Designing technology to increase inclusion for the disabled
Inclusive design isn’t just about meeting the needs of the disabled, it’s about opening-up the possibility of creating better products and services for everyone. New technologies are supporting inclusion.
But there are also challenges. Most Artificial Intelligence programs deliberately look for patterns when processing data. But by ignoring the outliers, they risk perpetuating a form of inadvertent prejudice.
Jutta Treviranus – Director, Inclusive Design research Centre, OCAD University, Canada
Kylie Appel – Project Manager, TOM: Melbourne
Mark Pesce – Honourary Associate, Digital Cultures Program, University of Sydney
Karen Dolva – CEO and co-founder, No Isolation, Norway
Ian Hamilton – UX designer and accessibility specialist
Antony Funnell: Some of the cleverest innovations in our world often go unnoticed. One you've probably never given much thought to is the way the footpath is cut away at a pedestrian crossing to allow better access for strollers or shopping trolleys or bikes.
The 'curb cut' as it's called is interesting because it was originally designed specifically to help the disabled, but now of course it benefits everyone. Well, everyone pushing, pulling or riding something with wheels.
Jutta Treviranus: We frequently lose sight that humans are very variable and diverse, and we design our technologies to work for the average or the typical.
Antony Funnell: Jutta Traviranus, an inclusion design expert who lives in Canada.
Jutta Treviranus: There is this phenomenon that we call the curb cut advantage or the transfer effect. Many of the things that are innovations that we rely upon and depend upon were initially designed to address the challenges that someone with a disability has. We actually within the Inclusive Design Research Centre define disability as a mismatch between the needs of the individual and the service product or environment offered. So it's not a personal trait, it simply a consequence of not designing something for someone.
And so the more we make it possible for people with needs that have not been addressed or individuals that have difficulty using a particular design in the design process, the better the design will be and the more innovative the design will be. And the benefit is felt not just by the person with the disability but it is felt by the whole population because we will have designs that are more adaptive, that are far more generous in terms of the functionality.
Antony Funnell: Inclusion, technology and design, that's today's Future Tense, I'm Antony Funnell.
So factoring inclusion into the original design process can produce significant benefits for a wide cross-section of people. But of course if that happened on a more regular basis there wouldn't be any need for this program. Oftentimes inclusion occurs without intent. Let's look at a case study
Voiceover: It is impossible to talk about Google Home without also talking about Amazon's Echo and they are very similar. Both are voice activated connected smart speakers that can play music, control a bunch of smart home devices, add things to your to do list or shopping list, and do a bunch of web searches, all with just your voice…
Antony Funnell: Smart speakers are arguably a bit of a novelty. They're designed to let you access the internet without getting your hands dirty. But they might also be the beginning of something much more useful.
Mark Pesce: My name is Mark Pesce, I am the honorary associate in the Digital Cultures program at the University of Sydney.
Antony Funnell: Mark believes they have the ability to open doors for those who've long felt shut out.
Mark Pesce: What had happened, I had a conversation with my friend Steven Collins who lives in Canberra who has just had his brother-in-law move in who has multiple disabilities. And he had bought a Google Home about a few weeks before. And his brother, who really isn't literate, really hasn't used the computer and has never use the net, had found that he could control the lights in the house and could actually ask Google Home all sorts of questions and get the answers from the net. And so his brother was experiencing I guess the joy that we were all experiencing maybe when we first fell into the web in the mid-1990s when he discovered this universe of knowledge and information that had been closed to him because he didn't really have the right set of skills to be able to use the net. And it wasn't that the net wasn't there, but the net wasn't accessible. And so what we are doing here is we are changing the nature of the on-ramps to this sea of capacity and this sea of knowledge.
Antony Funnell: Because design has been a problem for people with disabilities, hasn't it, in the past, that a lot of the devices, as you point out…you know, design for people with disabilities wasn't necessarily a priority.
Mark Pesce: No, and someone who is now turning middle-aged, even reading something on my mobile phone that has a very small font size is getting to be difficult for me. So there are all sorts of barriers when we design for perhaps this perfect 21-year-old male engineer who has just graduated from uni and their capacities, you actually exclude an enormous amount of people who don't quite measure those capacities. So the more that we can think about all of the different ways that we can work and lowering the barriers, the more we open that up.
Antony Funnell: And so voice activated devices will allow people who are disabled or perhaps have literacy problems greater access to the net. But we are not necessarily just talking about them being more social, are we, we are talking about core functionality for some of these people.
