DeveloperSpace to help bridge the widening digital divide We are, unintentionally, in the process of excluding more and more people from participation in education, employment, and daily living by digitizing all aspects of our society and putting digital interfaces on everything. Prosperity4All seeks to help reverse this digital exclusion as Dr Gregg Vanderheiden and Dr Matthias Peissner explain The rapid evolution
of technology and the introduction of digital interfaces on an ever wider range of products and services is helping to widen the digital divide, leaving more and more people at risk of being excluded from key services. Technology interfaces are increasingly essential to accessing health and travel services for example, and people who cannot use them are unable to fully participate in the emerging digital society. To address this issue an international group of scientists, developers, consumers and companies have come together in the Prosperity4ALL (P4ALL) project to work on the development of a Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII), aiming to help make technology more widely accessible. “Our goal is to make it easy, affordable and efficient to produce or create solutions that help everyone to access technology,” says Dr Matthias Peissner, the Project Coordinator. A key component of the GPII is the DeveloperSpace, a website to help developers design more inclusive features in mainstream products and new types of assistive technology (AT). The wider, longerterm goal is to ensure that accessible solutions are available for everyone, including those on the edges of the digital society, and the DeveloperSpace will play a significant role. “We aim to create and gather things in the DeveloperSpace that would help developers,” outlines Dr Gregg Vanderheiden, the project’s technical coordinator. “So, providing the parts, resources and tools to understand specific problems around digital inclusivity, and then to find better resources and information about strategies to deal with them.”
DeveloperSpace The DeveloperSpace is intended to be a place for collaboration on grand challenges, enabling researchers to locate other people who might be able to help in development, such as technical experts and consumers
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Picture of the DeveloperSpace homepage. that understand the specific problem around digital inclusivity. Researchers and people working in the field can use the DeveloperSpace to share ideas on how to more effectively personalise online materials and interfaces. “For example, if a PhD student is looking for a project, they can find something that uses and develops their expertise and represents a real user need with real world impact,” says Dr Vanderheiden. There are many different reasons behind digital exclusion; Dr Vanderheiden says the project has identified four key groups. “We talk about barriers due to a person’s literacy, digital literacy, disability or age,” he explains. “People with reduced literacy or digital literacy face problems in understanding both how digital technologies work and the language used. Auto translation and self-voicing technologies are two solutions being facilitated.” The disability community itself is also very diverse, encompassing a wide range of physical disabilities that may hamper an individual’s ability to access technology. Older people are treated in the project as a separate group, even though in some cases
they face similar challenges to people with disabilities. “The problem is that older people acquire functional limitations, but they don’t view themselves as being disabled,” says Dr Vanderheiden. Modern technology tends to be aimed at a broad market, often excluding those who find it difficult to access it, such as the disability population, people with low levels of digital literacy and the older generation who may be less familiar with today’s technologies. Now researchers aim to help technology developers address the full range of users. “Our main goal is not to develop new solutions for people with impairments, but to provide a platfom where different things can be brought together. Where, for example, developers can find stuff from other developers and researchers, that can then be re-used,” says Dr Peissner. “We aim to bring all the existing research together to help develop solutions that really work for the market.” This work is part of a wider international initiative which aims to help widen access to technology among people who face accessibility barriers. Alongside the DeveloperSpace, the P4ALL project is also
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working on other elements of an eco-system aiming to encourage inclusive design. This includes a second key component of the GPII, a unified listing, which brings together information from several databases into a single unified listing of products and services. “The unified listing provides a pipeline between consumers and developers,” explains Dr Vanderheiden. This can act as a channel for the exchange of information and views, so that developers are aware of the needs of the disabled community. “With feed-forward information, consumers can push developers to do something new, while with feedback information, consumers can give their views on products and technologies,” continues Dr Vanderheiden. “Then users can also share information with each other, about what works with what, and about how to use certain technologies effectively.”
have trouble using technology,” says Dr Vanderheiden. The ideal long-term outcome of the project would be that accessibility is no longer a peripheral consideration in development, as Dr Vanderheiden explains. “In the long-term we want there to be no such thing as accessibility, so that when people are designing something to be usable, their usability testing would include everybody – they don’t think about accessibility as an additional feature,” he outlines.
Social and economic impact This could have a significant social and economic impact as more and more civic, health and education services move online. With over 2 billion people limited in varying degrees in their ability to access technology, there is not only a strong moral case for widening accessibility, but also an economic one. “The more things people can’t do for
to make it easy, affordable and efficient to produce or create solutions that help everyone to access technology Our goal is
Accessible technology The goal of making technology more accessible is widely shared, yet it must of course also fit in with commercial objectives. While it has previously been argued that an overt focus on serving the disabled community stifles technical innovation, recent history demonstrates otherwise. “When Apple introduced the iPhone, initially they had accessibility problems, so they went in and added some features. Now the most innovative and profitable phones and tablets in the world are chock-full of accessibility features. This has given the lie to the notion that you can’t combine accessibility with technical innovation,” points out Dr Vanderheiden. Ultimately companies of course want to maintain profitability; Dr Peissner says the project aims to help them achieve this, while also making their products more accessible. “At the moment, accessibility is mainly driven by regulations and external pressure. We want to turn it into a positive thing, that everybody who is engaging can really benefit from this eco-system,” he explains. A greater focus on accessibility can bring commercial dividends to technology companies. Going back to Apple’s products, their accessibility has opened up new markets. “All sorts of people that wouldn’t have been able to use their products are now able to use them. Some of these markets are huge, as there’s an awful lot of people that
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themselves, the less able they are to live independently, and the quicker care costs are going to accumulate,” points out Dr Vanderheiden. A key challenge now is to engage developers more widely and encourage them to share information. “We’re using ‘gamification’, breaking technical challenges down into little bits so that the initial engagement is very rewarding,” continues Dr Vanderheiden. “There are lots of developers who would like to create solutions for people with disabilities, the challenge is to work out how to do it more easily, and how to make it more economically sustainable over the longer-term.”
At a glance Full Project Title Prosperity4All - Ecosystem infrastructure for smart and personalised inclusion and PROSPERITY for ALL stakeholders (PROSPERITY4ALL) Project Objectives The task of PROSPERITY4ALL is to build ‘behind-the-screens’ technical infrastructure that allows these users to access assistive technologies and services. This also involves bringing together software and component developers to get them to innovate on behalf of people with special needs. Project Partners Please see website for full details of project partners. Key Project Links W: http://Prosperity4All.eu W: http://GPII.net Contact Details Project Coordinator, Dr Matthias Peissner Director, Head of Business Unit HumanTechnology Interaction Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO Nobelstr. 12, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany T: +49 711 970 2311 E: matthias.peissner@iao.fraunhofer.de W: www.iao.fraunhofer.de
Dr Matthias Peissner (Left) Dr Gregg Vanderheiden (Right)
Dr Gregg Vanderheiden is a Director and Professor of Trace R&D Center at the University of Maryland, as well as a Director and co-founder of Raising The Floor (RtF-I). Dr Vanderheiden has worked in technology and disability for over 45 years, and is work is found in Windows, Mac and Linux OSs as well as many other ICT products. Dr Matthias Peissner is Director and Head of the Human-Technology Interaction Business Area at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO). He has expert knowledge as a project leader in a number of diverse areas, such as adaptive user interfaces, user experience engineering, and user interaction in intelligent environments.
This project was funded by the European Commission 7th framework under grant 610510. However no endorsement of the results by the funding agency should be assumed.
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