So the talks about uh disability and technology broadly,
but specifically as the title says about cloud computing,
which is really what I'm working on at NIDRR,
I'll be telling you more about that, but
sort of by way of background and this is something
that you may all have thought about or you may
not have. But the increasing ubiquity of computational representations,
things we usually talk about as machine readable
representations. This has huge benefits, at least in
principle and often in practice for people with disabilities.
And the reason is that when you have something in
computational form then you have enormous flexibility for putting it
out in different ways. And a hugely important example
that's by now I hope familiar to everybody just text
the speech but you may not think about what this
really means. I considered something not well, it
could include reading this, but suppose you just need
to read the newspaper. I mean, not long
ago, if you were blind forget about it. Now,
it's trivial because newspapers are available online and you
can get them and you can get them read to you.
So this is an example of the capability that
technology now affords. But the fact is that while
in theory we have this enormous flexibility in practice,
it can be difficult for people to access it.
So there's kind of an emergent challenge here that that
that people are are working on to do two related
things. So one is to make it easier than
it is now for an individual who wants or needs
stuff to be presented in a particular way to actually
get it presented that way, without having to fuss
around too much. But also, extremely important is
to make it easier for other people to do whatever
they have to do to actually create contact content or
services that can be accessed flexibly. So these are
sort of paired challenges. And there's a big project
internationally that's addressing those challenges and it's called the Global
Public Inclusive Infrastructure Initiative. And there are many,
many, many people around the world involved in this,
but but the person who's really the leader of
the effort is a wonderful person named Gregg Vanderheiden of
the University of Wisconsin. And I know many of
you will know who Greg is and will know what
a dynamic person he is. He's someone who's been
working in the assistive technology and inclusive technology world and
it's been an innovator over over many years and he's
really spearheading this international effort. So to kind of
give you an idea quickly of what this is all
about. If the media will cooperate here, and
if I can operate my mouse appropriately, I can't
actually see it on my screen. I want to
show you part of a video that expresses the vision
here. Yes, whoops, sorry, bug,
because I tried this out ahead of time. It's
not, I have to queue it back again at the beginning.
Sorry about forgetting that. No, that's not
what I want, is it? That's beyond the fringe
for those who recognize it. And what became of
my glasses? Somehow I've managed to yeah I know which
what pocket could I put it into? I don't usually
do. Oh there we go. Oh I know,
I didn't want it to click against the microphone which
sometimes happens. Okay. Alright so let's go back
here. Ah Actually tell you what, let's try
it a different way. We all use technology everyday
The person buying a dream and we're using it
to do more things all the time. Some of
the things we used to do face to face we
now do with automated systems. For most of us
those systems are okay most of the time and when
there are problems we can find a way to get
along. [Inaudible]
But those of us with disabilities often
run into situations where the technology doesn't work well enough
to meet our abilities. P [Inaudible]
In some cases we can use
assisted technology to bridge the gap. Assistant technology or
AT can provide text for speech, video
checking the captions, turn text into speech the weather
today will be mostly sign or make words on a
screen easier to read whatever the user needs to accomplish
a task. Unfortunately we don't all have the assistant
technology we need and we can always take it with
us to use anywhere we want. Imagine if you
could pick up any device anywhere and it would automatically
adapt to you person picks up device and it changes
size. Imagine someone who is usually confused by technology
now, every computer looks like their personal device,
simple with just the controls and features. They need
complicated computer screen changes to a simple version. Imagine
a student who has to use computers in different labs
and classrooms if all of them worked exactly as needed
. There's a way to offer accessibility solutions to more
people in more situations. We call it the global
public inclusive infrastructure or G P II. The G
P I I will use the clowning, the electronic
networks that power most of our information services and the
intelligence and electronic products themselves. Right now we use
the cloud to store information and sort of file in
the file so that it's available from then on accessibility
developers will create tools for the toolbox that address those
needs accessibility software and flows into the genre. The
G P I I will store information about devices,
their uses and features device information. Then when a
user needs an accessibility feature, the G P I
I will say the right user profile and features check
the device and guide the device and using its own
features to meet the user's needs accessibility information. The
G P II will automatically apply the right tool to
whatever device the person is using wherever it is.
So the interface will work the right way the G
P II will be great for users. It will
support independence with enabling technology when you need it,
where you need it, how you need it.
There's no need to explain, negotiate or justify anything
. It just works. All of the information will
be kept private and secure. The traveler gets the
writing to face. Therefore change information kiosks and the
seat back is straight on. The G P II
will be great for society. It will offer wider
participation in education, employment, commerce and our communities
. Many people are in the schools offices and community
center. The G P II will provide developers with
the tools and parts. They need to develop a
team more easily and at lower cost developers can then
upload their products to the G P II marketplace quickly
making them available globally. The G. P.
I I will give mainstream technology companies and easy way
to match accessibility features to their products and services as
they're being designed. Product designers where professional services are
needed. The G. P. I. I
will give counselors, therapists and educators more options for
evaluation and management clients and therapists work together on the
the G. P. I. I will let
schools, libraries and other public locations serve everyone more
easily. Every user will get the interface. They're
already familiar with the weather. Today will be mostly
saying library computer shows no vision interfaces to different users
, employers will be able to accommodate new employees.
They can promote and relocate employees without having to reconfigure
or reinstall a lot of technology, employee, new
workstation manufacturers, the accessible interface, the G P
I I will offer a new way of providing accessibility
, when, where and how it's needed. We're
just getting started building it gpr construction site. We'll
be working closely with consumer advocates, 80 and mainstream
technology companies and other stakeholders to make sure it meets
their needs. The G. P. I needs
that all policymakers and leaders Canada with policy. We
hope that you find the G P II as exciting
as we do and spread the word. Now.