Mark Pesce: Someone could be saying how do I bake this cake? How do I open this lock? It's all the kinds of skills that we would immediately jump online to find out how to do, and they can now have a companion who can actually step them through this process.
Antony Funnell: The smart home devices haven't been designed with these people in mind, but are companies now…are they looking towards this, are they embracing it, are they seeing the potential there?
Mark Pesce: Well, the interesting thing is my friend Steven actually tried to talk to the Google Home group saying, you know, this is an amazing application, you really should lean into it, and he didn't get a reply back. I think that people are so focused on a particular class of wealthy, Western, fully abled, educated consumers as the primary market, that they are really overlooking some of the other things that are being unlocked by this market.
Antony Funnell: But you do see this as a potential area for growth or expansion.
Mark Pesce: I absolutely do. The wonderful quote from William Gibson, 'The street finds its own uses for things, uses the manufacturers never intended.' We now have this second generation of Google Home devices which are going to cost about $100, you can just put them all around the house, and so you now have this capacity to be able to enable people to have this conversation fairly inexpensively and fairly pervasively, and I think they are going to get used in a lot of situations that Google is not thinking through, because they are useful, not because Google has intended it.
Antony Funnell: Now, what makes smart speakers such clever technology is the AI or Artificial Intelligence that underpins their algorithms.
But when it comes to disability and inclusion, AI is a blessing and a curse, according to Jutta Treviranus at OCAD University in Toronto, a blessing for the reasons Mark Pesce just outlined, and a curse because AI systems work by excluding outliers from their data. But those outliers in many cases, says Professor Treviranus, are human beings who don't fit the norm.
Jutta Treviranus: We think machines are objective and that we shouldn't question because they don't have the human foibles of the stereotypes or discrimination, but it's actually good that humans don't use only research and statistically based research to make decisions because then we can use human judgement and human discretion to understand that this might be an exception to the rules or to the data and research that we've learned. When humans are removed and if we continue to eliminate the outliers then we are creating a vicious cycle. If you are not part of that dataset you will never be part of that dataset. The computer won't recognise or understand you, and so you disappear in fact from the dataset.
Antony Funnell: And can I get you to give us some examples of that? I mean, how does this elimination process, as you call it, how does it manifest itself?
Jutta Treviranus: Well, some very, very obvious things that are already being experienced, if you have, say, an anomalous voice or accent that the machine has not been exposed to, then your voice won't be recognised. If you have, say, a facial deformity then your face won't be recognised in face recognition systems. But more impactful at the moment are things like applying for credits or loans, applying for insurance, applying for a job. All of those are things that are already using machine decisions. And so you are less likely to get a loan, to get credit, to get insurance, to be flagged as someone that should be interviewed in a competitive job. Or even when you are applying to a university or a college where there is a competitive process, when there is many applications, the applications are being filtered by a machine that is making the decisions, and that machine, if it doesn't have data about your success within an academic institution, then you are not going to be flagged as someone who should be offered a position.
There are other things which are just emerging, like self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are using data that is average data, typical scenarios at intersections. I have a personal experience with someone that propels their wheelchair backwards, so that's completely unexpected to an artificial intelligence system that is determining what a car should do at an intersection, because what it's expecting is that someone in a wheelchair is moving forward and is not erratic.
Antony Funnell: So the ideal solution to this would be to build an awareness of the need for inclusion into the design process at the beginning, but given that AI and machine learning is already quite advanced within our society, is the genie already out of the bottle, in a sense?
Jutta Treviranus: The one thing about inclusive design that we learn again and again, and every time we come upon it is amplified, is if we design for the edges, if we design for the outliers and design inclusively from the start, then we have a better system, better at prediction, better at innovation, better at transferring…especially in the learning scenario, better at transferring to new scenarios.
Innovation happens at the edge, it happens at the edge of our society and at the edge of our imagination. If we continue to stay in the rut of what we know and what we've learned and what is average and typical and usual to us, then we are not going to innovate. But also risks that occur start out as weak signals. There are things at the edge, they are the unexpected. And so if we want better artificial intelligence, it's definitely necessary to encompass the outlying data. And in fact one of the experiments we've been looking at is what happens when we start by teaching the machines using the data that is usually thrown out. And what you have is a machine that…yes, it takes a lot longer for it to be useful and to be able to find the patterns to make useful inferences, but it's far better at predicting risks, it's far better at transferring knowledge about one thing to another scenario and adapting it to that new scenario. So in fact it's smarter to actually do the opposite of what artificial intelligence currently does with data.
