- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@sidar.org>
- Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 11:22:02 +0100
- To: IG <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Hi Folks, on Wednesday I attended the RNID's day-long session in Brussels on access to the information society for people who are Deaf. A mixture of politics (all the great and good of European Accessibility were present, from Erkki Liikaanen and Inma Placiencia to Jorgen Friis and Shadi Abou Zahra among others), community building, and technical discussion, it was overall a valuable day. Much of the discussion was about problems more basic than web accessibility, such as the lack of an emergency service that people can access (you can dial 000 or 911 or 17 or whatever the local equivalent is on a mobile phone, but you can't SMS it and there is no guarantee that SMS gets delivered anyway). There was also an encouragingly strong thread of discussion about the need to ensure that standard, mainstream technology development is used, rather than being locked into outdated specialised systems as is the case with text phones (which were developed in the 20s as a replacement for telegraphy, adopted in the 60's when businesses started to move beyond them and therefore give them away, and use a raft of different standards making Europe a series of little islands that can't call each other). Captioning got a run, (I'll leave it to the experts, but there were no great surprises) as did the need for sign-language interpretation, particularly where the content was moderately complex and the captioning risked losing the many relatively poor readers among the deaf community. And one area that got people very excited was the lack of a suitable chat framework. In general they are line by line, rather than being character-by-character interactive as text phones are. I am sure blind users appreciate that fact, because with a screen reader the alternative would be a nightmare. Deaf users, on the other hand, find them enormously frustrating - particularly when translated to the mobile world. Normally small isolated communities get offered only the most well-known, most mainstream technology, so the new MSN, ICQ, Yahoo chat systems are all that many poeple have seen, and they compare unfavourably to text phones. The older, widespread and robust Unix "talk" is in fact what they are looking for, but without a champion it seems that the concern went into making chat accessible for the blind with no particular consideration of what Deaf people actually do. Well, where accessibility entered into the picture at all, anyway. GSM came in for a lot of harsh treatment - much as it has enabled people to have a whole lot more communication, through SMS, in something approximating an international standard (it's used in virtually every country except Japan, although it is not so common in North America which still has a mish-mash of competing mobile telephony platforms). Because there are many arbitrary barriers to using it - I cannot send SMS to france or finland from my australian phone, because the network providers block access, although there is no real technical reason. It used to be impossible to send messages between networks in Australia, but some behind-the-scenes discussion about whether that was discriminating against the Deaf began and the networks opened up shortly afterwards. And there is no guarantee that SMS messages get delivered anyway - like email it is a send-and-pray protocol, although non-delivery is rare enough that people forget it happens and get surprised by it. (Jorgen Friis is from ETSI, the European standards body that developed GSM, and from Denmark, a generally nice country :-) Anyway, such are my thoughts. Many thanks are due to RNID for the organisation of the event, to the participants, to an army of interpreters (3 sign languages plus lip-speaking) for facilitating side conversations, introductions, and answering my assorted questions about signing. Cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathieNevile Fundación Sidar charles@sidar.org http://www.sidar.org
Received on Saturday, 28 February 2004 05:24:17 UTC