We want to hear your ideas about the G P
II, what it means to you and how we
can work together its findings of people discussing the GpR
, the GpR. I'll give you the follow up
stuff and we do want your ideas but not right
at this moment. So let's see if I can
navigate back to the power point. It's like I
can so there's a lot there and we can talk
about a lot of it. But I want to
focus on one big piece of what's going on there
, which is really the web and zero in on
how this projects into the web to set up for
some technical discussion in a second, just to make
sure everybody's on the same page with respect to some
of the basic concepts here. So what happens here
is that an individual works out what their needs and
preferences are for how they want information presented and how
they want to interact with it. That preference specification
is stored in the cloud, meaning available online from
anywhere They use a browser. The browser allows them
to authenticate the browser automatically accesses the preference information and
uses that to customize the presentation of anything they view
on the web. And there's there's a key point
, I want to clarify about this where it says
modified browser. The point here is not that a
person with a disability gets some special browser. The
idea is that everybody's browser will do this and that's
not completely pie in the sky. So, as
I'll be mentioning, when you give you some status
, there's a significant implementation effort on this and both
Microsoft and Mozilla are participants in that with a view
to making ie and Firefox play this game. And
the further view is that showing the way with those
browsers that it will become something that if you have
a browser, you you need to have it do
this. And if you think about it, that's
really important to the vision. So the idea here
is not that as a person with disabilities, you
have to make sure that some particular software is installed
, which indeed is part of the problem today,
rather than ocean is anywhere you go, if you're
using a browser, it's going to have the capabilities
that we're talking about here, namely to auto configure
whatever content or services you're dealing with on the web
. So we kind of pause there actually tell you
what, well as usual you're kind of dispersed here
, but if you're close enough to talk to somebody
, take a minute to sort of talk about the
video and this and see if it makes sense or
not. So take a minute or two do that
. If you haven't met the person next to you
, take an opportunity to do that too, and
I'll give you a minute or two to do that
. Alright, stop thinking of communicating. So any
questions that surface, does the outline of this make
sense? Okay, great. So what's the status
of it? So, uh Greg in particular began
working with lots of other people, has had a
lot of success in promoting this idea around the world
, and in particular, he's been successful in brussels
. So going back, gosh, a couple of
years maybe now, he got the european commission very
interested in this idea and they incorporated this into one
of their big research frameworks and issued a call for
proposals and in fact an implementation project launched more than
a year ago now, You know, not gigantic
, but pretty big. an$11 million dollar effort
over. I can't remember if it's three or four
years, a good deal of additional international participation,
notably from Canada and I'll say quite a bit more
about that and where that comes in and also as
I'll describe and what I'm really doing at night er
is helping them develop an initiative on cloud computing and
while there's some other aspects of that that I'll mention
later, the focus of it really is pushing this
G P I vision and I'll tell you a little
bit more about what we're doing on that, I
want to mention another thing that's that's happening just recently
, that's of interest in itself, but also forms
part of it looks like the emerging implementation effort here
, so I don't know actually, I'm curious has
anybody heard of End stick the National strategy for trusted
identities in cyberspace? Actually, nobody, I'll come
back to this at the end. This is something
that some of you may want mel may well want
to get involved in. This is a public private
partnership, it's a White House initiative originally, but
there's now a public, private, substantial public private
partnership working on really sort of redesigning the infrastructure,
we all used to authenticate online. You know,
people have known for years that what we're doing is
really not very good that, you know, you're
constantly having to re authenticate and use multiple passwords,
which is a bad idea from various points of view
and so on. So there's a big effort to
rethink that there are number of pilot projects associated with
this effort and I'm delighted that one of these projects
is saying okay, we'll take on this G P
. I thing that is the infrastructure aspects of it
delivering these preference attributes and in particular doing that in
a way that addresses the obvious security and privacy uh
issues. So it was mentioned in the video again
, you may not have had occasion to think about
this, but if you're a person with a disability
it's not anybody else's business, what particular accommodations you
need and in some cases it could be really sensitive
information for you. And so it's really important that
using this system doesn't mean that all this stuff kind
of leaks out into the world. And so there's
a convergence between what end stick is trying to do
and what GOP needs to do. And there's a
again, not a huge but there is an implementation
effort ramping up right now to address that, which
is I think very cool technical status. There are
some demos that are available. All this stuff incidentally
is uh the all the implementation work that's being done
. Design and implementation work is all in the open
. These are basically community source style projects that are
going on so many of you are interested in this
stuff and I hope many of you will be,
it's it's easy to get involved in it at any
level of technical depth. But anyway, where it
is is that there's some demos now available on this
idea of reconfiguring user interfaces to respond to user preferences
. And I'll be saying more in a bit about
technically what's involved there in actually making that work.
So an important piece of this that I mentioned in
the run up and was also mentioned, although not
that much in the video, is that obviously the
point of all this is what happens on the user
side of it. But for that really to work
, it has to be the case that the people
who produce content and services can easily do that in
a way that works with this with this structure.
