Thank you.
I am the director of something called the Inclusive Design Research Centre, which has the mission of proactively ensuring that emerging technologies are designed inclusively. We focus on inclusive design for our digitally transformed and complexly connected society. We turned 25 this year and are engaged in many collaborative and international projects.
In my statement, I want to focus on the area where we have the most unique expertise, and this is the impact of the domain of digitally transformed, complexly connected societies on people experiencing disabilities. I also take a systems view of the goal of accessibility for people with disabilities in order to address not just the symptoms of exclusion but the underlying systemic causes.
First I should tell you how we define disability within the design domain and within the data domain. From the design perspective, we see disability as a mismatch between the needs of the individual and the environment, product or service offered, not a defining personal trait. From a data perspective, disability is the outlying edge of the starburst that is the normal distribution, sufficiently far from the central cluster for whom most things are designed so that things are not designed for you and you have difficulty with or can't use the current designs.
People with disabilities are the outliers. The primary defining characteristic of disability is difference, difference from the norm, and thinking of that starburst, people experiencing disabilities are more different from each other than people who are clustered around the average. As you move from the centre, the dots are further apart.
This means that people experiencing disabilities are served by systems and processes that are designed for variability and complexity. Any evidence related to persons experiencing disabilities will be dispersed and diffuse. There are no large numbers of homogenous representatives, and therefore, there is no statistical significance. Also of note, “majority rules” does not serve people with disabilities.
How is a digitally connected domain different from other domains that you may hear about in terms of accessibility?
Interoperability is the most difficult and pernicious issue in the digital domain. Once adoption begins, barriers propagate and morph extremely quickly and are almost impossible to contain. Inaccessible conventions lock in and are impossible to reverse—try to get rid of the QWERTY keyboard. Therefore, retrofit, which is possible but expensive in other domains, is almost impossible in the digital domain. Timing is also extremely critical and does not follow a predetermined schedule. There's no benefit in scheduling a five-year review.
People experiencing disabilities are the most vulnerable to threats caused by the digital transformation, but also provide the most compelling benefits for emerging technologies. Technical systems can be designed to provide one-size-fits-one; they can present a different entry point or user experience to each individual.
What are the failures and weaknesses of current legislative frameworks? Technical regulations cannot keep up. They become outdated and then accessibility is seen as an impediment to innovation and progress. Most regulations treat the symptoms and not the cause. We have regulations regarding inaccessible documents rather than the authoring tools that produce them. We focus on the products, not the process.
Accessibility is usually also in a gatekeeping role, which leads to resentment, and not as part of the design from the start, where we should be thinking about accessibility and the digital domain. We focus on accessibility as an obligation, not as a benefit. We should see it as an impetus for innovation, long-term cost reduction and longevity of design. We need to provide the economic modelling to highlight the significant return on investment. We have amassed evidence to this effect.
Also, any available supports, tools, training and expertise provided with respect to supporting the regulations are often fragmented, contradictory, confusing and redundantly produced. The all-too-common checklist approach requires reductionism and increases the barriers for anyone not included or served by the checklist.
We have promoted also, with respect to accessibility and computer access, an integrated not a segregated computer access strategy. Promoting an assistive technology industry as a separate non-integrated technology is not viable. It increases the cost and reduces the interoperability. This has become a barrier to digital equity when it was seen originally as a solution.
The emerging threats and opportunities that we need to pay attention to include our emphasis on evidence-based governance. The form of evidence requires large homogeneous groups. People with disabilities are not homogeneous and will not pass any thresholds with respect to evidence.
Artificial intelligence and decisions based on population data, for example, automated vehicles and outliers, do not take into account people who are outliers, and people with disabilities are outliers. Data-guided decisions perpetuate past exclusion, as they use data of the past. If you've never held an employment position, there's no evidence of your ability to perform within that position and so you will never get chosen for the job.
With respect to privacy, de-identification of people with disabilities does not work. People with disabilities are the easiest to re-identify and the most vulnerable to data abuse and misuse. Block chains and other disintermediated systems create the challenge of who you regulate. There is no service provider that you can ask to create accessible systems. Current project planning, monitoring and evaluation processes impose assumptions in unpredictable variable domains that people with disabilities experience.
There are some silver linings. Open platforms offer an opportunity. They can be a means of aggregating and sharing resources, tools and knowledge, matching unmet personal needs and connecting demands at the edge with producers at the edge. They can diversify demand and supply to reach the edges where people with disabilities are.
I have five recommendations.
The first is that we should support inclusive research and innovation. There's currently a systemic bias against research in this area because there is a lack of statistical significance and there are not enough peers to review the research. We should integrate accessibility into all research support throughout the process, the call for proposal and determining the success criteria, and in the peer review.
Second, we should emphasize systemic processes for long-term change and encourage diversification, not competition, for one winning alternative, participation of informed diverse perspectives in our decision-making processes, and the integration of exclusive design training for all relevant roles.
My third recommendation is that our interventions should be timely and proactive. We should designate and empower a role for vigilant monitoring, and for power to intervene in emerging technology processes or in a watchdog role for emerging technologies and practices. Within this domain, that is the only way we will stop catching up and be able to equitably participate.
Fourth, we need to produce and provide authoring and development tools that produce accessible content programs and services through procurement. You'll save innumerable hours and effort in remediating inaccessible content if you design it accessibly from the start and this is supported in the authoring and development tools.
Finally, I recommend that we establish a community portal that pools resources, tools, research and constructive feedback from the public and from other individuals who are innovating in this domain, thereby reducing fragmentation.
This doesn't need to mean that the government is supporting any one solution, but that it is pooling the resources such that the public and people with expertise, especially individuals experiencing disabilities, can review and support the systems.