11:04am Friday 12th December 2008
By Maggie Hartford
For most people, the Internet is a boon. You can book a holiday, pay a parking fine or register to vote without leaving your house. You can also avoid queues at a travel agent, council office or Post Office.
But, as more and more services become available online, many people are being disadvantaged, including the UKs estimated ten million disabled people, with an annual spending power of £80bn.
Lucien Taylor, of Oxford Information Labs, believes passionately that anyone with a website has a moral duty to make it accessible to those with poor sight or hearing, or mobility problems.
His company, based at Oxford Science Park, has created a new technology that enables web pages to be read aloud, but he says even charities are failing to make their websites available to people with sight problems.
He said: “There is legislation that anyone providing a service online has to make it accessible to everyone. But so many people are infringing the law — there is an enforcement problem.
“If it is a public service and it is only available on the Internet, then you are obliged to make it accessible. But there is a grey area — for example, if it is available elsewhere, but only by queuing for hours at a Post Office. I think that is an issue.”
Last year, an EU survey showed that only five per cent of public websites and three per cent of private websites complied with guidelines. He and his fellow directors, Philip Prince and Mark Robertshaw, did their own survey and found that 90 per cent of websites failed to comply in any way. Top website for accessibility, incidentally, was Oxford University.
Mr Taylor said: “Businesses cheat by employing software that appears to make their website accessible. There is a box-ticking mentality.”
His company paid the Shaw Trust, based in Cardiff, to test its system. “We designed the software to meet their needs. They have people with a wide range of disabilities, not just sight problems but other needs.
“It has been fascinating. We did not do it to make money — we were asked to do something, and we just got clever at it.”
Originally an actor, Mr Taylor left the profession after ten years and retrained in IT, specialising in document automation for the publishing industry. His company designed a dispute resolution system for Oxford company Nominet, which controls all domain names ending in .uk, and a quality improvement hub for the Royal College of Nursing, which has a research institute at the science park.
He says the success of his company is partly due to the fact that it is based in Oxford, and can attract talented staff.
The move into ‘assistive technology’ came after Oxford Information Labs designed a website for a pilot Goverment project on support for under-fives. One of the requirements was that it should be accessible to people who can’t read.
“We had to make the information available to everybody, so we designed a text-to-speech element called Speak.To.Me. It allows people to listen to the website without having to download or install extra software, and without having a high-end PC.”
Designing the system, they used a voice “rather like Sue McGregor’s, a classic Radio 4 voice”, according to Mr Taylor.
“It was important to us to have a real person, not a voice synthesiser that sounds like a Dalek. It is 1,000 times cheaper than paying an actor to sit in a studio, which is the alternative. And you couldn’t do that and read a list of search results in real time — it is just not feasible.”
It was so successful that the idea was copied by Oxford City Council, which has made its website more accessible in other ways.
“We were asked to produce a video with streaming content and they are looking at alternative ways of presenting written text.
“One thing that has proved successful is to present the content as video, and we are also doing a subtitling project.”
But he is disappointed that so few businesses are interested in addressing the accessibility of their websites.
“Our strategy now is to please customers with other things that we do, and built trust, introducing Internet accessibility through the back door as an added value.”
He added: “it’s an area that has been dominated by techies, but you have to think about the human users. People don’t question it when they have to fit a ramp for the disabled, but they won’t change their website.”
“There is a real challenge for the technology sector, because we haven’t given people a good time. We have a real trust issue in our industry. We spend most of our time wooing new clients, trying to reassure them that we will be fair and honest.”
Contact: 01865 784294/www.oxil.co.uk
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