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03/13/2007Putting Technologists to the Test
Kevin Carey is Director of the U.K.-based HumanITy, which fosters digital inclusion across all platforms — computer-based systems, broadcasting and telecommunications — in the context of increasing hardware and content convergence. Carey, who is blind, views the digital divide as much a problem of design as people accessing technology, and asks, “Why don’t we ask the technologists why they don’t develop systems that need less skill? Why is it always the people’s fault? I think we’ve got a problem of the interface between people and engineers.” At the Digital Cities Convention in London (September 25–26, 2006), Carey chaired the Digital Inclusion Roundtable, and the following interview is adapted from the proceedings.
 Q: Access and accessibility — how do you define the two?
A: In Europe, when we say access, we generally mean people’s ability to pay for or access infrastructure. It might mean money, or living in rural areas. Accessibility normally means the specific set of problems faced by legally disabled people, and people who have a functionality problem with information systems. Accessibility is a subset of e-Inclusion, which is the widest definition of all. Exclusion covers a huge amount of distance from, or failure to be able to interact with, digital information systems.
Q: What does this look like in the U.K.?
A: About a third of the population, for one reason or another, do not interact with digital information systems. We estimate that figure is falling slowly. But we have a functionality gap. It’s roughly the same kinds of people — people who are poor, not very well educated, skewed toward the elderly, disabled, minorities.
This is a bit of a complex generalization because there are wheelchair users who are absolutely brilliant at using IT, and there are rich people who are hopeless. In the U.K., 80% of those with mobile phones can now send a text message, which is 64% of the total population. Equally, the penetration of digital television in the U.K. is pushing now toward 70%. So while we talk about a digital divide, it isn’t the most useful way of understanding people’s access to technology. But when we talk about e-Inclusion, or the converse — exclusion — we’re really talking about people’s ability to interact with, as opposed simply to consume, the riches offered by the Internet.
Q: How did this divide arise in society, and how is it perpetuated?
A: There is a short history we need to understand. From the development of the World Wide Web in 1993, the European public policy stand on accessibility was that it was really the fault of the people. If you could only get people and nail their bottoms to chairs and make them word process, the world would be a better place. Well, actually, that hasn’t turned out to be the case. People who don’t naturally want to interact with information systems behave in exactly the same way as the rest of the population, which is, that if you show them that it’s to their advantage to do it, they probably will.
In the late 1990s, there began to be some recognition that perhaps the problem wasn’t entirely anthropocentric. At HumanITy, we began to analyze the number of people who could drive a car but couldn’t run a computer. And we did some interesting work on people who could find things in hypermarkets but couldn’t find things on the Internet. We concluded that the best way to describe the e-Inclusion / e-Exclusion problem was to think of a functionality gap between people and information systems that could be narrowed on both sides of the divide. It wasn’t purely an anthropocentric problem, and it wasn’t entirely a design problem.
Q: So it’s both.
A: The single biggest factor in increasing automobile use by the elderly was the invention of the automatic transmission. Why don’t we ask the technologists, instead of talking to people and asking them to develop their skills, why they don’t develop systems that need less skill? Why is it always the people’s fault that they don’t have enough skill? I think the roadblock is that the systems aren’t properly designed.
Last week, I was working on designing the new BBC iPlayer, and I was given the choice as a customer either to stream or download. I said, I think you mean “now” and “later.” And they said, Oh yeah, streaming is now, and download is later. Why don’t we just use “now” and “later”?
Q: IT companies appear to be run by engineers and not the marketing department, which is the anthropocentric side.
A: Yes. It’s sort of like you’re in Heinz, and all the people in Heinz liked mayonnaise and none of them liked beans, so the only thing the marketing department had to sell was mayonnaise because the people in the factories didn’t like beans. That’s what computing looks like to me. It looks like marketers trying to sell what engineers want to make. I think we’ve got a problem of the interface between people and engineers.
Q: We’ve been targeting hardware pretty heavily here. What about software?
A: We’ve gotten into the habit of the serialization of software, which is that it’s never finished. You’re having to send new boxes of stuff out to people, or ask them to download it from a subscription base on the Internet. In other words, it’s not actually a product, it’s a process. I buy software. I buy a man to come in and install it, or otherwise it won’t work properly. I buy somebody else to put my Braille translation software on there, and they have to make sure all that’s compatible. I have to buy upgrades for both programs — the ordinary program and the Braille translation software. I have to buy a virus checker and a spam excluder, and download bug-fixing patches for both sets of programs. So I think one of the key challenges, and a solution to it, is this huge amount of client-side junk, whereas wireless broadband will allow us to provide service-side solutions that won’t be very popular in Redmond, Washington, but might be necessary to improve inclusion.
Q: How do you see wireless helping matters generally?
A: My great dream application for wireless broadband is the ability of people to do hybrid transactions that simultaneously involve other people and digital information systems, so that they can switch out of being autonomous to being facilitated, and back to being autonomous. But not in computer suites, but when they really need to do it, so that people can do this at any time, so that it’s both mobile and it’s hybrid. For lots of people, that will change their lives from online form filling right through to e-learning. And I think that’s immensely important.
E-mail Kevin Carey at humanity@atlas.co.uk.
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