Life in the slow lane

Recently I attended yet another debate about the relationship between disability and information technology. If I said it was profoundly depressing, I would be exaggerating the pleasure I gained from it.

 

There were the same old suspects drawing salaries for saying the same old things. The focus was on what the technology industry might be able to do to narrow the 'digital divide' for disabled people.

 

But most of the time was spent in complaining about prejudice, the cost of access technology, the limitations of Access to Work, non compliance with web accessibility and the shortcomings of the Government's procurement policies.

 

All very good points in their way, but hardly relevant to the issue.

 

If all the above problems were overcome, if we had a perfect world with no prejudice and perfect, free access technology, there would still be one, central problem, processing speed.

 

When I arrived to work with blind people in the Caribbean, the major occupation was basket-making. I soon found out that blind people, lacking hand-eye co-ordination, made baskets more slowly and with more faults than sighted peers, so they were non-competitive; they were being subsidised to make goods they could not sell.

 

Much the same applies to people with disabilities who use ICT at work. I know, you can always find exceptions but in general people with visual and physical impairments and intellectual disabilities process data more slowly than their peers.

 

I don't know about people with hearing impairments. No amount of technological acumen can free blind people from the need to access information in a linear format because they can't scan a whole page at a glance. Information architecture will help people with switches but the bigger the database, the greater the number of operations.

 

But perhaps most difficult of all - and hardly mentioned in the debate - are the problems of those with intellectual disabilities who find the accumulation of options bewildering.

 

What this means is that if we are in competition in a global labour market, we need to work out where processing speed doesn't count and, incidentally, where automation isn't likely to flourish. We need to work out what we do better than fast processors and better than machines.

 

At the 'top end' of the market, the real premium is on wisdom, the ability to add deep experiential value to data aggregations. When it comes to people with low skills levels, the objective should be to identify parts of procedures which require minor but subtle variations which are comparatively expensive to automate.

 

But in the medium-term the great liberator will be the development of hybrid systems such that the system itself will diagnose user difficulty, triggering human help. This means that a large group of people with disabilities could all rely on one or two specialists to get them out of trouble.

 

Of course, matters would be much simpler if we switched to thin clients with our access technology software on the server side; but to do this we have to break the near monopoly Microsoft client-side model.

 

Not for the first time, I have to say that the real problem is not the technology but the people.

 

At the debate I attended, it was so much easier for people to take refuge in familiar arguments, delivering messages to the wrong doors. The best we can expect of technology companies is that they do their job, obey the law and keep an open mind about market opportunities to tackle the accessibility problem; but it isn't their job to rid the world of prejudice, they aren't vicars or legislators.

 

As long as we go on with this line of behaviour, we will not focus on the real problem. Nobody wants to know that there are areas of activity where disabled people can't be competitive; it's much better to complain the world is an unfair and cruel place.

 

The problem is that this stops us facing the non-competitive problem honestly; as long as we can shift the blame onto somebody else, we don't have to do anything ourselves.