So there are a few things that G. P
. I. Is doing on this side part of
it and that's actually the point I'm giving there at
the top. It really has to do not so
much with the technical aspects as the business aspects and
I can use an example that maybe will resonate for
for some of you. Uh we've we've talked with
people in higher education, disability services organizations and one
of the things we've learned is that people who provide
those services who are always under funded and really thinly
stretched have to waste a huge amount of their time
. Configuring licenses for assistive technology software and the reason
it's a waste is that every vendor is doing it
in a different way. They've all got, I
don't know, I'll try to live with the reverb
here. Uh They've all got their own ideas about
how you should arrange it so that you can have
a certain number of students using a product at a
time, you know, at different locations around campus
. And so if you're in that business, you
spend a lot of your time keeping licenses up to
date, configuring them again, each vendor working things
differently. It's really a huge mess. So one
of the part of the vision here is that there
won't be any compulsion involved here, but it will
be open to any vendor to participate in a kind
of a standard scheme where the subscription information is kept
as part of people's online information. And so when
somebody sits down to use something, it'll be obvious
whether they're entitled to use it or not. And
so it ought to be managed in a in a
simple way and there are number of emergent benefits there
. So one of the things that's really an issue
for again, those same people in higher ed providing
system technology services is, you know, they equipped
a student with appropriate supports and then the student graduates
. Okay, well they'd like to be able to
continue doing whatever it is they've been doing. But
in general, that's hard to arrange. And with
this scheme it's not going to be hard to arrange
because all that has to happen is people make transitions
among settings is it's a, you know, different
people are writing the checks more or less, the
basic access can still be maintained and all the personalization
. A lot of these technologies used, all of
that just gets carried on seamlessly. And so everything
everything can work better. So that's one aspect of
it. But what I want to focus on more
is well, what about actually creating the stuff that
works with the infrastructure that's got to be made easier
than it is now. And a key part of
that has to do with software architecture. And here
I'll reveal that part of my agenda for this talk
is to get computer scientists interested in this work and
not just interested in it in terms of its objectives
which are I hope appealing to everybody, but to
recognize that there are some really interesting, important general
and deep challenges in making this stuff work. And
one of those areas is in the area of software
architecture so broadly you could say that one of the
long running issues in computer sciences that everything is possible
and nothing is easy but everything possible often deludes people
into taking on overly ambitious projects and so on.
And and the reason that nothing is easy part comes
in that we all know that the technology as we
actually work with it, is really fiddly error prone
, obsessed with trivial details and and everything else.
And so it's easy to say well in principle,
this user interface could work in any of these ways
and in principle, that's true. But getting it
so that it can really work in those ways in
a manageable way is a deep problem, but there's
good work being done on it and I want to
share a little bit of that with you in the
hope that maybe some of you will want to get
involved in this. So this work is going on
at a place that perhaps most of you haven't heard
of, although it's a really interesting institution located University
in Toronto. Okay, it stands for Ontario College
of Art and Design. This is an institution that's
origins was, as the name suggests as a College
of Art Design, but it was promoted actually a
long time ago to university status, but one of
the initiatives that Okada is taking on is developing a
a program and inclusive design. And the leader of
this is a wonderful person shown there, you to
Trevor on us. UDA is much like Greg for
those of you that know Greg and don't know UDA
, another visionary, a person who's extremely energetic,
tireless one could say. And in a genius that
putting together effective multinational collaborative projects on a large scale
and you can see some of the partners that are
involved in some of these things. So there's a
family of projects, All this stuff is, you
know, fully available to you on the web if
you've got a fluid project dot org, I guess
I left the U R l off of here,
you can you can read all about it. So
in the context of the fluid project, which is
one of the contributing projects to the overall G.
P. Ii. Implementation work around the world.
The software architecture work in particular is is being done
there. So uh some high level stuff about the
aims of of fluid and I think you'll see how
this fits into the sort of mosaic of objectives for
uh for G. P. Ii. The state
of play today. Is that the frequency with which
people who are creating stuff for the web actually do
it in a way that it's accessible inclusively usable by
people. That rate is shamefully low even in situations
where there's in principle legal compulsion. So people are
not required to do it even when they're required to
do it. They don't they don't do it very
well or very often. Uh the the one of
the high level ambitions of the fluid project is to
get it so that it's easier to do it right
than it is to do it any other way probably
speaking, which would be great and they are making
some progress on it. Again, there's there's the
U. R. L. It's on good habits
so on. So drilling in a little bit.
So suppose we want to have presentation of information that's
conditioned by what somebody's needs and preferences are the software
architecture work is being done by a group headed by
these guys on trade and Colin who are the lead
architects for the the fluid project and interesting people deep
thinkers which is good because it's it's it's it's needed
. So, again, pushing down a little bit
in the technology from the higher level motivations. You
know, we all know this traditional software is really
hard to work with and that's because traditional software is
code and you might think, well, that's by
definition what software as well, not necessarily, but
code is a really viscous difficult to modify ah ah
medium. And unfortunately, we're in an environment where
for all kinds of reasons, not just responding to
individual needs and preferences, you know, stuff needs
to change. That's the software maintenance problem. And
and those of you that are in software engineering at
all know that maintenance costs, you know, normally
dominate initial creation cost, people don't usually think that
, but or act on that, but but it's
really true. So, an example of this fits
into an illustration, I'll give you in a minute
, You know, the fairly recent emergence of HTML
five. So, if you're doing anything in the
web world, you know, suddenly there are new
resources, new ways of doing things that come along
and for your technology to to remain relevant. It
has to be able to respond to changes like that
. And if you're working with code, it's just
really hard to make it work that way. So
, the fluid architects have extended a concept that some
of you might know of, which is a design
pattern called inversion of control. So this is roughly
a way that you can get it so that you
can write code where what actually happens when you run
that code depends on stuff that's determined later, uh
based on other other considerations and and what the fluid
folks have have done is really two things. So
one is they've extended the sort of factors that can
be taken into account in an IOS IOC system,
in selecting what's actually going to happen and getting it
so that you can respond to things like user preferences
and also other factors as I mentioned. But another
key thing is they're doing this not just with code
but actually with the clarity of specifications, so that
the stuff that you're working with isn't that fiddly viscous
code kind of stuff, but stuff that's more modular
and more easily worked with the context that is extended
. IOC can work with includes not only information that
might be placed on a web page, if we
think about that kind of settings were on a web
page, that's going to look differently at different times
. So one way you can do that is to
get it so that some process that okay, some
process that set to user's preferences can actually inject a
little bit of information that causes the web page to
look differently and I'll give you an example of that
in a second. But another example that may help
you to see what's really at stake here and this
is something that's working now, all of this is
working to some extent, but something a little more
mature. So consider the problem of writing a web
page where one of the things that has to happen
in whatever it is that you're doing is that somebody
needs to upload a file. Well, there are
a lot of ways that a web page can allow
you to upload things and some of them are better
than others, but which of them are possible depending
on the level of technology that you're working with.