Antony Funnell: Jutta Treviranus doesn't just preach inclusion, she and her colleagues actively practice it. In early October they launched a contest for students called 'Race to the Edge'. It involves teams of people coming together to design what they've termed 'edge scenarios'.
Jutta Treviranus: So what we are doing is we are trying to challenge the artificial intelligence developers, so the leading developers, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, QNX, et cetera, to address edge scenarios and outlying needs. We have a number of universities and colleges, high schools forming teams to create these scenarios that are things that an artificial intelligence system may not at the moment recognise, understand or serve. And we are going to release these scenarios or the secret tests to the six large machine learning AI developers and see which of the six manufacturers or developers can address those scenarios first. And the idea here is that we want to push the artificial intelligence systems to be able to address these scenarios and outlying requirements.
Antony Funnell: So far they've got teams from Canada, Spain, Ireland, Colombia and Germany, and the intention is to approach the big tech companies in February next year.
From Toronto to Melbourne now and another contest centred around inclusion. This one's called the TOM Makeathon, and the project manager is Kylie Appel.
Kylie Appel: So the concept behind TOM is a 72-hour makeathon. It is part of a global TOM makers' movement, and the goal for TOM is to drive innovative technological solutions to real-world challenges facing people with disabilities.
Antony Funnell: The Makeathon gets underway at Swinburne University in early December and will run for three days, challenging multi-disciplinary teams of engineers, designers and scientists to come up with solutions to the specific unique disability needs of ten individuals.
The inaugural Makeathon was held in 2016.
Kylie Appel: Last year we created for Stacey, who is a woman in a wheelchair, she wanted to travel independently overseas, so the team created a portable ramp for her so she could unlock her dream of travel. We also created for Mandy, who lost her lower arms and legs, she is an amputee, her wish was to go riding with her family, so we created a tricycle for her.
We also created for Alex who had a spinal cord injury, the team created a modular videogame controller that he could hold in one hand and adapt to his position after his injury. We also created for a lady called Anat a magnetic bracelet. She unfortunately was in a car accident and had an ABI, she wasn't able to write and use utensils, and her wish was to be able to use utensils again, and the team created a magnetic bracelet.
Each challenge improves a person's life directly, with the aim to impact the lives of people around the globe as well. All the technology that is created at TOM will be uploaded into the open source maker platform, so anyone around the world can download the technology.
One thing to mention about TOM in terms of the selection process is when we select the challenges, which is a really, really big task, we always try to address issues or areas where market forces have failed, neglected challenges that have no market or government solution or the existing solutions are unaffordable. So the options our teams will come up with will generally and genuinely make a difference in people's lives.
Antony Funnell: Kylie Appel from the forthcoming TOM Makeathon in Melbourne. And if you're interested in that event or the Race to the Edge contest, you'll find details on the Future Tense website, just search the words Future Tense and RN and you're sure to find us.
One surprise for me in putting together this program was to discover that the online game sector has had some serious issues with accessibility and inclusion. I kind of had it in my head that games provided the perfect outlet for people with disabilities. But it seems that hasn't always been the case, as British game designer and accessibility specialist Ian Hamilton explains.
Ian Hamilton: It's an interesting industry because compared to other ones you can kind of have a set bar of what is an acceptable level of accessibility to meet. That doesn't quite apply to games because games are by definition inaccessible and exclusionary. So if you were to make a game that was fully accessible, you would need to remove all of the barriers in it. If a game didn't have any barriers, it wouldn't have any challenges or rule sets and it wouldn't actually be a game, it would actually be a toy or an interactive narrative. So all games must actually have some level of inaccessibility built-in, so it's a question of optimising, of finding ways to remove unnecessary barriers to make sure that people are only ever excluded for the right reasons. You know, somebody who is deaf isn't going to be annoyed about not being able to play a music quiz, but they are going to be annoyed if you haven't subtitled the opening sequence to the game.
Antony Funnell: So for game developers, not taking these kind of issues into account is really an opportunity loss, isn't it.
