use audio because it is inappropriate or not available, they become deaf. When they can't look at the screens of their pda's because they need to keep their eyes on the road or look at something else, they are blinded. Only through inclusive design of mainstream products and services can we address these and other issues. To allow, through inclusive design, more people to participate in society, to play the economic game, to be consumers, will benefit the overall economy. With the prospect of more than 81 million deaf and hard of hearing people in Europe alone, this is a very compelling argument.
But it does not end there: deaf and hard of hearing people are certainly consumers and they want to use services and products just like anyone else, but in addition, there is another economic argument, one that is often overlooked: deaf and hard of hearing people are also potential employees and employers. They have, just like the rest of the active population, a lot of expertise, knowledge and experience to contribute. Yet, if technology excludes them from employment, prevents them from sharing their knowledge and expertise with the rest of us by being employees and employers, than the whole of society loses out. Inclusive design of mainstream products and services can therefore bring a decisive advantage to the economies of Europe. (Next slide)
Another key characteristic of the Information Society is the ever-growing globalisation: of economies, but also of technologies. The Information Society is in essence a borderless phenomenon, with elimination of the "distance" factor and movement to technical, economic, social homogeneity. That borderless nature has further eroded the concept of special, non-mainstream devices like for example textphones. What reality has proven to us is that such specialised technologies simply fail to deliver the same borderless, integrated user experience that mainstream technology has to offer. We have no chance to overcome these problems outside mainstream technology. The "global village" is no longer a concept. It is a decisive part of our daily life. That means that the challenges of inclusion and equality in society have been globalised in the same way. There are no real regional solutions anymore. Instead, we have to bring together user groups, standards bodies and the industry to create global, integrated solutions for making mainstream technology accessible and usable by all.
I would now like to illustrate all of this by exploring in some detail one example of how the Information Society has created a new reality, has also raised new barriers to opportunity and fulfilment for deaf, hard of hearing and speech-impaired people and how a drastically new strategy for mainstreaming is required if we want to have a remote chance of removing those barriers. (Next slide)
The example I am going to use is that of interactive texting. This term might need some clarification. When I speak about interactive texting, I am not yet referring to a particular implementation technology, I am just using it to refer to a specific mode of communication that deaf and hard of hearing people need as an equivalent of what voice telephony offers to hearing people.
One of the classic problems I encounter when speaking about interactive texting is that many hearing people do not really understand why it is so important and how it differs from other text based communication systems. As I said, interactive texting is used by deaf, hard of hearing and speech-impaired people for quite specific purposes: it provides them with an alternative to what voice telephony is for hearing people. So, what do hearing people use voice telephony for? Well, it allows them to communicate directly, interactively with another person, in a unimodal way - the mode being voice. The communication takes place in real-time, it is of a conversational and streamed nature and you can barge in or respond immediately to what the other party says.
So, in order for interactive texting to be the equivalent textual version of voice telephony, it needs to offer similar functionality as voice telephony: it must be real-time, at least from the user's perspective, provide a streamed and conversational mode of communication and allow to barge-in and respond immediately. Because of these requirements, the consequence is of course that not just any text based communication system can provide this experience.
Yes, there exist an ever-growing number of text based communication services, most of them in the form of mainstream provisions that are available to all users. (Next slide)
And indeed, where deaf and hard of hearing people have been using textphones for decades now, recently the rest of the world... (Next slide)
...has discovered the benefits of text communication too! We all use email, sms, we chat in internet chat rooms, we use news servers and message boards, etc. But no hearing person would argue that because of the existence of all these new technologies, voice telephony has suddenly become redundant. (Next slide)
And that is because the decision as to what specific service to use, is heavily dependent on what we want to achieve. And in some cases, we will elect to send an email. In other cases, we pick up the phone and talk to someone. Deaf and hard of hearing people are in this respect just like anyone else: they too have different requirements at different times. But without interactive texting, they find themselves in a similar situation as hearing people without a phone. (Next slide)
The traditional implementation available to deaf and hard of hearing people for interactive texting, are analogue landline textphones. They are simple devices, based on modem technology and have a screen and a keyboard. Every character the user types is sent immediately to the other end. Textphones have most certainly opened up the world for deaf people since their introduction. But technology has moved on dramatically since and more importantly, the evolution towards an Information Society has embedded telecommunications much more deeply in our daily lives. As a result, textphones no longer suffice to bring deaf and hard of hearing people on par with their hearing peers.
