INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION UNION
|INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION UNION |Joint Coordination Activity |
| |On Accessibility and Human Factors |
|TELECOMMUNICATION STANDARDIZATION SECTOR |Doc 208 |
|STUDY PERIOD 2013-2016 | |
| |English only |
| |Original: English |
|Source: |Gerry Ellis, Vice Chair JCA-AHF |
|Title: |Mr. Ellis’ Report on 2015 M-Enabling Summit (1-2 June 2015, Washington DC) |
Introduction
The 4th m-Enabling Summit and Showcase with an overall theme of “Mobile Innovation: Smarter Living for All“took place in Washington DC on June 1st and 2nd, 2015. It was attended by around 500 people from approximately 20 countries representing academia, government, industry, persons with disabilities and their organisations. This report can only give a flavour of the wide variety of issues covered in the plenary sessions and myriad parallel sessions. The entire agenda can be seen at: agenda.html
Monday, June 1st
Following an introduction to all attendees by Mr. Axel Leblois, President and Executive Director of G3ICT, Mr. Gary Shapero, CEO of The Consumer Electronics Association delivered the opening keynote speech. He set the scene for the 2 days by talking about how billions of devices will be linked in the future to increase opportunities available to people and allowing technology to undertake many of the activities that people do today. These include benefits like greatly improved positioning systems, having deliveries made by drones and the option of producing items oneself using 3D printers. He also warned that there are potential downsides like loss of privacy and potential data security issues. His final comments should be a warning to us all that we must maintain vigilance to ensure that we can access new technologies as are already changing so rapidly.
A video was then shown featuring Stephen Hawking. He described how he liaised with Intel to develop a new generation of the software that he uses to communicate and to interact with his computer.
A plenary Session on innovative development then took place.
The chairperson, Kevin Carey of the RNIB in London, said that in a capitalist world, the private sector want the top third of the market, the government deals with the middle third but nobody wants to deal with the bottom third. We must sure that we are not left in the bottom third.
Peter Corn of Amazon described a device called a Firefly. It can be pointed at something like an object or a TV programme and information stored in the cloud or software on the device itself will report to the user what it is.
Jutta Treviranus, Ph.D., Director, Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University, talked about how 3D printing will reduce the cost of producing specialised devices as opposed to purchasing them. She said that 3D printers are now cheaper than laser printers were 10 years ago.
We heard of how Microsoft’s “Hello” option will allow Windows 10 users to log onto their computers without using keyboards and passwords.
We heard from Mike Ellis of Sprint Relay that their success in making their services as accessible as they are is mainly down to consulting with persons with disabilities and employing them.
Oded Ben Dov, Co-Founder and CEO, Sesame Enable, described how they use a million dollar award to send their accessible mobile phones to users around the world for free.
A second plenary session, chaired by John D. Kemp, had the theme of “Can Policy and Multi-stakeholders Cooperation Promote Innovation?”.
Karen Peltz Strauss, Deputy Chief, Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) listed pieces of legislation from the 70’s onwards. She described how they found that the market was not a sufficient driver to convince industry to accommodate the needs of persons with disabilities. They thus went down the road of developing regulation, with consultation with persons with disabilities as stakeholders a key element. Karen said that there are still gaps, for instance around the issue of access to the Internet.
Susan Mazrui, Director, Public Policy, AT&T, said she is lucky in that her team has a wide variety of expertise including persons with disabilities.
She said that it is difficult to measure the size of the disability market is very difficult. As people grow old they want accessible products and services but they do not consider themselves to be disabled. Susan said they engage with a lot of stakeholders and not always the most experienced as some of these are almost too expert.
Tom Wlodkowski, Vice President, Accessibility, Comcast, described 4 principles for their disability group
• Customer engagement to get feedback
• Ensuring accessible products are available to customers
• Infrastructure including best practices and tools
• Service including concentrating on the needs of the customer.
Adrienne Biddings, Policy Counsel, Google, described a 20 million Dollar worldwide Google initiative to back projects that improve accessibility for persons with disabilities. He said that Google’s aim is to make all the information that they can universally accessible.
Dmitry Polikanov, President, Deaf-Blind Support Fund “Connection” of Russia, said that deaf blind people used to be only supported by charities. Russia is now working on national policies rather than individual charities working alone. They are trying to predict how many people with disabilities there will be in the future and how their needs are changing.
There were 2 sets of six parallel sessions following lunch. As we could not attend them all, these are some highlights from those that I attended.
Judy Brewer, Director, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), W3C, said that Web Content Accessibility Guidelines norms are standard but they are updating some of the success criteria. She said that they are investigating what needs to be done in relation to all of their guidelines to better support mobile and other emerging technologies.
Henny Swan, Senior Accessible User Experience Consultant, The Paciello Group, used to work for the BBC. She described how she helped BBC develop guidelines specifically for mobile developments. Google have Android-specific guidelines and Apple have IOS-specific standards. However, some features that are available in Android are not available in IOS and vice versa. BBC standards are aimed at being applicable on both.
Preety Kumar, CEO/Founder, Deque Systems, Inc., told us that they have also developed their own standards.
