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Our technology guru went out to find out if tech is actually helping the people who need it. |
Sameer Latey is a Chartered Accountant with an Export Oriented Unit in Thane. He is responsible for the purchases at the Thane and London offices. Impressive job description; especially if you consider that Samir cannot see at all. He lost his vision five years ago in an accident.
Mamta Chandiramani knows no loss. Born two and a half months premature, the incubator’s protective but oxygen rich environment caused detachment of her retinas. She knows no loss because she never knew what it meant to see. Mamta teaches computers to other vision-impaired individuals at Voice Vision. (Voice Vision has been imparting computer education to visually impaired people in Mumbai for six years.)
Nikita Vaid is a Bachelor in Management Studies from the Bombay University, the first student of her kind. She is vision-impaired from birth as well but that has not stopped her from doing her Bachelor’s in Management, a Master’s in Music and garnering various other accolades along the way.
It would have been easy for any of these three individuals to give up and refuse to join the mainstream. They didn’t quite see that as an option. Samir is grateful he finished his Accountancy qualification exams before the mishap but never felt sorry for himself. He got up and got on with his life. Mamta and Nikita never knew what they missed so, in a way, they had no barriers to overcome - simply their lives to live.
So how do Sameer, Mamta and Nikita interact with technology? Surprisingly freely and productively, it would appear, at least at first glance. An inspection of their common arsenal yields talking watches, talking calculators and, now, talking mobile phones and talking computers. While talking watches are common-place and talking calculators may not seem too novel we were intrigued by the software involved in facilitating their use of mobile phones and computers. All three use shareware versions of a package called Talx for their phones and JAWS (Job Access With Speed) for their computers. An example of assistive technology, Talx is a software for Symbian OS phones that reads out menus, messages and even the letter corresponding to the key being pressed. JAWS is a screen reader developed by Freedom Scientific (http://www.freedomscientific.com).
What it does is read out the contents of the screen, be it menus, dialog boxes, button or text in windows. Without sight the mouse and the monitor are useless to our terrific trio. JAWS, consequently, is controlled completely by the keyboard. Adjustments for speed, volume, detail of punctuation read out and even the voice are possible. People adjusted to the system can achieve extremely high levels of productivity. Our protagonists listen to the text being read out at completely unintelligible speeds. Using nothing other than this piece of software they are able to do almost anything that any sighted person could do at the computer. Editing text, chatting, surfing the Net and even programming are relatively uncomplicated using JAWS. JAWS is useless, however, when it comes to graphics and it is here that we begin to discover the roadblocks technology creates for people with disabilities.
Barring some significant exceptions the thought behind technology seems to be: Technology for technology’s sake. The purpose of technology is to assist and elevate; to enable and enhance. In a world of patents and copyrights, however, the race for the technological edge has resulted in technology forcing users to wrap themselves around it rather than the other way around. Little thought is paid to usability and inclusiveness.
Sameer has some insights to share with us. Consider something as simple as opening an e-mail account or leaving a comment on a blog. To prevent bogus accounts and spam most services include some form of word verification at some stage of the process. These "words" are image files to prevent bots from reading them. While it works well at shooing away bots it also prevents screen readers like JAWS from reading them. Or consider opening a bank account. Most banks view vision-impaired as susceptible to being duped and resist giving them accounts. Who can blame them? Vision impaired people cannot even fill out cheques. In today’s world you would be forgiven for thinking that writing cheques is a skill that we don’t need what with ATMs springing up at every neighbourhood corner. What you probably don’t realise that only the smallest number of ATMs in the country are speech-enabled allowing them to be used by the vision-impaired. They have no choice but to withdraw cash and pay by cheques - activities which are not easy for them to manage.
The picture is not completely dismal, though. As awareness about these disabilities spreads more and more service providers are waking up to the potential of this section of society changes are being introduced. Mail service hosts like Yahoo! and Google give vision-impaired people the option of downloading audio clips that read out the letters to be entered. Talking ATMs are beginning to make an appearance around the city. Support groups like Access India, National Association for the Blind and their members provide each other with resources such as cheque templates for various banks that allow users to enter information in tab-delimited fields and print these cheques on any printer.
There is a lot of technology out there to help people with visual disabilities. Consider the Braille Phone which allows the vision-impaired to send and receive Braille text messages. Those little bumps you often see on some keys on the keyboard? Just indicators so that the vision-impaired can get their bearing on the keyboard. OCR software is a boon for those with visual disabilities. Converting printed or hand-written pages to text in the electronic format allows them to access it using screen readers like JAWS, HAL or Windows-eyes.
The problem is not with technology. Technology is just a tool. The problem is the way we view technology. When technology becomes more important than design usability suffers often creating bigger barriers than it overcomes. Consider the design of modern web pages. Techniques like CSS and tables let us control the presentation of the pages very precisely. Where, then, is the need to present text as images just to control the formatting? Even at Hafta we have made that mistake (since corrected) where our logo at the top of our screen and the menu on the left are graphic with no textual descriptions to them. We love technology but we recognise that technology is not the cure-all or end-all. It is merely a servant that exists to assist its masters - the users.
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