Access For All

A new international research report commissioned by ACCAN (Australian Communication Consumer Action Network) reports on 16 high-speed broadband applications that can provide enormous benefits to people with disabilities. The report was conducted between November 2009 and January 2010 and discusses the uses of broadband applications in Europe, the United States and Japan. “This is ground-breaking research into how the innovative use of high speed broadband can deliver potentially life-transforming services for consumers with disabilities,” Allan Asher, CEO of ACCAN said. “If Australia were to adopt these uses it would set the standard in international best practice with this platform.”
Download the report here.

The FCC (Federal Communications Commission – USA) released “A Giant Leap and a Big Deal: Delivering on the Promise of Equal Access to Broadband for People with Disabilities“. It is the second paper in a series of working papers that are being released in conjunction with the USA’s National Broadband Plan, and it is the first time the Commission has issued a working paper addressing accessibility and technology issues.
References are being made to EU backed initiatives such as the ÆGIS and Reach112 projects.

As appeared on PlatformOnline:

After taking in some sessions on technologies designed to improve health and education, we took a moment to speak David Brown, professor of interactive systems for social inclusion at NTU, and Penny Standen, professor of health, psychology and learning disabilities at the University of Nottingham, about their research into ‘serious games’.

What’s the difference between serious games and commercial games?

David Brown: Commercial games can be serious games, but it just means that, unlike commercial games with an entertainment purpose, serious games usually have some kind of learning or rehabilitation focus rather than purely entertainment.

At today’s conference, you presented several games designed to rehabilitate people with disabilities and health problems. Can you describe how one of those games would be used?

DB: One of the games that we develop is a 3D introduction to work. [It] uses the [Source] engine that’s used to produce [Half-Life 2]. Except we produce a new level of the game – it is modded. And instead of running around killing everybody, we strip all the weapons out, and we just use the characters the environments, the settings, the buildings, to simulate what it might be like for a person with a disability on their first day. Because they might have more extreme fear or trepidation about their first day. And there might be some really particular information about what a person with a disability must know on their first day – we use the game, and that engine, to simulate their first day at work.

Why did you decide to pursue this research?

DB: Really it was about 20 years ago. I started working with Penny [Standen] and the Sheppard school 20 years ago, because people with a learning disability don’t particularly work [well] with abstract ways of learning, such as learning English to describe something or mathematics. They work very well with being shown or interacting with three dimensional, interactive environments – where you can learn by doing, learn experientially rather than learning something like English then reading a book about it, because it is an abstract [way] to learn about a real world system. So, we simulate the real world system.
Penny Standen: You can also do it over and over again. You can practice things as many times as you like without really getting your teachers fed up. And it’s a safe environment in which to practice in.

The possibility to repeat tasks is a key advantage for serious games, then…

DB: Yeah. [Users] can interact, they can get consistent feedback. It is your interaction at drives the learning process, so you’re fully engaged in the system. We started with the development of virtual environments way back in the day. But what we find more recently is, we can do the same kind of simulations, but the games’ engines give us all of the environments and the characters already developed up to a really high [level] of fidelity. That’s what our young gamers have come to expect. So, if we were developing those characters ourselves we [would] have to invest huge amounts of time and energy to produce that kind of level of system. Whereas, games’ engines do half that work for us. We just then have to embed the narrative in there, rather than developing the environment and characters as well.

What sort of limitations are there for serious games?

DB: The limitations would be whether we’ve actually embedded the learning objectives in them. Sometimes with serious games, we put lots of learning objectives in and that detracts from the game playing element. But with pure games, there isn’t the learning embedded in it either. It’s about finding that middle ground between the two, so you’re maximising the engagement from a computer game, but also getting the advantages of having learning objectives. That’s a really fine line to balance between. Sometimes you achieve it and sometimes you don’t.

Where do think your research will take you in the future?

DB: Well, there are lots of things we want to do, like a lot of the stuff we’ve been showing tonight, such as stroke rehabilitation. What I want it to be now. We’ve had lots of ideas for the last 20 years, but, perhaps over the last five or six years, we’ve been proving that serious games and virtual environments do have a real clinical effect – as Penny’s proved – on people’s choice reaction time or their independent decision making or in some of the other studies on memory. So, these games and environments do have a real educational or clinical effect and we need to go on proving that. Once we [establish] that, they’ll be embedded into real educational and rehabilitation [institutions].
PS: [Building] something that’s more acceptable to a wide range of age groups as well. I think people have been saying that some of the [users] are too old and they may not want to do it. But I think they’ve got to be acceptable to everybody, so that people use them as a natural form of learning or treatment.