So starting at the bottom of my list there,
if you if the person is using a clunky old
browser, the only choice, maybe plain old html
and what it allows you to do, but gee
maybe the person has flash and unless you think Flash
generally is a terrible idea, you might say,
well maybe it's a little better if you give them
a file upload, er, that makes use of
flash, but then better would be gosh, if
they've got html capabilities. Html five capabilities. Html
five has a better way of doing file uploading.
So one of the effects of this technology is that
when you're writing your web application, you just say
at this point I want to do a file upload
and the system determines which form a file upload,
the person is actually going to get based on what
their platform actually permits furthermore. Okay, because this
is declarative, you can actually extend this without modifying
any of the code that's involved. So what you
said on the page to say that you wanted to
do a file upload doesn't have to be modified at
all. And there can be new and better future
ways of doing file uploads and as those become available
, those can be injected into the system in such
a way that that application that was written before those
things were even thought of now makes use of them
without any code modification. So I'm not going to
inflict the most boring demo ever on you partly because
I haven't done it for a while. I don't
even know if I've got the software to do it
, but I'm gonna I'm gonna give you the effect
of the boring demo uh and some of you may
want to tune this out, feel free to do
so but suppose that somebody wants to view this web
page, that's all of course just made up text
there just to sort of illustrate a point. But
that's the page the way it might look like if
you just kind of look at it raw. Well
for some people it's going to be better if when
they look at that page they see that and typically
they'll see that which is called the table of contents
and then all that other stuff we saw before,
it's just below the fold their, you know,
why might somebody be interested in that? Well there
are a lot of people who for various reasons visual
or cognitive find it difficult to read text. So
they may be able to do it, but only
with difficulty. It doesn't work for them to scan
a whole lot of material to see whether they're interested
in it. So some of these one person with
aphasia that I worked with struggled to tell me because
speaking wasn't difficult. When I was sitting with her
in a web session, she was saying I have
to read everything. So could not skim she had
to plow her way through everything. Well, for
such a person having a breakdown that says in brief
, here's the stuff that's on this page that can
make a huge difference because there's a lot less reading
required to determine. For example. Gosh, I
don't care about any of this or Oh, I
was really hoping I was really looking for something about
Grouse and here it is. Okay, so that's
some of the motivation why somebody might want these views
. Well, how could you make this work?
How could you get it so that somebody could specify
a preference that they want to see a table of
contents versus not Again, this is the part you
may want to squint. Some of you might want
to look away through this. Well, okay,
not quite yet. So this is just saying we're
going to do this with the clarity of specification.
So what you're going to see here is javascript,
but for those of you that know about this.
It's actually not javascript generally, but it's what's called
Jason, javascript object notation, which is really a
declarative way of putting stuff in and hastened to say
here that nobody is asserting that what you're looking at
here is ultimately what people are going to see when
they're offering this stuff. So this is just making
a technical point for those of you who care about
it. To sort of show how to clarity,
specifications can be used to do this. A real
system like this has to have a better way of
presenting these declarative specifications and allowing people to edit them
. But this is what they what they look like
today. So that stuff may look like code,
but it isn't. It's actually think of this sort
of object literal so that's declared of information and I'll
take you through a little bit for those who care
how this how this actually works. So what we've
got there, that that may be toc thing that's
a declared a specification that says that's something that's basically
going to turn into a table of contents or not
. Okay, so that's existed. That's on the
page and let's see what else do we have here
. Okay, let me see if I can unpack
that thing for you. Okay. These are what
are called demands blocks, maybe I'll come back to
those. That's another part of the clarity specification.
But I think this picture maybe will be a little
bit more informative. So this is sort of a
gloss on what these demands blocks look like. So
we'll just look at the top one there. So
what this is saying to clarity of is that if
somebody is interested in that maybe the table of contents
thing that could appear on a page if that appears
on a page, If in the context in which
it appears there's this thing called Yes. Toc that
might be injected for example by a user preference,
then the maybe TOC components is going to get replaced
by a declared a specification that gives them the table
of contents. Okay. If on the other hand
, uh the thing appears in the context in which
there's this tag that says no table of contents then
the table of the maybe table of contents things gets
replaced by an empty component. Okay, so the
reason this is the world's most boring demo is this
making heavy weather of a simple point. But the
higher level point is with the clarity specifications, you
can have an element that you put into the web
page which is going to appear in different ways.
Radically different ways in this case. Either it's nothing
or is a table of contents based on information extracted
from ah a user preference set. Okay, let
me start pause. I won't make you talk with
one another about this, but anybody have any questions
about what you're seeing here? Yeah. Whether with
bunk name and the fluid table contents and is that
defined by fluid or is that a user to our
programming defined? Okay, so sort of a little
of both. The reason all these things are qualified
with fluid, is that one of the things and
it's actually important for certain practical reasons. All the
fluid work is very name space conscious for people that
know about that. And the reason is that there
are a million web frameworks out there like J query
and all these different things that people need to be
able to use. And one of the things that
some of you who do this stuff may have run
into is that it's not uncommon to find clashes.
