Personal Interface Unit (PIU) — an idea whose time has come?

I first encountered this term in Alan Cane's May 30, 2007 Financial Times column about the growing digital divide between the disabled and those fortunate enough — so far — not to be among them.

Long story short: AbilityNet, a charity specializing in technology useful for those with physical impairments, "... finds consistently that more than 80% 'do not even meet a minimum accessibility threshold."

More: "Another study revealed that of 1,000 public UK websites tested, there more an average of 108 barriers to accessibility on each page."

Here's Cane's piece.

Perspectives: Focus on disability could enable us all to play better

It is but an ancient memory now, but the 2007 FA Cup final between Chelsea and Manchester United — for non-footballing readers, it ended Chelsea 1, Manchester United 0 after extra time — will not go down as a game to remember.

The brand new, hugely delayed, hugely expensive Wembley Stadium, with its colossal arch visible from across north London, did get the thumbs up, however.

Which is more than the Wembley website did, at least from AbilityNet, a charity specialising in making technology useful for those with physical impairments.

It gives the site only two stars — three are needed to denote the minimum standard that would enable disabled people to use the site effectively. It fell short on many measures that could have made Wembley online an enjoyable experience for the partially sighted and blind, the hard of hearing and those who find using a mouse difficult.

This is by no means unusual. AbilityNet has been monitoring websites for accessibility for years and despite legislation designed to ensure that people with disabilities are not discriminated against in the e-economy, it finds consistently that more than 80 per cent “do not even meet a minimum accessibility threshold”.

Another study revealed that of 1,000 public UK websites tested, there were an average of 108 barriers to accessibility on each page: silly and easily correctable things such as labelling a photograph “photograph” rather than providing the screen reader with a description of its contents.

Tesco stands out as a company that has made huge efforts to make its website accessible and has been rewarded with four stars out of a possible five by AbilityNet.

But giving the Turing Lecture last year, Chris Mairs, the computer specialist who is registered blind and is chief technology officer for Data Connection’s MetaSwitch division, observed: “The inaccessibility of most retail websites is just one example of countless barriers illustrating a substantial divide between the government’s stated objective and corporate/societal behaviour.” (In 2005, the UK government argued that “by 2025, disabled people in Britain should have full opportunities and choices to improve their quality of life and will be included and respected as equal members of society”.)

The “digital divide” that separates rich from poor in terms of access to information technology is well understood and there are programmes in place to attempt to remedy the situation — the “One laptop per child” initiative led by Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ recent promise of low cost software are examples.

But as Mr Mairs’ remarks indicate, an equally problematic divide is developing between those physically able to enjoy the benefits of IT and those to whom IT is a barrier to be overcome.

The problem is international. There are, of course, many examples where IT has been put to good use to overcome a physical handicap. “Jaws”, the text-to-speech reader that enables blind and sight-impaired people to read a computer screen, is a brilliant example.

Mr Mairs point out, however, that a small market inevitably means that such devices are expensive and, more critically, that the access they provide to a lifestyle necessarily lags behind the emergence of that lifestyle.

He goes on to argue: “These technologies — mobile phones, iPods and so on — often create or fuel new cultures and new social grouping.

“If a particular disability group is excluded from access to a technology, then they are also often excluded from that cultural shift or that social grouping.”

The interface is often the problem: it is designed to be both intuitive and appealing. Manufacturers are unwilling to compromise what can be a major, perhaps the major, selling point for the sake of accessibility.

He has an answer: a personal interface unit or PIU, which would be a way of separating the interface from the functionality of a device.

The PIU would be tailored to the individual — an audio PIU for the visually impaired; a visual PIU for the hard-of-hearing. Mr Mairs proposes that the mobile phone could provide a PIU for the visually impaired with speech synthesisers allowing them to join the now universal texting culture.

Retailers have found, however, that given the choice of a fully featured website or a simplified version tailored for accessibility, customers often choose the simpler option. Few people use more than a few per cent of the power of the digital devices available to them.

The truth is that we all struggle to deal with technology at some point and the digital divide can operate in many ways — young versus old, educated versus uneducated, north versus south, east versus west and so on.

In other words, we could all benefit from our own, individual PIUs if we are to keep pace with the development of technology. That is unlikely to be realised.

But if the ergonomists working on the design of the latest, most intuitive, most tactile, most glitzy interfaces were to collaborate in their thinking with specialists in accessibility for the physically impaired, everyone might benefit.