A Technology Special

Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4

THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

IN TOUCH – A Technology Special

TX: 18.05.2021 2040-2100

PRESENTER: PETER WHITE

PRODUCER: SIMON HOBAN

White

Good evening. Tonight, a technology special. What are the bits of tech that can improve the lives of people who are blind or partially sighted? Well, we’ll be talking websites and apps, the latest developments in smart speakers and what the future holds when it comes to augmented reality. And if the reality is that you don’t know what that means, you’re not alone. Stay tuned and all will be explained or as much as we’ve got time for.

But first, even before the pandemic we were already living more of our lives online than ever but coronavirus has put rocket boosters under that. From online shopping to remote appointments to check the state of your eyesight, the digital world is increasingly king. All the more reason, then, that the websites and apps that we use need to be accessible for people who are blind or partially sighted. So, for the last few weeks we’ve been asking for your experiences.

We asked Robin Christopherson to take a look at some of the examples you gave us. Robin is Head of Digital Inclusion at AbilityNet, that’s an organisation which offers advice to businesses and public bodies on making their websites blind friendly. And he began by explaining how the legal landscape had changed since he was last on the programme.

Christopherson

Finally, we have some legislation with teeth, i.e., a named body in the government that will be actively monitoring, reporting on and, hopefully, enforcing as well and that’s in the shape of the Public Sector Regulations that, yes, they only affect the public sector but many organisations who want to supply to the public sector are sitting up and listening as well.

So, thankfully, that made its way into UK law before the Brexit guillotine. Unfortunately, the one that was for other bodies didn’t quite make it in, but let’s hope that the government decide to enact that as well.

White

Let’s turn to some of our listeners’ emails. Now lots of them brought up a story, which is very much in the news, about the company Milk and More. Now they’ve switched their subscription services entirely online. Marianne O’Brien, she wrote to us, she says: “I managed to sign up online but the app is in portrait mode and I need it in landscape for my iPad.” Well, we put that to Milk and More and they do say their app is designed for a mobile phone, which is why it’s in portrait mode. They say they will explore options for a tablet formatted app.

So, Robin, good to see a commercial organisation is responding to concerns like that because with them being a commercial outfit, as you’ve been explaining, they’re not covered by the new legislation.

Christopherson

Well, yes, you’re right, they’re not covered in the regulations that are new and potentially have more teeth but we absolutely need to make it clear that it is a legal requirement for all websites and apps to be accessible under the Equality Act of 2010. So, loads of time to get to grips with accessibility but actually it makes your products better for everyone who’s juggling their phone one-handed, trying to look at your website on a sunny day on a small sheet of shiny glass, in a noisy café, bumpy bus – I could go on and on. So, it really should be a basic requirement to make sure that your digital products are fit for purpose for people – everyone.

White

So, I just want to stay with Milk and More for one more example. Jonathan Fisher emailed to say that setting up an account required him to do one of those picture tests, where you have to pick boxes that show a car or, in this case, a motorbike and it’s all about proving you are who you say you are, checking your identity. Now, obviously, a motorbike is no good to him or anyone who’s blind. How common is that online?

Christopherson

These are called capture challenges and they are the bane of people’s lives who have a disability because it’s an arms race between artificial intelligence that the bots have and becoming more and more challenging for actual humans because the bots are getting more and more clever…

White

The bots – the bots are the people who are trying to fool you, fraud you, come up with false sites, basically.

Christopherson

Yeah, make fraudulent submissions to an online form, set up fraudulent accounts, spam, yeah. So, this capture is a challenge and on the case of Milk and More and many other websites, you have a tick box which says I am not a robot. And that tick box is surrounded by an invisible area that monitor how you bring your mouse towards that tick box and if you’re a bit shaky then you’re not a robot but if you tab onto it, like a screen reader or a keyboard user, often that’s considered robotic enough not to pass the test. So, when you tick it, it says, ooh you’re not verified as a human and then it brings up these distorted images or distorted audio. And I’d be happy to play you a little bit of what one of these audio captures sounds like, shall I give it a go?

White

Give it a go.

Audio capture

Distorted noise.

White

Enough already. So, what’s the answer?

Christopherson

The answer is not to use capture challenges, if at all possible, there are plenty of other ways of ascertaining whether this is a valid person. But, if you must, then use something like textcapture.com which just offers very straightforward – which of these following words are not fruit, for example. And then it gives you a list and you have to say which ones aren’t, which for people – because it’s text – if you’re a screen reader user, if you need to make the text larger, there are so many reasons why this is a better approach and surprisingly it still thwarts the bots because they’re not quite clever enough to manage all of those different logic questions.