And that's because all too often people are developing these
frameworks think that they have the only framework you're ever
going to care about and the fluid people know that
that's emphatically not true. So they're very careful about
the way names are used to manage those kinds of
name clashes. But the what's in those same spaces
is extensible by you. So, so the vision
is that as this thing sort of becomes more real
, there'll be a rich set of these components that
are available for anybody to use, but it will
also be possible. They will constantly be new ones
getting added. So it's a bit of both.
So I think this won't be any surprise to you
at this point. So it's just kind of explaining
what I just went through. So uh what's uh
uh Oh no, sorry, this is yeah,
that's right. That's that's what I already explained.
So what all this machinery ends up is that this
thing that when the page was specified and said,
well this is maybe a table of contents that gets
replaced either by a table of contents or by nothing
depending on what the user actually wants. So,
I already made one of these points at least,
But again, for those of you that might be
susceptible being drawn into this a few things about it
. So, so I already made the first point
there, but another one is also important. So
in the web world for excellent reasons, design,
you know, what things look like is really important
. And again, one of the ways that well
intentioned efforts to reform web technology founder is that they
don't recognize that. And so you might have certain
nice widgets, maybe even widgets that have desirable accessibility
properties, but if you want to use them the
appearance of your web pages seriously constrained. Okay.
And that's not gonna work because people who create pages
care a lot about what they, what they look
like. So another thing that the fluid folks work
really hard at is is mark up agnosticism. So
getting it so that as much as possible. Now
there are some cases where this doesn't end up being
true, but as much as possible, what your
page looks like is still up to you. So
an example would be what does that table of contents
look like? Well you can mark that up broadly
anyway, you wanted to and the underlying machinery would
still work and that's designed to make it so that
people who care about what things look like really can
, you can do it and and there's a lot
of stuff that's been done to make that happen,
including this use of kind of indirection. So the
notion is to get it so that uh it's,
it's gonna be rare even if you haven't already constructed
page with a lot of markup, they're really working
hard to get it so that you can interface the
fluid stuff to your markup, you don't have to
change your markup to fit. So it's funny come
out of that technology dive to some of the points
that were made in the video and sort of reinforce
those things. So one of the things we're doing
at night right now is some technology visioning, So
, you know, in managing a research program,
a certain amount of it is incremental. So what
are people doing now and what's the next reasonable thing
for them to do and all of that. But
one of the things we're trying to do is to
not not do that, but augment it with really
trying to step ahead in time and imagine what really
can happen that can really make a difference. And
for people with disabilities in particular, that's the focus
of the of the agency and if we do that
, it's really striking how many positive changes in people's
lives all ride on the kind of infrastructure that we're
talking about here. And again, I think the
video did a good job of that, but actually
to introduce some things which weren't actually pointed to specifically
, but some of you might have thought about,
so, you know, a huge problem for anybody
in our society nowadays is getting employed and for people
with disabilities, that's an even huger problem, as
many of you will know, but maybe not all
of you. So, the employment rate for people
with disabilities is one, I just wanted to say
nowadays more dismal than it is for people generally.
So, it's it's a huge issue. Well,
if you think about where should the opportunities be into
some extent? They're already there, you can say
well, broadly online economic activity going back to that
very first point, people with disabilities can be well
supported when they're working in an environment in which what
they're dealing with is computational representations and online uh economic
activity has that character to it. So, actually
, one of the ideas that you to Trevor Donna's
is cooking up, which is just a subset of
this notion of opportunity in the online spaces, maybe
some of you have heard the term, uh I
think it's called to party market or sometimes to face
market. So traditional markets, information flows are very
asymmetric. So people make stuff and they advertise it
and consumers learn about it and they buy it.
In traditional markets, consumers don't have good ways of
conveying what they want or need other than by buying
things or not. But in two sided markets,
the information flows are more symmetric. So it's possible
in a two sided market for somebody to say,
well, I wish somebody would make this is that
it would really be good. And the point is
that people are in a position to make things can
respond to those signals. So part of what his
vision of the suicide ID market is, people with
disabilities can put information out about what they would like
to have and other people with disabilities, anybody else
for that matter. But in particular, people with
disabilities can themselves respond to that. So, another
sort of background issue here is pushing not only in
the ways we've talked about here, but in other
ways to make it possible for people with disabilities and
indeed people generally to make it more possible for them
for everybody to create the technology they need. But
notice that a side effect of that is it creates
economic opportunity for people with disabilities. And indeed,
it creates economic opportunities that people with disabilities are uniquely
qualified to supply. So this is potentially a transformative
kind of thing online education. So anybody who's who's
not asleep knows that we're seeing another round of escalating
interest and online education. So this is either an
opportunity or a disaster for people with disabilities. And
we're hoping of course it's going to be an opportunity
that that as the infrastructure develops around massively open online
courses, including the surrounding social software that's extremely critical
in all of that as that infrastructure develops, if
we can make sure that it develops inclusively, this
is going to be huge. Okay, so there
are lots of reasons why I read does exist now
is really a struggle for a lot of people with
disabilities. I mean, not at least, I
mean, people have really serious mobility challenges. It
can be very hard for them to access education the
way it's normally made available well for online education,
those challenges are are are certainly different. So there's
a huge opportunity there. Community participation, the way
our society conducts itself today, people with disabilities are
frequently excluded from things and you know, probably many
of us could tell really unfortunate stories about, about
all of that. It can be really hard.
Actually, starting again with mobility issues with mobility is
a challenge. Much of community participation. The way
society is organized today is really dependent on mobility,
going places physically to to interact. But again,
we can see that as social participation shifts or opens
up in the online space. This also offers really
important benefits potentially for uh people with disabilities and more
generally wrapping up a lot of these stuff increased independence
, which was one of the huge values here,
really making it possible for people to make their own
choices. And you can see that I hope really
built into the fabric of the G P II.
