Table of Contents
Author: Adrian L. Jessup Schneider
Motivation
My inspiration for this sub-case came from my interview with Dr. Audrey Girouard. Our discussion of Dr. Girouard’s work in deformable user interactions, and in particular bendable input for smartphones (Ernst et al., 2017), inspired me to consider the importance of accessible devices that can be carried with the user.
Dr. Girouard’s bendable smartphone input offers two different ways it can be carried with you. First, of course, it is a portable object. Second, and of more importance, a smartphone is a very common device that can perform many functions. That means it can perform an adaptive function in a variety of circumstances, without the user having to be burdened with many individual devices.
For ease of discussion, I have split this sub-case into two categories, as follows:
Portable
I define portable assistive devices as being small and unobtrusive devices that can be carried at all times, and that may be either integrated into everyday devices or custom-designed as assistive devices. The archetypal example in modern society is a smartphone, but wearable technologies like wristbands or smart glasses also belong to this category. Portable assistive technology may be a physical object, or software installed in a physical device. Portable assistive technology might also be a design feature included in a physical device, such as introducing deformable input/output to a smartphone.
Cloud
Cloud technologies are those that can always be available within an externally accessible network. Due to the nature of cloud technologies, they are normally not physical objects (though an object designed specifically to access a cloud network may qualify as a physical cloud device). Internet-based cloud computing is the main component of this category, but assistive services that are available on call—such as accessible transportation services—also meet this definition.
Portable Devices: More Eggs in a Lighter Basket
The essential benefit of portable devices is, simply, that the user can have them available when they’re needed. You don’t need to ensure you are in a location that offers adaptive technologies if you can carry appropriate technologies wherever you go. Portable devices are more accessible than non-portable devices, because they can literally be accessed in a wider range of circumstances. Portability can therefore be considered a form of second-order accessibility: the accessibility of accessibility.
The existence of portable assistive devices is hardly new. The famous white cane used by people with a visual impairment allows the user to check for obstacles, sudden elevation changes like stairs or curbs, and changes in the substance of the ground or floor itself (CNIB, n.d.). The cane would be vastly less useful if it were not a handheld device that can go anywhere the user needs to go.
However, each device we carry, even if it’s ideal for its job, is an additional bit of weight and bulk that needs to be accommodated. If one device, like a smartphone, can perform many tasks, then users can carry an additional specialized device they otherwise wouldn’t have room for, or simply enjoy being less burdened as they go through their day.
The Bundling Effect
To illustrate the impact that a multi-function device like a smartphone can have, I will discuss a paper called Freedom to Roam: A Study of Mobile Device Adoption and Accessibility for People with Visual and Motor Disabilities (Kane et al., 2009). This article was published in 2009, and therefore allows us to compare how the utility of mobile phones has evolved over the past eight years.
The authors recruited 24 participants to provide a list of the devices they carried with them on a regular basis. Every one of these participants already carried a mobile phone, though in 2009 many (15) of these were basic phones rather than smartphones.
Other popular devices among the participants included 12 music players, two GPS devices, and one compass. All these capabilities are now standard on modern smartphones.
It’s useful to remember that 2009 was before Apple’s 2010 iPad pushed tablet computers into the mainstream. The 11 respondents who carried laptops might now prefer a lighter tablet, and the four who carried some form of magnifier could use a tablet’s (or smartphone’s) camera to zoom in.
Not So Fast, Captain Optimism
Those who remember my title for this section may be thinking: “Isn’t ‘all your eggs in one basket’ a cautionary metaphor? Because there may be something wrong with the basket. And then you’ll lose all your eggs.”
Well… yes. And Freedom to Roam points out some problems with smartphones as accessible devices. Common problems identified by the participants included text that was too small or low-contrast, the phone being too small or thin for a user with a motor impairment to grip properly, and keys that were too small or too smooth to feel. (That last problem has surely been worsened by the modern obsession with touchscreen keyboards, says this Blackberry devotee.)
In 2009, some of these effects were accelerating. This was during the era of ever-thinning phones—an era that may be continuing—and one of the participants found that her previously reliable phone became difficult to use when she upgraded to a newer model.
But remember, we’re eight years along from the publication of that study. Let’s examine the wish list put together by the 24 participants, identifying how their mobile phones could better suit their needs. The top five features, each requested by at least five of the participants, were as follows:
- Screen reader
- Voice input
- Large buttons
- Screen magnification
- Smaller device
All these features are now standard! This is also the case for most of the improvements requested by the participants: user-installable applications, automatic brightness and volume adjustment, touchscreens—all are now expected features when you buy a phone. Even those that aren’t, such as optical character recognition, are theoretically supported by the phone itself, awaiting only a software engineer able to solve the difficult problems involved with making them work.
It is interesting to note, however, that smaller devices were a commonly requested feature, despite it being a problem identified by some motor-impaired users. This is a reminder that one-size-fits-all solutions rarely do fit all. Fortunately, it’s still possible to have assistive devices to augment the usability of the phone itself. Many phone cases, in addition to protecting the phone from damage, also add bulk to the phone and include surfaces that are much more easily gripped.
Perhaps, someday, the cases may even be bendable.
I therefore feel justified in being cautiously optimistic about the accessibility of smartphones, and hence the potential of smartphones to themselves act as accessibility devices. After all, if you have only one basket to worry about, you can devote all your time to making sure it’s a really good basket.
Cloud Computing: So Portable You Don’t Even Transport It
The logical extreme of portability is to have a single device that performs all needed accessibility tasks. However, even if we believe that such a device could exist—which I rather doubt—we can go one step beyond. More accessible than a portable device is a “device” that doesn’t even need to be carried at all.
