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An interview with Kevin Carey, Director and Founder of HumanITty
By Clare Richards |
Kevin Carey's favourite digital resource is not his PC or his mobile phone, it's his talking microwave. As one of the UK's leading experts in ICT and social inclusion you might expect something a little bit more hi-tech. But being totally blind, Kevin discriminates ruthlessly between the aspects of modern technology that work for him and those that don't. "My Sky TV remote controller is totally inaccessible and I can't use the menus on my mobile phone. Over the last four years my technological life has stood still, if anything it's got slightly worse, but the fact that I've got a talking microwave is just wonderful," he says.
As the founder of HumanITy, a UK-based charity set up to bridge the digital divide, Kevin is a passionate advocate for the half of the UK population that has difficulty accessing the sights and sounds of the Information Age. His mission is quite simple: "To get information to people who need it in a medium they can access." This is certainly not a minority issue in the UK's ageing population: "Almost all disabled people become disabled after the age of 50," he says.
He is frustrated by the slow rate at which accessible media technology is taken up by the computer industry. "We should be a lot further on than we are at being able to talk to computers and to have them talk to us. For more than 10 years we've been able to do voice-in on computing and it's not as reliable as it should be. Most computers can generate voice-out at very little cost," he says. He also calls for an ethics of ICT design as strict as the ethical principles behind the design of children's toys and medicines. "If we are going to call something a communications technology then we must be clear that it can facilitate communication and not frustrate it," he says.
In fact HumanITy have now switched their attention to the potential of broadcasting having concluded that computers in their current form (qwerty keyboard, mouse etc) will always exclude 50% of the population - "the bottom half of the market", as Kevin calls it. "What people need is reliable, trusted information, and the more we thought about it, the more we thought that's not the internet - that's broadcasting," he says. I ask him to forgive an ignorant but obvious question: how exactly does a blind person watch television? "Television is the primary information medium for most people in the country. People who can't see simply get used to filling in the gaps. You get used to guessing but I would simply much prefer to have it made easier," he says. Audio description - literally a voice describing what is going on in the unexplained parts of the programme - is the answer but current UK legislation only requires 10% of programmes to have it 10 years from now. Kevin says that this figure is too small but explains why: "Audio description is an art form so it's expensive to produce - it's an attempt to describe what is missing".
Kevin has just started a two-year NESTA Fellowship to research digital audio description and subtitling techniques to find out whether it's realistic to ask for more coverage. "The kind of technology that you're using dictates what is reasonable to ask for in legislation," he says. He has just returned from a research trip to the United States where they are much further on than the UK. Even though there is no licence fee in the United States, they have a statutory requirement to have 100% of their programmes subtitled for deaf viewers by 2006. They also have a National Centre for Accessible Media in Boston and Kevin is also researching how this could work in Europe - naturally a complex proposal considering the number of languages involved.
10 years from now Kevin believes that the key user interface will be the numeric keyboard rather than the qwerty keyboard, which, after all, was only designed to stop key clashes on manual typewriters. And how does he envisage convergence of the TV and the computer? "It may be that convergence will render PCs and televisions near identical; but the former comes out of an environment of mistrust and the latter out of an environment of trust, so even if the technologies converge, we might well be better off putting a printer onto the television than trying to force unwilling people to use the PC," he says.
For an unashamed member of the 'intelligentsia', Kevin is refreshingly enthusiastic about television. "I think it is immensely stimulating and it's done an immense amount of good for people. People are so much more knowledgable now about their own health and also how the world works, and that's almost entirely due to factual television programmes," he says. He is also genuinely passionate about its social role, which he says is the main motivation for his work: "Daytime television is a real companion for many old people on their own - it's what talks to them and it needs to be fully accessible to them because its crucial," he says.
www.humanity.org.uk
HumanITy
108 High Street
Hurstpierpoint
West Sussex
BN6 9PX
Phone: 01273 834321
e-mail: humanity@atlas.co.uk
April 2004
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