That it should be up to people to be able
to specify how they want and need things to be
presented by them and not have all the time to
just kind of adapt to what people are prepared to
to give them. But again, apart from just
reviewing those advantages, I just want to note that
making the online infrastructure that everybody uses inclusive is a
very high sex issue for this or a matter in
realizing these kinds of visions. Mm hmm. And
that's why neither is working on this cloud initiative.
And indeed, that's why, as I've already said
, that's why I'm I'm uh, working there.
So a little bit of background, I think maybe
I mentioned this, but but if I didn't mention
again, because it's important. So, as a
funding agency, neither has supported Gregg Vanderheiden in developing
the ideas that we're talking about here, so neither
can can claim a significant role in the idea is
that we're that we're discussing here. And briefly,
it looked as if there would be a major federal
investment in promoting this idea. So, I mentioned
that There's$1 million,$11 million Europe. There
isn't an$11 million us, but it looked briefly
as if they would be even a substantially bigger one
. So there was an administration request for a$10
million$50 million dollar investment over about five years.
But it won't surprise anybody who's paying attention that that
didn't happen. Okay. That where, you know
, heaven knows the Europeans have budget woes, but
nevertheless, somehow they're able to get it together to
do stuff and we're having this is obvious in our
society, a bigger problem coping with our economic problems
. Um so but anyway, briefly it was thought
that there would be a major initiative and uh that
brought the night our leadership to a kind of a
fork in the road because although they've been supporting this
work through Greg neither historically is an agency that has
focused mainly on social science research and biomedical research.
They haven't had anybody on staff who's focused as computing
. But looking at this in the way that I
was just suggesting a minute ago and saying gee this
is really strategic work, we can't not promote this
. They came to feel well, extra appropriation or
not, this is something we've got to do.
So they asked me to come in to develop an
initiative there and it looks as if going forward,
although my role probably isn't going to continue indefinitely.
I think the idea really has taken root and neither
leadership is really committed to the idea that they want
to make a long term investment in, in computer
science research. And again, that's part of why
I'm here. And when I'm talking to you,
I'm hoping that some of you will see this as
an opportunity and we'll talk a little bit more about
what that what that might mean. Anyway, what
does this initiative consist of? Well, because we
didn't get the extra money, Leadership was able to
free up some money from their fairly limited, realistically
ongoing budget. But my charge was developed leverage.
And so I've worked with lots of people around Washington
, which has been extremely educational for me. And
so we have a bunch of A bunch of projects
and if anybody's interested, I could tell you more
about what those are. But just to mention one
we have a joint project with nest, it's mostly
in this project, but we're supplementing them. It's
on inclusive voting. So today voting for people with
disabilities is pretty much of a train wreck voting generally
isn't so great. But the way voting is organized
in this country, the poll workers are sometimes literally
, and, and even if not literally, you
know, sort of virtually amateurs. So elections don't
happen all that often and voting by people with disabilities
doesn't happen all that often. And so the likelihood
that you encounter somebody who knows how to make that
work. It's actually not all that great. So
I was talking with somebody the other day who's who's
got a pretty low vision and he described that they
had set up a special place for people with low
vision to vote, which was which was positioned in
a windowless room with fluorescent lighting on the ceiling behind
you as you leaned over the ballot paper and tried
to read it. Not happening. So what's been
recognized really through the obvious huge explosion in early voting
and absentee voting, Lots of people aren't even going
to the polls. So they're creating their ballots outside
, they're marking their ballots outside the sort of controlled
environment and then they're casting them by a separate process
. And what this is making people realize is that
you can productively separate the process of casting and counting
ballots from the process of preparing them or marking them
. And the reason that's important is that in the
monolithic voting systems of today where that's all rolled up
together, the extreme security concerns that are necessary for
the casting and counting part, those have infected the
whole thing. So that voting software is basically locked
down. So no matter how egregious the user interface
problems are, there's basically no way to change anything
, There's no workable way to change it. So
at the nice people and others working in the field
of recognizes, we can productively separate these things.
We can have a much more relaxed and flexible approach
to ballot marking, We can make that much more
inclusive. So some of you might now share on
Laskowski at at Nice who who works on a mission
in support of the Election Advisory Commission, they're developing
a prototype for a more inclusive voting system and we're
supplementing them so that they can evaluate this emerging G
. P. I. Framework as a part of
that so that if a person is already specified his
or her needs or preferences for how they want to
interact with stuff they can just use that instead of
having anybody to have to go through and tinker with
the voting system make that that happened. We also
have a contract out for a feasibility study on an
aspect of this landscape that for no particular reason the
european and Canadian work hasn't hasn't yet covered. And
that is providing people with assistance in specifying what their
needs and preferences are. So for some of this
stuff it's kind of obvious and or you know nothing
deep going on. So something like font size.
You know, people have different font size preferences but
it's not rocket science to work out what font size
might work. But there are other areas where it
is rocket science. So one is that a lot
of people are literally unaware that their accessibility settings of
the way your keyboard works and because they're not even
aware there are any settings they don't have any idea
what settings might work for them. Most people,
it's irrelevant. But if you have certain kinds of
motor issues, it's very highly relevant. There's a
case where there has been research done showing that you
can give somebody a test passage to type. You
can measure, you can basically collect all the signals
, timing and everything from there, typing. You
can munge that stuff and you can come back and
say these look like they'd be good settings for you
. What we funded is a contract to review all
that literature and fold it into a design for a
tool or tools that would provide people with appropriate support
, whether automated or not for actually setting up those
needs and preference specifications. Another thing, and this
is directed at those of you that are in the
research business. So, obviously, as I've said
, nighter funds things. But one of the ways
that's a little bit peculiar about the way Neider works
is that they don't just issue requests for proposals when
they're thinking about issuing one, they have to put
it out for comment. And this is nice because
it provides a kind of an early warning about what's
likely to happen. It's not certain to happen because
the point of the public comment is that if everybody
said, boy, this proposed RFP is the stupidest
thing ever, you know, it would be a
huge waste of taxpayer money conceivably it might not happen
. But of course it doesn't happen very often.