White

Moving on to another listener on this. Andrew got in touch to say he was trying to set up a charity using the Charity Commission’s website and he came across forms that weren’t in an accessible format and used pdfs which, of course, we know can be a nightmare for people who are visually impaired. Now the Charity Commission are a public body, so, Robin, what did you find out about that?

Christopherson

If you have a pdf, that is key to a particular service, then you need to make it accessible because having the ability to sign on with the Charity Commission is obviously a key part of their service. So, that needs to be provided either in an accessible pdf or, I would recommend, as an online form.

White

Just to say what the Charity Commission said. They said that they recognised that some documents currently only available in a pdf format but they’ve identified the issue and they’re in the process of developing alternative ways to increase accessibility. They can offer alternative formats for those documents on request.

Robin, it sounds like there’s progress but what has to happen to make accessibility as good as it can possibly be for blind and partially sighted people, what still needs to be done?

Christopherson

It’s really important within organisations of any size that there is both a top-down commitment and also a bottom-up training and retooling of organisations so that the tools that they use will produce nice accessible content and functionality and that they have the right guidance and training. Now, interestingly enough, I’m on the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Disability and we wrote to the Prime Minister in April last year, when the whole covid situation was escalating, seeking reassurances that accessibility and digital, when it comes to people with disabilities, would be a top priority. He replied in July with a four page pdf and it said all the right things but, at the end of the day, if the Prime Minister’s office hasn’t got to grips with the basics, then it kind of shows that we really need to embrace digital inclusion, the accessibility guidelines at our core, in our day-to-day jobs otherwise disabled people are going to continue to slip through the gap. So, some way to go.

White

Robin Christopherson.

And do keep your experiences coming, we’d like to keep up the pressure on this.

But there is still technology which can be used without having to grapple with websites. Smart speaker technology has been a real boon for people with visual impairments – the ability to issue voice commands and get what you want has obvious advantages. And more and more services are becoming available as third-party developers vie to get their technology included on the main platforms – Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s home speakers. Well, the latest to have their skill accepted on Alexa is the AI company RealSAM and Louise Humphreys is their UK manager.

I asked her to tell me a bit more about RealSAM.

Humphreys

Ah, so right now, our service on smart speakers features over 27,000 audio books, podcasts, we have the Calibre audio library on there, as well as Torch Trust and Librivox with a range of information, as well, from sight loss charities. So, that’s really quite unique and interesting about this service. We recruited 15 charities, at the start of covid, when we were being told that it was actually incredibly hard for people to provide their support services and they wanted to make audio available. So, we worked with them to directly put their content onto Alexa and Google Home.

White

And are you thinking particularly of people perhaps who find websites difficult to navigate?

Humphreys

Possibly, but I guess the idea was that we all have this situation now where there’s so many different things that we have to access for different things – different apps and different websites – and our vision was to really just to bring everything into one place. So, we created this hub for blind people and you come to RealSAM and that’s where you can access your entertainment, your news, your information from support services. And we want to keep building on that. So, we’ve launched a very early version of the product and the vision is to keep adding to it and, globally, to become the one stop shop really for smart speaker content. And we’re seeing different people, younger people, so this smart technology is opening us up to a new audience and it’s great.

White

And how much does it cost to use?

Humphreys

So, we’ve got an intro offer going for the first year, just, as I said, we are because we are building on the service, it’s £19.90 and if you signed up now, you’d get a full one year for that price. And we’re going to keep reviewing that, our intention is that it will roll into a subscription price of £9.95, which is comparable with a lot of other content sources that you can subscribe to.

White

Louise, thank you. So, what do the consumers think? Chloe Tear is a disability blogger, she’s visually impaired herself and she wrote a review of RealSAM. So, Chloe, what did you make of it?

Tear

I really, really liked the concept of RealSAM. I’ve used smart speakers for many years but I think their navigation was just a lot smoother. You can give more than one command at once, it just means that, again, everything is in one place. And I think the kind of foundation they’ve built with RealSAM is going to be really beneficial as more and more content gets added to it.

White

So, what content do you, in particular, use, what did you take advantage of?

Tear

I really enjoyed the audio books, it’s something I use a lot anyway, but kind of just being able to be like go to this page and it’s almost as if I’m opening a book. I also really liked the access to daily Ted talks, again it was just really easy to get up. I think, you know, the sight loss information is going to be really beneficial, just if you want to check something or if you’re new to sight loss.

White

Anything it could improve or perhaps anything completely new it could do?