When I was a child, the majority of households in our street did not have a telephone. And it was perfectly possible to be a fully participating member of society without a telephone. When around 1976 my father had one installed, it was still very much a luxury item, nice to have, but not an absolute necessity. Today, telephones are everywhere.
However, because textphones are not mainstream products, they have not kept up pace with the rest of technology and indeed society. Because it doesn't reside in the mainstream market, text telephony hasn't benefited from competition and mainstream developments. As a result, the current user experience in text telephony is nowhere near what mainstream voice telephony users enjoy. Textphones are not widely available; in many parts of the world they are even completely unavailable and public facilities for text telephony in most countries is lamentable. In addition, there are a number of non-compatible textphone protocols in use, so different regions in Europe and the world use different technologies. As a result of this plethora of textphone protocols, users face all kind of difficulties in trying to call other textphone users. Can you imagine that hearing people would only be able to call other users if they were on the same local network and were using similar telephone handsets that had to be configured in the same way before they would work? Yet, this is exactly what textphone users have to put up with. Network support for setting up textphone calls is extremely limited, not to mention facilities to allow different textphones to work together. As devices textphones are not nearly as user-friendly and modern as other phone terminals and textphone users certainly have not the same kind of choice in equipment and services that voice users have. The overall majority of textphones are horrendously expensive yet offer only very basic keyboards and screens, let alone other advanced features. And while hearing people can walk into any phone shop in the high street and buy whatever equipment they like, deaf and hard of hearing people do not have that freedom of choice at all. (Next slide)
One of the phenomenon that has made the problem of interactive texting hugely more important, is what we now can call the "mobile revolution". The introduction of GSM, digital mobile telephones, has dramatically changed our world, in only a few years. To be able to communicate effectively and continuously wherever you are, has evolved from a luxury gadget for the happy few into a mass-market product, a commodity that is absolutely essential for people who want to take full part in life.
Unfortunately, when the GSM standard for mobile telephones was created, successful and popular as it might be today, some major flaws in the process have caused serious and very deep problems for deaf, hard of hearing and speech impaired people who rely on interactive text to communicate. What are these flaws? Well, to name a few of them: mobile phones cause serious problems of interference with hearing aids and despite the fact that there are today technical solutions available to overcome that difficulty, Europe has, in contrast to the USA, failed to act. Furthermore, mobiles often lack features for volume control or induction loops with standardised connectors, which hard of hearing people might need, and too little attention was given to quality of speakers and microphones which is so important for many hard of hearing users.
But by far the biggest flaw in mobile telephony is that when the scheme was designed, the need to use interactive texting was never tabled as an essential feature of the system. That has resulted in the fact that there is no provision for interactive texting on mobile phones. And precisely because communicating while on the move has become so critical in this Information Society, the lack of such basic functionality has resulted in a major barrier in employment, education, health, social life and entertainment for deaf and hard of hearing people.
This is a prime example of how progress in technology can be not only beneficial, but can be a serious threat to opportunity and fulfilment for certain groups as well.
Groups like RNID have reacted to this appalling lack of functionality, and indeed the RNID mobile textphone has brought some relief, but it is clear that these kinds of very specific, time-limited and constrained solutions cannot change the fundamental, underlying problem. It is addressing some of the symptoms, but we are not curing the disease.