So it's an early warning kind of thing. And
uh so there's there's something out on inclusive cloud and
web computing, very much the stuff we're talking about
that's out there for comment right now and maybe you
could have a look at that and of course comments
would be welcome. But also some of you might
think about applying to that. And the top level
thing is I've been saying how many times here night
is recognizing the increasingly crucial role of computer science and
what they do or to put it another way,
the increasingly crucial role of computer science in supporting increased
independence for people with disabilities. So as an agency
, we're keenly interested in bringing more computer sciences to
the table. But we're recognizing it's not gonna work
very often. Not never, but it's not gonna
work very often for somebody who's just a computer scientist
to sort of come and say, well I know
how to do all this stuff, you know,
just just give me the money could happen, but
much more likely that something productive will happen. If
somebody who's just a computer scientist says, jesus stuff
sounds interesting, I'll get in touch with other people
who are already doing some work in this area.
And so the effect will be that that the people
working on these opportunities will will increase and their technical
competence. That is the technical capabilities of the grantee
pole pool will increase as new people, perhaps some
of you come into it along with creativity, new
ideas and all those other good good things. So
briefly, ah there's more so still under the cloud
heading. So if we look at what are the
opportunities being created by the emergence of the, of
the cloud? So there's some other things which are
not really cloud based accessibility important though that is.
But other things, so many of, you know
, big data with capital letters is a huge buzz
phrase, but like some buzz phrases, it seems
as if there's substance behind this. So a little
bit about how disability services are provided in this country
. So under our federal system, We don't really
have federal programs in the sense that they play out
for citizens in a uniform way across the 50 states
instead, what typically happens is that money gets given
to the states by the federal government and there are
certain parameters established for that. But within those parameters
or constraints, the states are free to do things
in different ways. And there are many illustrations of
this. The effect is if you look at these
quote federal programs unquote and you look at the data
that are being collected about these things. You've got-related
data being collected in the 50 states, but in
somewhat different ways. So, okay, but actually
, where does the cloud come into this? Well
, until recently, the data being collected in these
programs. So an example would be special education.
So, some of, you know, there are
federal mandates that require school districts and schools to provide
certain kinds of supports for students who need them.
There's something called individual education plan that people have to
maintain. But the details of a lot of that
are left kind of flexible. But anyway, until
recently all that stuff was just in manila folders.
So whatever you thought the value of the data in
those folders might have been, you know, forget
about doing anything with it. But now, for
obvious reasons it's all being collected in digital online form
. And so in principle it's available. But now
you run into further levels of difficulty including what I
was introducing a moment ago that in this case actually
different school districts, they're collecting related data, but
in different ways. So until recently forget it.
But now there are tools sometimes called data wrangling tools
and maybe some of you work on these things which
make it easier to actually deal with things like that
and to work through large volumes of data collected in
different but related ways and actually rationalize it so that
it can be looked at another technical challenge that progress
is being made on is dealing with free text information
. So a good deal of information that's kept when
disability related services are delivered in what are called clinical
notes. And these are just that they're notes.
I don't mean handwritten notes, although they may be
that in some cases, but let's say machine readable
notes. But notes nevertheless, again until recently,
forget it. But now there are text mining tools
that look as if they are able to look at
information like that and extract meaningful structured information from it
. So any of you who do that kind of
stuff and would be interested potentially in applying it in
this broad space of services with people with disabilities.
It looks like there's a big opportunity, there certainly
challenges, including ones around privacy and security. Again
, on this kind of stuff, but nevertheless,
an area with a lot of potential, the second
opportunity there maybe doesn't relate as obviously to sort of
big trends that are out there. If you're a
person with a disability, you spend a discouraging proportion
of your time in what we could call paper pushing
. It may be today. Digital paper pushing,
but it still has the underlying logic of paper pushing
. So you have to apply for services, you
have to establish eligibility services worse built into the legal
and policy structures. You can't do it once even
if you have what anybody from a common sense point
of view would say as a permanent disability, it's
not recognized in law and policy. You have to
re establish your eligibility over and over again. So
you're constantly submitting the same information furthermore, different agencies
that you have to interact with because there are many
programs that typically has to interact with, they all
want slightly different information. but there's a lot of
overlap there, so it's a huge issue and as
is perhaps apparent this burden falls in many cases on
people that are the last people you'd want to burden
with, that kind of stuff. But that's part
of the reality of the world of of service delivery
that we've provided today. One of the things that
we're interested in is using technology to improve the situation
and I'll just mention one thing that some of you
might want to look at. It's not yet targeted
at people with disabilities, but it's a promising start
. There's a white house project called mega dot gov
. That's recognizing that there are many things citizens want
to do that require them to work in a complex
and confusing way across a variety of agencies and they're
developing technology to actually help people manage such processes at
a high level. So the example that they've started
with actually is you want to change your name,
you've got to visit a lot of windows, so
to speak to do that. And their notion is
let's get it so that there's sort of one virtual
window that you have to visit and everything that has
to happen happens. And we feel there's a lot
of potential of that idea more potential actually in the
world of disability and disability services. Okay, because
I know a lot of you visualization, I want
to talk at least briefly about this one. So
I'm now moving away from the cloud again, the
focus of most of what I personally am doing is
on the cloud, but there are a lot of
other needs and opportunities that come up as you talk
with with people. And maybe I'll just talk about
the middle one here, because this is maybe something
that some of you would be interested in. So
making information accessible in an inclusive way. Federal agencies
are kind of getting to the point where they can
do some of them can do a kind of an
okay job where text is concerned and there's a lot
that can be said about why that's harder than it
should be. But as they're doing that, they're
realizing, well, things are changing. So for
example, there's a lot of work on making textbooks
accessible. At the same time, textbooks are decreasing
share of what's really happening in education and increasing share
things like interactive games and simulations and stuff like that
. We're hardly anywhere in meeting the challenge of making
those kinds of experiences inclusive. So, I'd love
to talk with any of you that might be intrigued
by what could be done there. And just as
a kind of a teaser, we can talk about
tv Rahman who's a blind computer scientist at google and
really, really blind, but he can play video
games that you would anybody would assert are intrinsically visual
if you're intrigued by how that can happen. I'd
love to talk with you about it, we need
a ton more work of that kind. So I'd
love they're to be follow up with any of you
that are interested in this stuff. So, as
I've mentioned, the G P I I work and
in particular the fluid part of it, which is
where a lot of the technical work is going on
, all that's happening in the open. So if
you're used to open source projects, that's what it
is. There are people all over the world participating
in this stuff. There are great examples of people
who just kind of happened on the work and found
it interesting and now have become key players in it
. Just the way, you know, you want
to see happening and help in a healthy, open
source kind of project. Those of you that are
researchers. I'd love it if you could if you
haven't if you could look at what nighters doing.