Rawlson King, Lead Researcher, , talked about systems for using biometrics to recognize people. She said that around 10 billion biometric features are checked so it is nearly impossible to get a false match between two people. However, she said that there are also potential problems because people change as they grow old.
Steve Tyler, Head, Innovation and Development, Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), spoke about potential problems with near field (NFC) and Bluetooth technologies. He said that if he swipes his wallet near an NFC point of sale device and if he has more than one NFC-enabled card in his wallet it is possible that he will be charged twice, once on each card. He said that, being blind, he may not know how much he is being charged yet he has given permission by swiping his card.
Steve talked about the “SNAPI” card. The card will allow the user to pay for things like train tickets. However, the card will also inform the ticket barrier that the user is, for instance, a wheelchair user and the barrier will give the user extra time to go through.
Katie Haritos-Shea, Sr. Accessibility SME, Standards QA Architect, JP Morgan Chase, talked about problems with privacy, security and data protection in relation to mobile devices, particularly those that are connected to other devices in an Internet of Things world. She said that EDM chips on cards that are in most parts of the world are coming to the States. These allow cards to be swiped thus eliminating the need to sign a docket. However, their use is likely to increase the level of credit and debit card fraud as compared to the current level.
Other problems mentioned include that payments are controlled by a small number of companies and that company has to get a slice of the action for each transaction. She said that interoperability between payments companies is still a problem, particularly internationally.
John Rempel, Quality Control and Training Specialist, AMAC, Georgia Institute. Whereas young people learn to use new technologies quickly, older people have often done things in a certain way all their lives and find it difficult to change to use accessibility features of devices. He said that the loss of independence that is associated with growing old and acquiring a disability can be socially awkward. This leads to a need for training for older people to use devices that are new to them.
Stephen M. Bauer, Ph.D., Competition Manager & Project Officer, National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), spoke about research called an exclusion calculator which is based on data from 300,000 people in the UK. The research attempts to demonstrate why some people have difficulty interacting with their environment but it has some problems. He talked about how it might be improved by using it in conjunction with the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF).
Rich Donovan, Chief Executive Officer, The Return on Disability Group, said that if you tell any CEO that there are 1.3 billion persons with disabilities the CEO will jump at that as a market. He said to promote accessibility within a company, one must address the issue from the top of the company down.
David S. Martin, Program Manager-Disabilities, DOT Compliance, Delta Air Lines, said that even if one convinces the company leader of the benefits of including the needs of persons with disabilities, this is passed down to others to implement. He said that they do not have a disability and may well misunderstand the needs and how to vindicate them. He said that the challenge is always to get the next level of management up or down to buy into accessibility. He said that around 10% of employees in Delta have disabilities and this helps ensure that the needs of people with disabilities are understood within the company.
The parallel sessions were followed by the FCC Chairman’s Awards for Advancement in Accessibility. The award ceremony was introduced by The Honorable Jessica Rosenworcel, Commissioner, Federal Communications Commission. This report does not list the winners, but they are available on the FCC web site at:
Tuesday, June 2nd
The second day began with a plenary session with the theme of “The Internet of Things, A new Frontier for seniors and Persons with Disabilities “. I chaired this session.
Tobin Richardson, President and CEO, ZigBee Alliance, Dan Norman, Head of Strategic Engagement – North America, GSMA, Kimberly Marshall, North America Stakeholder Strategy, Uber Technologies and W. Bradley Fain, Ph.D., Principal Research Scientist, Chief, Human Factors Program Office, Georgia Tech Research Institute made up the panel.
The lively, conversational discussion addressed the issues of the potential benefits of the Internet of Things, the potential pitfalls, what is required in the area of standards and what is required to ensure that user interfaces are accessible and that Internet of Things related technologies are interoperable with assistive technologies.
The conclusion was that many of the issues remain the same regardless of the technology involved. We need to be involved early in the design process right through to development and testing to ensure that our needs are included. We need to influence the development of standards and guidelines. However, it was recognised that what is implemented in the next few years will affect technology for many years to come. We must not miss that revolution.
The summit then returned to the format of parallel sessions. These are some of the highlights:
Andrew Kirkpatrick, Group Product Manager, Accessibility, Adobe Systems, talked about a tool called PhoneGap. It takes code for a mobile application in one end and produce apps at the other end that are suitable for different platforms. Compilations are performed in the cloud. It is available from:
Tim Springer, CEO, SBB BART Group, said that Native applications are those that are built on the operating system where they will run. An example is an app that is built on IOS to run on IOS. In this case it is relatively easy to include accessibility. It is more difficult to build in accessibility to hybrid apps that are planned to run on several platforms. He said that a lot of accessibility depends on testing, but this is frequently very manual. He mentioned that a new tool will soon be available to automate at least some of this.
He described 3 apps that are available on the app store to raise awareness of accessibility amongst software developers. They are called Accessibility101.
Ferran Gállego, Chief Technology Officer, Code Factory, said that they have developed a web browser that can be built into any app. This web browser will run on any platform so the app that it is supporting will be accessible on any platform.
Frances West, Chief Accessibility Officer, IBM, said that she was in the mobile world conference in Barcelona in March. She said that for the first time there were panels on equality including accessibility.