If portability is second-order accessibility, since you can bring it to where you need it, then cloud applications can logically be considered third-order accessibility: your assistance exists, in theory, anywhere whatsoever.
Nothing is Perfect…
Of course, the fact that I needed to write “in theory” in the previous paragraph means that cloud computing isn’t quite there yet. In 2014, Media Access Australia, a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring the accessibility of all forms of media, released The accessibility of cloud computing – current and future trends, a document exploring both the benefits and risks of cloud computing as it pertains to accessibility (Hollier, 2014). The conclusions of that document form the backbone of this discussion of cloud computing.
Let’s start with the bad. Cloud computing means the information is not carried with users themselves, but is instead stored somewhere in internet-space. Since this is, in fact, the entire point of cloud computing, there’s no way around the risks this brings.
First is the question of security. Cloud services are always online, and therefore are innately at risk of cyberattacks, whether directed specifically against the service or else through whatever login process is used to access the service. Even if this occurs through simple theft of the user’s phone, the fact that the phone is an access point to a cloud service, potentially providing access to all systems that use that service, can make a breach of security more severe.
Relatedly, privacy is in question whenever a party is entrusted with personal information. While social media has accustomed people to sharing personal information online, there is still the possibility of misuse of this data by anyone involved in handling it, whether that be the original service provider, or third parties, like the owners of the physical servers on which the data resides.
A separate issue is the question of connectivity. While there is no theoretical limit to where cloud services can be accessed, cloud computing is reliant on internet access to function. Every year internet connectivity improves, but we’re not yet at the point where a user can count on having access to their data at all times.
…But Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining
A careful reader may have noticed that I’ve put this section on cloud computing in the opposite order from the portable device section: bad news first, rather than good news first. Why?
Simply put, I don’t know of good answers to these problems—yet. While I was able to partially counter the problems in the discussion of smartphones by discussing all ways these have been addressed and even solved in recent years, cloud applications of accessibility are so new that not everything is entirely prepared for them to take the stage to live up to their full potential.
That doesn’t prevent us from looking at the possibilities, and dreaming of the world that may come when the problems are solved. The accessibility of cloud computing gives us a tantalizing glimpse of the possibilities for where cloud accessibility may be headed, inspired by the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure initiative.
As a possible workaround to the issue of connectivity, consider an initial deployment in fields where we can be sure users will be in an internet-connected area. A ticket machine can be set up with user accounts that will automatically adjust itself based on the user’s preferences: adjusting text size or providing touch output for visually impaired users, or lowering the placement of controls for wheelchair users.
This principle can be used in bank ATMs as well, continuing the move toward accessibility that has brought into existence braille ATM keypads and speaking ATMs. In a way, this may even be easier, since a bank already has accounts for their clients. It should be comparatively simple for user preferences to be added so that the ATM can adapt to each user’s needs individually.
Gazing even farther into the future, we can imagine just about any aspect of the environment adapting to suit people’s needs: stairs flattening themselves into a ramp on the approach of someone who needs it, handicap-accessible power doors that can be activated from your phone, maps in public buildings that connect to your phone to tell you how to get to your destination.
It’s going to be some time until we can reach these dreams, of course. But the problems in getting there aren’t intractable. Internet connectivity gets better every year. We know more and more about what causes security holes, and what needs to be done to prevent more from opening up.
As long as designers keep working on these issues, it may not be very long at all before adaptive features start making their way into all kinds of spots in our world.
The Short Version
To summarize: mobile devices and cloud computing have great potential for improving accessible technology, enabling users to have access to the assistance they need wherever and whenever they need it. There is a potential bottleneck effect, in which a problem with the root technology (smartphone, cloud application, or other) causes a problem with everything that depends on it. However, if these problems can be solved—and I am optimistic they can be, in time—then we have the possibility of both flexible and robust assistive solutions for everyone.
In this post, I have referred to the dimensions of accessibility. First-order accessibility is simple existence, something that performs its task in only one way, such as a wheelchair ramp. Second-order accessibility is portability, allowing the device itself to be more accessible, such as a white cane or a smartphone. Cloud computing has the potential to be third-order accessibility, in that it can be accessed even without having to bring a physical device.
I would like to end to with a final pair of questions. What is fourth-order accessibility? What is even more accessible than a hypothetical cloud application that can be accessed from anywhere the user could ever need to go?
I don’t know. I expect you don’t know either. But perhaps we should be thinking about it.
References
CNIB. The White Cane. Retrieved from: http://www.cnib.ca/en/living/safe-travel/white-cane/Pages/default.aspx
Enrst, M., Swan, T., Cheung, V., Girouard, A. (2017) Typhlex: Exploring Deformable Input for Blind Users Controlling a Mobile Screen Reader. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 16(2), 28-35. https://doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2017.3971123
Hollier, S. (2014). The accessibility of cloud computing – current and future trends. Media Access Australia, Sydney. Retrieved from https://mediaaccess.org.au/sites/default/files/files/MAA_Cloud_computing_whitepaper_accessiblePDF_FINAL.pdf
Kane, S. K., Jayant, C., Wobbrock, J. O., Ladner, R. E. (2009). Freedom to Roam: A Study of Mobile Device Adoption and Accessibility for People with Visual and Motor Disabilities. In Proceedings of the 11th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility (pp. 115-122). Pittsburgh, PA, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1639642.1639663
ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSIVE DESIGN CASE STUDIES 