Ian Hamilton: Yes, it is absolutely. I mean, it's a missed opportunity directly for those markets, but also because the way you solve the issues is usually through one or two principles, either through communicating information in more than one way. So, for example, an icon or a shape as well as a colour, or like subtitles as well as speech. And then the second way is by offering players some degree of flexibility, so some difficulty options, options for control schemes. And both of those things, those are generally just good game design that benefits huge swathes of players. So it is not only an opportunity missed for the specific needs demographic but it's also an opportunity missed to actually make your game better for a huge chunk of your players.
Antony Funnell: Five years ago, Ian Hamilton developed a set of accessibility guidelines for games developers. And the initiative came about, he says, because game developers themselves realised they had a problem.
Ian Hamilton: The guidelines we developed cover three tiers. It starts out with basic guidelines, which are really broadly applicable and apply to loads of games, benefit huge numbers of people, are generally simple and easy to implement as well. So that's ranging from things like being able to remap your controls, so rearrange which button does what. So, for example, if you are a C4, C5 quadriplegic and can kind of move your hands and arms a bit but can't really curve your fingers around to pull the triggers, you can take those functions off the triggers, you can move them onto the face where you can easily control them. So to some people that's the difference between playing and not playing. Other people, it's just a matter of preference. So that's an example of something that has got really, really wide benefit.
Other simple things like colourblindness, like I mentioned, using something in relation to colour. Moving on to intermediate considerations, things that are little bit more involved, take a little bit more thought, a little bit more budget to implement, things like closed captioning which, as opposed to subtitles, is when you go beyond providing text for speech and actually start to provide captions for important background sounds, things like that.
And then also there is an advanced tier of guidelines. So these are things that are quite involved and only really apply to certain niche demographics, but for the games they do apply to they can make a huge, huge difference to people. So that's things like in-game audio sonar for the gamers who are blind and things like that.
Antony Funnell: Over the last five years or so have you noticed more game developing companies becoming interested in trying to make their product as inclusive as possible?
Ian Hamilton: Yes, absolutely, I've noticed a huge difference, and at all ends of the industry, from the small one-man outfits, all the way up to the biggest publishers. It's a very, very different industry to what it was like five years ago. It hasn't just been the difference in the industry as well, I think a really, really important change has been within the gaming community itself. So if you go back maybe a little bit longer, say for example seven years ago, if you had someone with a disability who was posting a message on a forum for a game explaining that they were having some kind of accessibility issue, they would be met with quite extreme amounts of vitriol, people not really understanding what accessibility was, thinking that it was going to be breaking their games that they liked just to serve a small demographic. And that has really, really changed.
So I think it has kind of snowballed. As more games are starting to implement accessibility, more gamers have realised what accessibility is, and actually it's a good thing that just allows more people to have that same enjoyment they are having. So now it's totally turned around. It's almost…the disability posts on social media, on the gamers' forum, for the most part they will be met from a lot of support from all kinds of gamers, any kind of disabilities, so that's a really, really nice change.
But from within the industry, yes, a very, very different place, not just on games themselves, so games have got way, way more consideration than they used to, but also at platform level. So now all of the main consoles, so the Switch, the PS4, the Vita, the Xbox One, they've actually all got accessibility feature sets built into the consoles, so things like zoom, being able to configure controls at system level. You know, if you were looking at how things were five years ago, that would have been pure science fiction, so it has been really, really nice to see the progress. Still a long way to go but at least things are solidly moving in the right direction.
Antony Funnell: Ian Hamilton, with a good news story there about technology and inclusion, our themes for today.
I'm Antony Funnell and you're listening to Future Tense.
Journalist: A Norwegian start-up hopes to end the loneliness of children with long-term illness by having an avatar represent them in the classroom. Long days at home without school or friends can be traumatic for children who are very ill. Oslo-based firm No Isolation has created AV1 to enable seriously sick children to take part in the school day from their bedroom.
Antony Funnell: The AV1 is the brainchild of Karen Dolva, the CEO and co-founder of No Isolation.
Karen Dolva: AV1 was never really an idea, it was more a solution to a problem. We were studying these kids and the environments around them, trying to figure out why they are lonely and why the technology offered to them doesn't work. And AV1 became the answer to all of our questions really, where we found out that we needed a small telepresence robot, something that was completely controlled by the child, where everything was streamed in real time so they could see their friends and be with them, yes, in everything really.
Antony Funnell: So we are talking about them having a presence within the classroom, even though they are not physically themselves in the classroom.