Frances said that nobody wants to do accessibility if it is simply seen as a cost. However, it is far more likely to be taken into account if one says that the maximum user experience is available and the maximum number of options are available to all users if the needs of people with disabilities are taken into account.
Frances said that IBM will shortly make its engine for converting text to speech freely available. Note that AT&T have already done this. Finally, Frances mentioned 3 R’s in relation to an organisation that is considering if it should provide accessibility:
• Rights
• Responsibility
• Reputation
We were told that A11YOZ has made a media player freely available that will make YouTube videos more accessible. See
This site also contains information on making social media accessible.
Debra Ruh, CEO, Ruh Global Communications & Co-Founder, AXSChat; G3ict EmployAbility and Technology Chair, said that facebook set up an accessibility team in 2011 and announced on April 2nd this year that they now have an accessibility toolkit.
Kendra Cox, Senior Product Development Engineer, AT&T, described their Corporate Accessibility Technology Office (CATO). She described the challenge of linking people with disabilities and older people with products and services that are accessible. She said that it is not enough to make an app accessible; there must also be training for users to help them learn how to get the technology and how to use it.
Michael Morris, Executive Director, National Disability Institute (NDI), presented statistics on unemployment and poverty amongst persons with disabilities. These are available at:
ndi-
I then made a presentation to a session with the theme of “Promoting Accessibility Professional Skills across Industries and Academia”
The panel consisted of:
Session Chair:
Jutta Treviranus, Ph.D., Director, Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University
Panelists:
Jeff Brandt, Director, Corporate Accessibility Technology Office (CATO), AT&T
Josh Christianson, Project Director, Partnership on Employment & Accessible Technology (PEAT)
Paul Bohman, Ph.D., IAAP Certification Committee Chair, Director of Training, Deque Systems, Inc.
Gerry Ellis, Feel The BenefIT; Fellow of The Irish Computer Society; ISO/IEC Guide 71,
We discussed various ways of providing education and certification to people who wish to gain qualifications in the area of accessibility. We agreed that IAAP is an excellent development. It allows the person doing the training gain recognisable qualifications. At the same time, it allows a potential employer identify those who have specialisations that they may need. However, many people do not require qualifications to this level. My major contribution was to point out the development of disability-related Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). These are web based learning modules that are free to use for the student and which encourage interaction between the MOOC operators and those consuming the MOOC.
The second day then finished with the final plenary session of the Summit.
Dr. Kemal Huseinović, Chief, Infrastructure, Enabling Environment and E-Applications Department (IEE), ITU-D, described the work of ITU and how ITU has taken on the issue of accessibility. He described work in conjunction with G3ICT on accessibility policies. He stressed the importance of public procurement. He said that standards are very important and spoke of how ITU was involved with the revision of ISO/IEC Guide 71.
Javed Abidi, Chairperson, Disabled People’s International (DPI), said that there are 800 million people with disabilities who do not have access to many technological advantages as the technology is too expensive or not available in their area. He said that the UN Development Goals will come to an end this year. The next set of goals for the next 15 years are now being finalised and will be published in September this year. He said that the UN Secretary General’s dream is that nobody should be left behind. He thinks that technology is the key to this.
Frances West, Chief Accessibility Officer, IBM, said that a for profit company wants as much profit as possible for as many as possible. She said that making mobile phones accessible involves making mobile devices personalised. This is what the general public also wants and this helps to open up the mobile device to all the world as well as persons with disabilities.
David Capozzi, Executive Director, U.S. Access Board, talked about Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. He said that the first policy for the accessibility of the built environment was in 1960. The Access Board was set up to enforce federal laws in relation to federal legislation rather than having each federal government department policing themselves.
David stressed the importance of developing internationally harmonised standards. It is also important that they can be measured against and that there is a method of enforcement.
Note that no date was offered for the current review of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.
Axel Leblois, President and Executive Director, G3ict, thanked all those involved with the Summit. He announced that next year’s summit will take place in the same hotel on June 13th and 14th. He then closed the Summit.
Networking
The m-Enabling Summit offered several excellent opportunities for networking.
I took these opportunities to, amongst others, make the following links;
AT&T – Discuss what options they make available free of charge to the general public to test web site accessibility
Adobe – Check what facilities are available free of charge to promote the accessibility of PDF documents. Note that this is a major issue with ITU at the moment.
A11YOZ –Check what facilities apart from their accessible media viewer are freely available
Mobile Manufacturers’ Forum –Discover information about their current call for input on updating their GARI web site. GARI publicizes information on the accessibility of various mobile phones.
Debra Ruh – Update on the status of a book in which my disability-related activities will be featured.
Axel Leblois –Discuss the possibility of a joint venture in Dublin in 2016.
Amazon – Discover more information about their Firefly product
RNIB – Discussed with Steve Tyler how we can improve links between the European Disability Forum, UK and Ireland
Trace Centre – Renew acquaintances with Professor Gregg Van DerHeiden and discuss potential future interactions
Note that contact details for all these persons or organizations can be found on them-Enabling attendance list. See same attached.
Gerry Ellis
gerry.ellis@
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