For all clarity, the use of SMS, while widespread amongst the community of deaf and hard of hearing people because it fits their abilities and preferences very well, can as I explained earlier not replace interactive, character-by-character text anymore than it could obsolete voice telephony for hearing people. (Next slide)
Some people have suggested that when Instant Messaging goes mobile, this might be a solution. And, of course, because of the trend to converge, this is likely to happen quite soon. Unfortunately, Instant Messaging has not the same truly conversational nature as character-by-character text. Instead, it uses blocks of text and anyone like myself who is a regular user of Instant Messaging services like Microsoft Messenger or ICQ will know from experience that it can't compete with voice telephony or indeed character-by-character interactive texting. These limitations become painfully clear when you try to use Instant Messaging to communicate with a voice user through a relay service.
Because, indeed, deaf and hard of hearing people of course do not only communicate with other deaf and hard of hearing people. They want to communicate with the rest of the world too. Relay services like RNID Typetalk(*) in the UK allow textphone users to have a conversation with a voice telephone user. Relay services will transcode everything that the text user types into voice and vice-versa. As such, relay services are essential in making sure that deaf and hard of hearing people can communicate freely with the rest of society. Unfortunately, Instant Messaging, because of the lack of conversationality and the long latencies that result out of the use of blocks of text, is pretty much useless to communicate through a relay. In fact, RNID carried out some trials with this and we found that the conversation breaks down even faster than we had originally assumed. (Next slide)
So, what is the solution then? It should be clear by now that we can no longer pretend that these non-mainstream, specialised, niche technologies will be able to deliver an equivalent experience to deaf and hard of hearing people. We need to break out of this restraining jacket. We can't allow ourselves to continue like this. We don't want new generations of specialised textphones, which will only increase the isolation and the barriers that deaf and hard of hearing people face in society.
The real solution certainly lies in a fundamentally different approach: we must aim to mainstream interactive texting, to make it a piece of the wide offering of mainstream services that is part of the variety of communication services that make up the arsenal of every citizen in the Information Society. Interactive texting must become as conventional and widespread as email or sms. And we have a great opportunity to do that: the user experience is appealing enough to attract all users, deaf and hard of hearing just as much as hearing people. Text is already a major pillar of today's information and communication framework.
The technology already exists. T.140 and its Internet equivalent as described in RFC2793 are existing open standards that can easily be integrated into current generations of networks and handset and that fit even better into the future, converged vision of IP everywhere. They are economically and practically viable, in fact they are very cheap and easy to implement, and they can offer, through gateways, complete support for existing legacy devices so that existing technologies are not suddenly made inoperative. There are already standards and implementations for all the added functionality that is needed, including such things like voice-carry-over. We have all the elements we need. What is required is the will to make it happen, and the business acumen as well as the ethical conviction to transform this vision into reality. (Next slide)
What we are trying to achieve is after all a more inclusive society. I believe the moral case by itself justifies the effort. But as I have shown, there is a very compelling business case as well. Those cynics who don't care about ethics can be reassured that the numbers actually add up. Think about the massive revenues that a very limited service as sms has been able to generate and think about the perspective of having a massively improved, yet technically unchallenging user experience at your disposal. The sky would indeed be the limit.
What is holding us back now, is primarily the issue of awareness: we must work together to make sure that all relevant parties fully understand all of this, are aware of the potential and appreciate the technical aspects completely. Raising awareness will be a major task for us in the years to come. In addition, we must make sure that the user requirements for accessible and usable services and products are fully understood. Again, all the stakeholders have to play their part here.
In combination with the fact that, as I said before, this is a global problem, we need above all a global strategy. That requires all stakeholders to participate. It must be based on consensus and the willingness to move things forward. The rewards that everyone can reap are potentially colossal. If we succeed in making sure that the Information Society becomes at the same time an Inclusive Society, we will have achieved for the first time in millions of years of human civilisation, a truly equal society, we will have satisfied the very promise of what it means to be human: to shape the world and make it into a better place where everyone, regardless of abilities and preferences, can fulfil their full potential. Let us transform this dream into reality. (Next slide)
Thank you very much for your attention.
Speech by Guido Gybels, given at the occasion of the European Conference on "Access to the Information Society" in the Residence Palace, Brussels, on 25 February 2004.
Slides for: The Information Society: opportunity or threat? (Acrobat 5 PDF format 177MB)
(*) The UK's relay service has since been renamed to Text Relay