Karen Dolva: Yes. The robot is controlled remotely, from a phone or a tablet, and it's the child that controls everything from their bed. And they can wake up the robot by opening an app and then use that app to see everyone and then hear what everyone is talking about and actually answer as well. The robot has a camera and a microphone and a loudspeaker and two motors, so you can turn it in every direction you want to.
Antony Funnell: And that's important, isn't it, that two-way dimension to the communication that it provides.
Karen Dolva: Absolutely, and I also think the presence is extremely important. These kids are not used to being able to just be there without any hassle, and that was extremely important for us, that they could go on field trips through this robot, that they could be in a classroom and they could go home with their friends after school, but in the robot form because they can't actually go themselves.
Antony Funnell: Just tell us about the robot. If I had one here what would it look like and how would it interact with children in a classroom?
Karen Dolva: Well, it's white, it's 27 centimetres tall, weighs around a kilo and it's very cute, nonintrusive. We didn't want it to take up too much space, so we've tested a lot of different sizes and designs. I think we've found something that the kids get instantly.
Antony Funnell: And it's a robot, it's not meant to look like a human, is it, but it does have humanlike features, doesn't it, it has a head that can move.
Karen Dolva: Yes, it has a head and it has eyes, but we definitely didn't want it to look human, that goes scary immediately. What we needed was human features where you can blink and you can turn around and look in the direction you want. That's one of the biggest issues with all of the other video conferencing systems really is that you are very static, you only look one direction, there is no personality to it, and we see that a lot of our kids are dressing up their robots and making it resemble their personality, not necessarily their looks but what football team they like or what movie characters. It becomes the second you, it is an avatar.
Antony Funnell: The child who is isolated who is using this device, can actually see their friends because of the camera on the AV1. So they can see their friends on a screen, but there is no screen on the AV1, is there, so the person's classmates can't look back physically at the child who is isolated. Why is that?
Karen Dolva: We assumed that we were going to have a screen on the robot because that is how we imagine videoconferencing. But then we kept hearing over and over again that these kids, they really don't want to be on display, and the day that you are lying in bed, you are not able to go to school, is not necessarily the day you want your face projected on a big screen. We took away the screen in the first prototypes, just to see if it would work or if it would be too alienating, and it really worked. The kids in the classroom, they know the person that's away, they get it instantly. I think it's with adults that we have to explain the concept a couple of times before it sinks in. But with kids, I think they are very used to having avatars represent them in games, they are much more adapted to technology are being a part of their life, so it takes a couple of minutes in the classroom and then it's just a part of it all.
Antony Funnell: Why is fighting isolation is so important to chronically ill children?
Karen Dolva: Well, these kids are, as all other kids, depending on social connections to develop language and social skills, and not being there makes it so much harder to come back. So what we've seen with quite a few of our kids actually is that they start participating more physically as well because it's not as scary. You were kind of there yesterday, you spoke to people, and you know what you are coming back to, verses being at home for months and not seeing anything, and then you are supposed to go back and act like nothing has happened and that's impossible. We hope we have really lowered the threshold to go back to school after you are hopefully completely cured and make that happen faster.
Antony Funnell: The response from the children, give us an idea of the sort of responses that you and your colleagues have had from children who have used the AV1, what do they tell you about the experience?
Karen Dolva: I'm guessing that we've gotten 60 emails from mums, and then we've gotten 20 emails from kids and teenagers themselves. We have quite a few users that are really, really sick. So during our testing last year we got super worried because one of the kids wasn't using his robot for more than five minutes every second day, and we got in touch with his family and eventually learned that he has been taken out of the country to do a bone marrow transplant in Denmark. And those five minutes every second day, that means the world to him. He's awake for 10 minutes a day, so just being able to say hi and talk to your classmates for a couple of minutes and not just be in a foreign country in a foreign hospital with no one but your mum, that's quite an impact. So I think the response overall has just been overwhelming.
Antony Funnell: Karen Dolva from the Norwegian organisation No Isolation. And Karen is their CEO. Their telepresence robot is now being used by children and young adults in various countries across Europe.
Next week on Future Tense, the ins and outs of cyber insurance with Lloyds representative Chris McKinnon, and we'll also find out about a new system for identifying and tracking drones. It's been developed by one of the world's largest drone manufacturers and it looks set to have an international impact.
Thanks, as always, to my co-producer Karin Zsivanovits. This week's sound engineer was Dave White.
I'm Antony Funnell, until next time, cheers.
- Antony Funnell
- Karin Zsivanovits