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05/16/2006

Toward a More Inclusive Information Society

The W2i Digital Cities Convention in Los Angeles features the first Digital Inclusion Roundtable on Wednesday, May 24, 3:45–7:00. Experts will explore the potential of broadband-wireless deployment models, applications, and services to improve digital inclusion and accessibility among underserved areas and underprivileged populations.

K. Anne-River Forcke of the IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center in Richmond, Virginia, who participates today at the W2i/UNITAR Webinar at UN Headquarters, will lead a structured brainstorm session on accessibility at the Roundtable in Los Angeles.

At the first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in December 2003, the representatives of peoples around the world, articulating a vision premised on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, declared:

our common desire and commitment to build a people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life....

Clearly, we have the will to shape the character of our nascent Information Society. But do we know the ways?

As the 21st century progresses, governments are recognizing new dimensions to the obstacles they face. In addition to the traditional challenges of providing public services, they are finding constituents demanding better responses to their often rapidly shifting wants and needs. As employers, governments are competing with the private sector to attract and retain leadership thinkers and racing against time as large portions of the workforce in countries like the United States, Japan, and the UK begin to retire en masse.

Add to this the complicating factors of the global economy and its implications for workforce skills and education, fiscal health, economic vitality, and public safety, and it becomes all too easy to dismiss "a people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society" as a distant, albeit noble, goal.

We understand fiscal management, we can measure education outcomes, and we have very clear definitions for public safety, but what exactly is people-centered? How do we measure inclusive? How will we know when we’re being development-oriented?

None of these questions is easy to answer, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. At the heart of the WSIS Declaration lies the concept of inclusion. While there appears to be a general understanding in the public dialogue of the term inclusion, there also appears to be a fundamental lack of clarity and consistency in the way the term is used. Is inclusion a goal? Is it an end-result of a program or policy? Or is it a strategy? A means or approach that supports achieving some other goal?

Inclusion and Accessible IT

In the public dialogue, the term accessible IT suffered similarly for many years, though—unlike inclusion—its baseline definition lies in technical standards and quantifiable regulatory requirements. When is something "accessible?" Are there shades of "accessibility?" Is "compliant with accessibility standards" the same thing as "accessible?" Is accessibility a goal or a strategy?

In 2003, the IBM Corporation developed a four-tier framework for accessibility that features both an enterprise view as well as an end-user view. For end-users, this framework sets out the following “people-centered” descriptions for IT Accessibility from the perspectives of both an organization's customers/constituents as well as the organization's employees:

Tier 1 — Compliance-Driven Accessibility focuses on addressing just the technical standards and regulatory requirements. This means:

For Constituents — “I can get access.”
For Employees — “I can work here.”

Tier 2 — Experience-Driven Accessibility combines the technical standards and requirements for accessibility with usability and user-centered design techniques to focus on the user's actual experience with the Web site or application or hardware. This means:

For Constituents — “I had a good experience.”
For Employees —“I like/would like working here.”

Tier 3 — Relationship-Driven Accessibility represents a step-change in the IT environment, integrating smart technologies that recognize an end-user's identity to adjust the IT environment to suit an end-user's preferences. As a positive externality, this level of accessibility can actually fuel or enable business model changes, both in the way that enterprises address the wants and needs of customers as well as those of employees. Consider now the difference in experience for end-users:

For Constituents — “This organization knows me and anticipates what I need.”
For Employees — “My organization values me as a team member.”

Tier 4 — Societal Transformation–Driven Accessibility requires collaboration across organizations and industries supported with infrastructure that facilitates the communications of an end-user's preferences. It's not completely unlike the evolution within the travel industry over the past several years where now, instead of having to tell every airline they deal with what kind of seat or meal is preferred, users simply define their preferences in a general profile and that information is communicated—often by an intermediary agent (IT-based or otherwise)—across all organizations involved in their travel plans. The effect is an integrated communication of user preferences that occurs in the background, reducing redundancy of tasks and requests, so:

For Constituents — “My time is well spent and productive.”
For Employees — “I am empowered and can see my future.”

The IBM Framework clearly calls out the “compliance” tier to establish that legal compliance with accessibility standards and/or regulations is measurable, setting it apart from Tiers 2-4 which are defined by a combination of user-experience characteristics. The practice that the ICT community can leverage from IBM's work is quite simple: Define your framework by clearly defining the experience(s) you want the end-user to have or achieve.

Accessibility is clearly not the same thing as inclusion. However, there may be an opportunity to leverage some of the tools that have helped bring clarity and consistency to the accessibility dialogue and extend them to the dialogue of inclusion. Ultimately, our objective must be to develop a global framework for inclusion that provides observable characteristics as well as quantifiable metrics.

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Toward a More Inclusive Information Society

Inclusion and Accessible IT

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