[Irl-dean] Accessibility in the future

[Mark Magennis]

Here's an interesting opinion piece taken from e-access bulletin, a  
free monthly email newsletter (www.headstar.com/eab). It's quite a  
narrow perspective but a good seed for an argument I think, so let's  
all pitch in. Who wants to go first? Barry? ;-)

Mark

Time for a New Beginning
by Kevin Carey.

There is an elegant correspondence between the amount of information
in circulation and its accessibility which can be expressed in two
formulae.

First, that the greater the quantity of information, the lower its  
cost of
production; and second, that the lower the cost of production, the
greater is the additional percentage cost of making it accessible.

Take television. When spectrum was limited, the medium was
analogue and the labour was unionised, the cost of producing television
was high; so was the cost of producing accessibility services such as
captioning, audio description and signing; but the percentage cost of
these special services was relatively low.

Now think about the explosion of television since 1990 when satellite
was introduced and project this forward to internet television: there
will be no spectrum and therefore no scarcity, and digital production is
cheap. Smaller and smaller players will find a toe-hold with niche
products, but the smaller the player, the higher the relative percentage
cost of accessibility services will become.

This scenario can be extended to multi media channels and on-demand
services. So the question is, do we expect multi media providers to
provide a full range of accessibility services, regardless of their
economic capacity?

If we want to look for a rational answer to this question, the starting
point is the way that television accessibility has been regulated. The
2003 Telecommunications Act obliged Ofcom to regulate accessibility
services. It set rational percentages of compliance, taking into account
the percentage of turnover they would need to spend in order to
comply. If the percentage was too high, the broadcaster was exempt.

That is a good starting principle, but it does not go far enough. A
second factor which we need to take into account is the purpose for
which the multi media enterprise has been established. We might
allow, for example, that a BBC television channel should be required
to provide 100% accessibility, whereas a student blog should not.
Between these two there are all kinds of information providers who
need to be subjected to a rational principle in addition to their
economic capacity. I suggest that the principle should be that the
degree of accessibility required should depend on the public purpose of
the information provider. We might argue that a major retailer should
be under a higher obligation than a wholesale supplier of nuts and
bolts.

There is a principle which directly relates both to economic capacity
and public purpose, and that is reach. If we are going to insist on a
level of accessibility, it should relate to the number of people  
likely to
benefit. This does not simply involve producing a ball-park figure for
blind and visually impaired people or deaf and hearing impaired
people; the evidence has to be based on actual behaviour rather than on
some wild estimate of uptake.

If we combine the organisation's mission, economic capacity and
reach, we are getting closer to a rational way of understanding the
relationship between the supplier and the customer requiring an
accessibility service.

Ultimately, we need a new approach to accessibility which is
proportionate, evidence-based and economically viable. That, however,
is not the end of the matter. One of the key features of the digital
information age is that production and publishing are becoming global.
If regulation is too harsh in one political sphere then companies will
move.

This, in turn, means that regulation of content will have to shift from
the country of origin to the country of consumption, which would
mean enormous cost shifts from publishers to internet service providers
(ISPs) and information brokers. If ISPs are to become pornography,
security, virus and accessibility police, they are going to need paying
through a combination of consumer and public sector revenue.

This is an important discussion because the globalisation of production
and publishing will sound the death knell for accessibility unless we
can forge alliances with those concerned with security, privacy, child
protection and public service content in order to achieve a public stake
in the way we filter and receive content.

In summary, then, the old game is over. We will no longer be able to
rely on national or even European regulators, to deliver accessibility
from the publisher. We are going to have to switch to information
brokers, distributors and deliverers, working out some mechanism for
imposing obligations similar to those which no doubt governments will
ultimately impose for the purposes of national security and child
protection. We have wasted almost twenty years waiting for each other
to act and now we are entering very tough times. We need a new
approach, we need to make a new start. This will not be easy, but it
will have to be done.

NOTE: Kevin Carey is Director of humanITy. This article is an edited
version of a talk given by Kevin at the recent Headstar conference e-
Access '08, hosted by E-Access Bulletin.



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