To find out more about serious games research in Nottingham see ntu.ac.uk/sat.

RoboBraille is named winner at the BETT Awards in London – the prestigious annual recognition of excellence in educational ICT. The Danish team behind the danish e-mail service RoboBraille won the prize together with the British partner The Royal National College for the Blind (RNBC) who took the prize. Among the nominees were strong combatants such as British BBC.
The RoboBraille service is an email-service capable of translating your documents to and from contracted Braille and to synthetic speech.
You use the RoboBraille email accounts by submitting a document (e.g., a text file, a Word document, a HTML page) as email attachment. The translation is returned to you via email, typically within a matter of minutes. All files are handled confidentially and they are deleted from the server as soon as your translation is done.
The RoboBraille service is available free of charge to all non-commercial users.
The BETT Awards is an annual scheme that highlights exemplar digital products intended for the education marketplace. The event is produced by Emap Connect, the organiser of the largest educational technology show in the world – BETT. The BETT Awards is made possible by working in association with Becta, the Government’s lead agency for ICT in education, and BESA, the trade association representing the educational supply industry.
For more information please visit: http://www.bettawards.com

Hungary does not pay enough attention to the possibilities offered by active ageing tools and by an inclusive Information Society for the elderly in relation to socio-economic competitiveness, employment, education and skills development. These indeed hold considerable potential in terms of market opportunities, productivity and growing domestic consumption.

Hungary has entered an era of accelerating loss of the demographic balance: while the Hungarian population will lessen by 10-20 percent in the next decades, society will age faster than the European average. It is foreseen, as a result, that in 2050, the legacy costs of one inactive old persons will be supported by only 2 active employees, instead of 5 today.

In a recent research, the Foundation for the Research on the Information Society has examined the process of ageing in terms of labour market activity, social contact networks, intellectual and physical activity as well as an independent and full life. It furthermore assessed the effects and drawbacks of the more or less open attitudes concerning technological innovations.

The research results have drawn a clear causal mechanism among the above aspects. Should state intervention intend to reach the strongest possible multiplier effect among the elderly, that is, in case its final objective is to increase employment and life quality, it must take account of the following lines:

1. Economic activity is most influenced by intellectual state;
2. Intellectual state is most influenced by the use of ICT tools.

Improving the accessibility and usage of ICT tools in the elderly group is therefore of substantial importance. The report calls on the government to pay special attention to this since digital tools play a provable influence on the improvement of the quality of life and intellectual activity of the aging and older people.

Unfortunately, some kind of a Matthew effect can also be demonstrated: the use of the ICT tools is basically influenced by intellectual activity, while it is one’s intellectual state and activity that can be most improved by the use of ICT tools, so those possessing a lot of cultural capital are able to accumulate even more by using these tools. This also means that those being in the highest need of the life quality improvement possibilities offered by the ICT tools show the most negative attitudes. The research thus concludes that the elderly in the Information Society represent a strongly segmented category.
Source: Official press release – Foundation for the Research on Information Society (in Hungarian)

In 2008 about 4000 hearing- impaired people lived in Belgrade, Serbia. Research showed that at least 70% of all disabled people were unemployed or had a very poor standard of living. In order to improve this situation, the International Aid Network (IAN) in partnership with the Serbian Association of Deaf and Hard of Hearing launched the project, “Professional Empowerment for Deaf and Hearing-Impaired People”, in June 2008. This project has given 24 hearing impaired people the opportunity to improve their chances at finding employment and also to enhance their current careers. An educational programme, financed by the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy and Microsoft Serbia, was carried out in the IAN computer school in Belgrade, and consisted of 296 classes. Each class was conducted with the help of sign language interpreters and students were taught how to implement and successfully utilize many different skills to empower them in the workplace. Students obtained the internationally recognised ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence) certificate as part of their intensive IT skills courses. Three top students have even become ECDL testers while participating in the project. In addition, students became further empowered in how to write better CVs, and acquired the necessary tools to find jobs via the Internet. By combining these two elements, IT and professional skills, the project has succeeded with this group of students and has set a precedent for more disabled groups to become actively involved in professional life.
Source: http://www.epractice.eu/en/cases/empoweringdeaf