Interview: John Gill
Able chats with John Gill, Chief Scientist at the RNIB about designing systems for disabled users…
CAN WE CHECK YOUR JOB TITLE JOHN?
It’s the rather grand title of Chief Scientist. If you’refamiliar with a government department, most government departments have a chiefscientist.
They may be chief of nothing, but they’re there to provide advicefor one’s political masters. Whether the political masters take any notice isanother matter. But they’re there to provide independent scientific advice.
SO, IS THAT YOUR ROLE IN THE RNIB?
To the RNIB but also to outside groups. I work with 40external organisations.
ARE THERE ANY PARTICULAR AREAS THAT YOU SPECIALISE IN?
I spent 38 years working in the area of technology anddisability. My recent work has been more to access to public, particularlyinformation and communications technology. And how you can design it such that it is useful as far as is reasonably possible by as many people with disabilities. There’s no magic answer to do everything for everybody. So it can cover everything from smart card systems, biometrics; there’s quite a lot of new technologies in the pipeline where the we need to configure the needs of disabled people from the outset, not after you’ve designed the systems.
IT’S EASIER TO DESIGN A SYSTEM THAN TO REDESIGN ONE?
The costs are phenomenal to redesign and in fact it doesn’t happen most of the time. The costs are ignored or it’s basically too late. So one has to get in there early, and sometimes very early, at the writing of the standards.
HAS THE GROWTH OF ITC BEEN IMPORTANT?
Well basically, more and more people, whether they like it or not, are having to use self service machines and other things. And we’re getting to the stage in some things that if you can’t use the self service terminal you may not have access to the service. Now that clearly is quite significant and that sometimes there’s alternative provision, but increasingly that will not necessarily be the case, nor will it be equal to that level of service. So there’s that. There’s also[the fact that] the technology is increasingly making it possible to do a lot more. If I can give you a simple example; if, for example, you had a card-operated machine, say a ticket machine at a railway station, if on your travel card is coded how you would like the machine to behave, that you as an individual would like large characters on the screen or speech output, or something else, or it’s in Portugese with sign language if you want to be exotic, then that could be coded on the card so it automatically changes the user interface.
Now we’ve had a pilot in some libraries, because in libraries nowadays, I know it’s obvious that you have books, but less obvious it’s where people who haven’t got computers at home or haven’t got internet access at home, use them to send any emails to their grandaughter in Australia, so what we did was a library card, you put it in the machine and it automatically reconfigured Microsoft Office, but more importantly, when you took it out it reset it back to normal. Because librarians are very hardworking people but are trained in books, not computers. They may be able to find it, but it takes rather a long time to set up and even longer to get back to the default condition. So it’s relatively simple things like this where the technology is offering newpossibilities.
DOES NEW TECHNOLOGY HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO IMPROVE ACCESS?
It offers great potential, sometimes less obvious, for instance somebody with an intellectual impairment might find a biometric method of identification better than a conventional password or PIN number, which theycan’t keep secure because if you ask them that they’ll tell it, whereas ifyou’re asked what your finger print is, you can’t… there are quite a lot of areas.
At the same time, badly designed machines can unnecessarily exclude people; biometric machines, for example… if you’ve got an Iris scanner – like you do at Heathrow and Gatwick for frequent travellers – you have to look at a red dot. Now red is the wrong colour for many partially sighted people – it’s at the wrong end of the visible spectrum – and a dot is not very good if you’re missing your very central vision, but flick in a big white cross… white can be seen by most people who can see, and a cross means that even if you can’t see the centre, you can see the rest and work out where you’re meant to be looking. You see it’s quite often a relatively simple design for the features, which is why we’ve developed a set of design guidelines to help designers, many of whom –because the equipment is not specifically for disabled people – it’s for the general public, they tend to forget that… Early systems tend to be for a younger and the elite; like biometrics, if you’re in the military, it’s to get into the nuclear bunker, now you know that you’re not going to have a disabled person needing to get into the nuclear bunker because there aren’t any in the Army, or at least not at that level. And you’re not getting the elderly because the retirement age is 55. Then they take the same system and roll it out to the general public , the general public includes older people, people with disabilities, people whose primarylanguage is not English, and a whole range of other things.
ARE YOU ACTIVELY INVOLVED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THESE GUIDELINES?
Yes, basically we put the guidelines up on our website and they’re used quite widely, and what we’re finding is that we keep adding to them. There are some areas where we link to where there are existing guidelines– you’ve got the Web Accessibility Initiative, so we link obviously straight to that, so there are a number of areas where there are… but there’s an equal number of areas, such as biometrics, that aren’t. So we go into much more depth in areas where there aren’t any other existing guidelines.
IS ALL THIS FUNDED BY THE RNIB?
Organisations tend to get it free; [the funds] come either from the RNIB or some research grants which are normally from theEuropean Commission.
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