I'm actually working on a piece called Neider for computer
scientists because I've learned that the computer science community,
we all know this oriented almost exclusively towards NSF,
but neither is different in certain ways, but we
need to make it so that people in computer science
see this as an opportunity to fund what they're doing
because you're badly needed. I mentioned that national strategy
for trusted identities in cyberspace. This is also an
activity that badly needs in particular, not just people
with an interest in disability, but anybody who has
an interest in user experience because here you have people
crafting a part of our computing infrastructure that if they're
successful is going to touch every one of us and
there aren't enough people who are involved in that effort
with the user experience focus. So I hope you
have a look at that. That also is open
, anybody can join and I and participate there.
And then that's my any email address. I'd love
to hear for many of you. And then I
need to thank my colleagues at Nasa and then I'm
sorry at night er and and the lead architects I
mentioned with whom I've worked on some of the software
architecture issues that again, I'd love it if some
of you feel gee this is something I want to
get involved in. So thanks very much to all
of you for your attention and I guess we have
a few minutes here and then some discussion time coming
up later so thanks very much. Yeah it seems
like uh it seems like analysis we're trying to do
is to promote some standards that and and it seems
like that's as much of marketing challenge as it is
the best in the world. Say look it's the
Mac Os, why isn't everybody? Yeah so I
was asked to repeat the question so sort of 22
facet to it. One is, you know,
isn't this a lot about standards and then sort of
following that isn't this a lot about persuading people to
get involved. So on the standards thing, uh
for reasons we could get into uh the G.
P. I. Effort has not wanted to identify
itself with the formal standards processes. One reason for
that is those processes are highly bureaucratic. And another
reason there's a lot of people in the tech industry
really really don't want to go there and don't respond
well to efforts to kind of make them to uh
do things. Having said that there are what could
be called consensus standards that are extremely important. So
, you know, most of what happens on the
internet and the web, it's not formal standards,
it's consensus standards managed and not um bureaucratic itself anyway
. So there's you're certainly right that at least the
consensus standards level, there is a lot, a
lot of overlap there. And you're certainly right also
that the success of anything like this, it depends
on people getting on board. And um that's why
back to one of the points I made about the
fluid project. Their aim is to get it so
that it's easier to do. It's easier to create
a great web page or great web app using their
stuff which, by the way, is accessible than
it is to develop in any other way. That's
pretty ambitious. But that's the that's the ideal path
, let's put it that way. Nobody imagines that
that's all going to work seamlessly, but that's what
people would prefer as opposed to anything that that operates
more through uh you know, compulsion on people's parts
anyway, both really excellent points. And definitely part
of the picture actually say a little bit more.
It does look in the commercial world as if there's
, well, there is already some uptake. So
there's a company called Text Help. They're based in
Northern Ireland, but they operate internationally, they're one
of the leaders, they've they've been an early adopter
of this stuff. And so this really is one
of those cases kind of like the cloud generally,
so people don't get involved in the cloud because somebody's
making them do it, they're getting involved in the
cloud because the economic and other advantages of doing it
are just overwhelming. And it's looking like from a
vendor point of view, there are analogous things that
can be said here, especially for new entrants,
If you're if you're established in the 80 space,
it looks pretty different and there's a lot of pain
out there, not being caused by G. P
. Ii, but being caused, in a word
by the iPad. Okay, so the 80 industry
has been built on selling multi$1000 devices and bundling
the very substantial R. And D. Costs into
that very high hardware price. You start having to
work in the mode of delivering software for commodity devices
like the ipad, it's a totally different business model
, different device very, very painful. Just got
back from the assistive Technology Industry Association and it's it's
it's it's not pretty, but it's one of those
things, you know, you can you can complain
about it, but you can't change it. And
so it's very clear that vendors are saying, well
we have any choice, we have to try to
make this work and and some of them are seeing
the G. P. I can help them do
that and make that make the transition, other questions
or comments from anybody. Okay, well I hope
that some of you will be able to come along
to the discussion afterwards and have a chance to talk
more about any of this. So thank you again 1217 --> A:middle L:90% .