ia050081



June 27, 2005



Subject: Accessibility Definitions - Contribution from Jim Tobias, Inclusive Technologies


Hi Connie et al,

Thanks for your note.  I promised to provide the group with some ideas on
our definitional issue, so I'll do it in the context of one particular
pre-existing definition of disability.

The other document we discussed is the WHO "ICF", or "International
Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health", also known as
ICIDH-2.  This is an important document in that it contains an
internationally recognized and authoritative framework for the entire
concept of disability.  For example, NIDRR, the US agency responsible for
supporting much of the research on disability, rehabilitation, and
accessible technology, uses ICF as a central organizing document and
encourages its use by its grantees.

As was mentioned on the call, the ICF puts disability squarely in the
social, not medical, realm.  To quote from its Introduction, "disability
serves as an umbrella term for impairments, activity limitations or
participation restrictions. ICIDH-2 also lists environmental factors that
interact with all these constructs. In this way, it provides a useful
profile of individuals' functioning, disability and health in various
domains."  (It's useful to understand that ICIDH-1 had a much more medical
orientation, and defined disability so as to focus on the individual rather
than the society or built environment.  About ten years of argumentation has
gone into its revision.)

A bit later (p. 8), the ICF defines certain terms:
"Body functions are the physiological functions of body systems (including
psychological functions).

Body structures are anatomical parts of the body such as organs, limbs and
their components.

Impairments are problems in body function or structure such as a significant
deviation or loss.

Activity is the execution of a task or action by an individual.

Participation is involvement in a life situation.

Activity limitations are difficulties an individual may have in executing
activities.

Participation restrictions are problems an individual may experience in
involvement in life situations.

Environmental factors make up the physical, social and attitudinal
environment in which people live and conduct their lives."

Of these 8, the first 2 are medical, the next 1 mostly so.  Beyond those are
4 that have to do with the roles that people have and the activities
normally associated with those roles.  Finally, there are environmental
factors.  The technology products and services we are concerned with are
only part of the "physical" subset of the "environmental factors" referred
to.  So we have a modest role (an unknown fraction of one-third of
one-seventh)!

Too modest, I believe.  As a designer and engineer I see how implicit
assumptions about users not only exclude current users who don't fit those
assumptions; they also exclude those users from contemplation, either by
designers or even by the users themselves.  If I can't climb aboard a bus I
don't even think about it after a while, and neither does the bus company.
So the built environment and the attitudinal environment have a deeply
reinforcing effect on each other.  If I am excluded from enough activities,
sooner or later I am excluded from certain roles.  Patterns of exclusive
products yield patterns of non-participation.  Perhaps a future version of
the ICF will explicitly recognize this.  For now, ICF clearly states the
position that disability is the product of a social process.  

Flowing from this position is that inaccessible products and services
literally create disability.  That is, disability in the sense of an
activity limitation does not exist until the designer (abetted by the
marketer, etc.) acts in such a way as to create an inaccessible product.

This may be relevant to our work in a number of ways.  For now, I would like
to propose 3 steps:
1. That we adopt the ICF as the authoritative framework for understanding
disability, beyond any short definitions we may adopt or refer to.
2. That we consider "accessibility" as the inverse of "disability" as
defined in the ICF.
3. That we explore using the ICF's framework to hold our results, and
reflect back to the appropriate persons within WHO what we are doing and
where we find the ICF in need of amendment.
I will look into whether I can release some documents along the lines of #3
that were prepared for another project, and which might save us some time.

***

I want to go on to say more about the other point I was trying to make on
our call.  I feel strongly about the need to do our work in a way that can
easily be used by others, especially others who are not experts in
accessibility.  As it is conceived now (and forgive me as a newcomer if I am
ignorant of previous conversations or decisions, or if I misrepresent the
current work plan), we are preparing an excellent set of guidance materials
for those who manage accessibility programs in either the private or public
sector.  If we can collect and collate all the standards that explicitly
address accessibility, and suggest solutions for the disharmonies and gaps,
we will have done these people a great service.

But my 20 years of experience in industry tells me that the biggest
information gaps have never been experienced by accessibility program
managers.  Those folks are able to attend conferences and trade shows, meet
with technologically sophisticated advocates, and compare experiences with
their peers in other companies or agencies.  The unbridgeable gaps lie
between those managers and the hundreds or thousands of people within their
own organizations who must somehow implement accessibility without fully
understanding the concept.  Accessibility, like all institutional
innovations, must be routinized and bureaucratized in order to have the
desired impact at the level of fine-grained design decisions, and in the
processes that support products and services throughout their life cycles.

So what do these hundreds of thousands of programmers, designers, testers,
industrial engineers, audio technicians, etc. actually need?  They need
product-specific and component-specific guidance.  They are not "designers"
or "testers" in general; they are assigned to a group that's working on a
new wireless voice and text terminal, for example.  They need to know
information that may be contained within a dozen standards documents, but
they probably don't have the time for such research.  One person may need to
know about the brightness of the display for purposes of procurement from
component vendors, and may not have the time to sift through an abstract
report.

If we could index our results so that they provided this kind of support,
the overall value of our work would be multiplied many times.  It might
itself become an industry standard for analyzing product and component
accessibility.  It would certainly reduce accessibility program costs and
delays, and provide useful just-in-time training for new staff.

How much additional work would it be?  (It's easy for me to say "Not much."
at this point.)  Having struggled through this exercise with several
companies, I doubt that there are more than a few dozen product categories
out there, nor more than a few dozen component categories.  If there is
enough interest I would offer to create 2 straw-man lists.

Thanks for your patience.

***********
Jim Tobias
Inclusive Technologies