Tear

Ideally, I would want it to almost be my Alexa and kind of run over the whole system, obviously that involves a lot of different programs but I think the core system will allow them to keep adding.

White

A tenner a month would be the eventual subscription cost, would you sign up for that?

Tear

I think currently probably not but that is, again, based on the availability they have currently. If they had a wider range of services then, yeah, I think it would definitely be beneficial and just allow a smoother experience.

White

Chloe, thank you very much indeed. And apologies for setting off your Alexas throughout that interview, as I’m sure that we did.

Now, everything we’ve talked about so far on this programme has been rooted very much in the present and what’s available now but coming down the track, is something, you’ve probably heard about – augmented reality. You might have heard of it in relation to Google’s glasses, where the idea is that the tech would overlay information onto the real world, things like a menu if you happen to walking past a restaurant.

Now, maybe that’s not much use to people who are blind or partially sighted but a masters student at York University wants to make sure we don’t miss out either on these developments. Josh Greg, is from the Audio Lab Research Group at York.

Josh, I’ve had a stab at explaining augmented reality, now do it properly for me.

Greg

Yes. I mean, to be fair, you were pretty much right on with your definition of AR there Peter. AR is a technology where virtual elements are overlaid onto the real world to enhance it. So, the example you used was Google glasses and so that might information but the other classic example is Pokémon Go, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that.

White

Indeed, yeah.

Greg

So, it’s, yeah, for entertainment too, to kind of put these virtual creatures into your environment, so you can interact with them for fun as well.

White

But from – I mean we’ve been hearing about the practical uses of the RealSAM idea, what are the practical uses of this to actually improve visually impaired people’s lives?

Greg

So, we’re looking at using creative cutting-edge audio technology. And from the start of the creation process with accessibility in mind throughout the creation process. And then the other thing we’re looking at is putting some control back into the user’s hands because not everybody’s access needs are the same. And if you think about it, this kind of makes sense – audio is often used to make the medium more accessible. The classic example would be audio description on TV or talkback on voiceover on your phone. But it’s not always perfect, when you think about audio description it’s often kind of written after the fact, without reference to the original script. So, what we’re saying is audio has all this amazing potential, creative potential, to show people, not just tell them. The example would be, in a radio drama, they don’t tell you what’s going on they show you through sound effects and through background noise and all those things, so we’re just doing exactly the same but through VR. So, that’s through using extra sound effects, through using 3D sound where you can hear things where they are in your environment in a more real way and also, where audio description is really needed, thinking about it much more creatively, so thinking about using first person methods, kind of making the whole experience much more cohesive, much more what the content creator wants it to be. And then the second thing there was personalising the content, no two users access needs are ever going to be same, so it’s giving control back so people can really focus in on the sounds that they want to hear. So, it might be they need to hear the Pokémon moving more than they need to hear the background music and letting them make that choice themselves.

White

And I think you want to enlist people to take part in a research project to design an augmented reality game. Tell us about that.

Greg

Yeah, that’s exactly right. So, it’s an opportunity to, you know, have a go, first of all and also, to kind of influence this research and direction we’re going. So, all you need is an iPhone or an Android phone and if you follow this link – so bit.ly/audioar you’ll be able to get involved. But essentially, what we’ve done, we’ve looked at the AR apps that are out there and looked at whether they’re accessible, the answer is they’re not. Often they don’t even work with talkback or voiceover, depending on which operating system you’re on. And now we’ve created an app that is – it’s this lovely game experience where you’re in a virtual forest and you can interact with things. And, so, we’re looking for visually impaired users and content creators, as well, AR content creators, to have a go and tell us is it accessible, how could we make it accessible. The idea then is to take this app and take that feedback and make an accessible version, so using those powerful cutting-edge audio techniques, using personalisable control so that people can have their own control over it. And coming back to the same visual impaired users to see if it works essentially. So, yeah, please, please do take, we’d love as many people as possible to have their say in this because it’s such a new developing technology. So, that was bit.ly/audioar, if you’d like to take part.

White

Okay, and we’ll have some more information about that on our website. Josh Greg, thanks very much for joining us.

And that’s all for this week. In the coming weeks we do want to talk about relationships on this programme, in particular we’re keen to hear from you if you’re someone whose relationship has been affected by your gradually losing your sight over time. How did your partner react to that? Did it strengthen the bond between you or did it cause problems? We’d like to hear your experiences, do email intouch@bbc.co.uk

From me, Peter White, producer Simon Hoban and studio manager, Sue Stonestreet. Goodbye.