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The Touring Intelligent Machine
May. 16th, 2019 01:54 pmThe Touring Intelligent Machine: Designing an Accessible Virtual Tour of MIT through a Voice-Based Alexa Adventure Game
Part 1: Technology, Accessibility, and People with Disabilities as Early Adopters and Adapters
When it comes to accessibility for people with disabilities (PWD), digital technologies are a double-edged sword, being equally capable of either allowing or preventing access, and yet people with disabilities are often technology’s early adopters and adapters, and sometimes themselves inventors. To illustrate this point, let’s take a quick tour of a technology that almost everyone uses every day, your smartphone.
If you enjoy listening to your MP3 player, its technological ancestor, the phonograph, along with the first telephone speaker, was invented by Thomas Edison, who was himself almost entirely deaf . The keypad, even in its twenty-first century virtual form, is still based upon the design of the mechanical typewriter, invented in the early nineteenth century by Pellegino Turri for his blind friend, the Countess Carolina Fantoni de Fivizzano, who wrote him letters using the machine. Lastly, grad students everywhere may empathize with Wayne Westerman and John Elias, who developed the touchscreen when Westerman developed repetitive stress disorder while writing his doctoral dissertation. It was this technology which was bought by Apple in 2005 and integrated into their own research to become the touchscreen used in Apple’s iPhone and iPad
For more on the subject of PWD becoming early adopters and adapters of technology, including the text-to-speech I’ve been using since the 1990s, see the paper The Evolution of Assistive Technology into Everyday Products by Nicolas Steenhout.
Did I say that was the last smartphone technology which began as assistive technology?
There is one more: Alexa herself started life as Amy, a text-to-speech program used to read news to blind people in Britain. Amazon acquired Amy when it acquired The Polish company Ivona Software in 2013 .
Back in 2013, however, no one, not even the Wall Street Journal, had any idea what kind of transformation Amy was going to go through on her way to becoming Alexa. WSJ thought Amazon was just going to integrate Amy into the Kindle ebook reader, while other tech Web sites such as Tech Crunch thought Amazon was looking to developing their own version of Siri, and still others dismissed Amazon’s final product, the Echo, as nothing but a geeky way to play music.
Perhaps, if someone had bothered asking a blind person what she would do with a cheap talking device with access to just about every news source, radio station, and podcast, not to mention many devices, connected to the Internet, she could have given them a hint. Most blind people, and many people with disabilities in general, are futurists, in addition to being optimists, and automatically start thinking about what they could do with any accessible technology that falls into their hands. Make it simple to use and then, unbelievably, price a basic version at $50, and often half that price, and almost anything begins to seem possible.
I need to take a moment here and describe the state of assistive technology for blind people in general. Media loves telling stories about the wonderful things blind people can do with their assistive technology, but no one ever mentions the price tag. Most screen reader programs, like JAWS, cost $1000. Kurzweil 1000, a software program that scans and reads text, cost $1000. The HIMS ebook reader I recently bought cost $500, and that is an amazingly unstable piece of hardware that crashes more often than a bumper car. It becomes clear why an iPhone, enabled with Siri, with its robust OS and free tech support for people with disabilities, has a huge dedicated following of blind consumers, but an iPhone still costs around $500 for the cheaper models. In addition, both assistive tech and iPhones have a pretty steep learning curve, a hundred things you have to know by memory in order to use them. For these reasons, these technologies can be a challenge to access, both in their price tags and their learning curves.
Then along comes the Echo Dot, with Alexa, and it costs $50, a tenth of most accessible ebook readers, and one twentieth of a screen reader, and all you have to do to start it is plug it in and talk to it. Even compared to Siri, it is amazingly inexpensive and easy to use.
And then there are all those games…
Yes, I’m finally getting to the games part of this paper: I apologize for taking you the long way around but hey, the route that takes twice as long is often the only accessible route, so welcome to my world.
I admit, I’m not really a gamer, not even a casual gamer, really. Video games were kind of spoiled for me the time I was playing one with my husband (I would make the choices and he would operate the controls), and I confusedly asked, “So, in most cases, the answer is steal it, kill it, or set it on fire?” and he acknowledged that this was indeed the case with most video games. So, as I’ve said, I’m not really a gamer, but my husband is, and my housemates are, as are many of my friends, and playing games together is one of the main ways in which people socialize, so there are times I would like to share that experience.
Think about it like this: of all the computer and online games any one of you has ever played, maybe one or two--or none--would be accessible to me, as a blind person and, of all the memories you have of playing games with family and friends, a blind person would have only a fraction of those.
Yet, access to games, like access to built environments, is often still dismissed as a subject which is not of particular interest, importance, or relevance to most people, despite the fact that, as in the case of access to buildings, there are now laws concerning access to games. The most common way of dismissing the subject is for critics to claim that accessibility to games can’t possibly be of concern when people with disabilities have more serious issues to deal with. Yet there are many sources which demonstrate that many people with disabilities believe access to games is of great importance. A few of these are AudioGames.net and AbleGamers.org, most of whom work with developers to make games more accessible. As many gamers with disabilities point out, reasons for playing games can include: socializing online is more accessible than travelling outside the home, a form of mental exercise, and even helping to cope with chronic pain.
The big software and game developing companies, such as Electronic Arts , are also starting to have working groups dedicated to the subject of accessible gaming, with Microsoft dedicating their commercial airing during the 2019 Superbowl to show off their new adaptive games controller, along with images of kids with disabilities using it. While we might cast a cynical eye, as it were, upon Microsoft’s use of adorable kids with disabilities to help sell their adaptive controller, there also needs to be the acknowledgement that January 2019 was the date that the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CAA), regarding companies’ requirement to include some accessibility features in all games, became active, after years of waivers requested by game companies.
This general purpose legislation, however, only applies to text chat, voice chat, and video chat. Consumers themselves are demanding increased accessibility features and, as described in this online article 5 Ways Accessibility in Video Games is Evolving, many game developers are beginning to recognize how improved accessibility makes for a better game.
On the day I am posting this, May 16, it is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, with many events occurring both on and offline, and companies such as Apple acknowledging what’s being done and what’s still left to do.
This first part of my paper is already getting longer than I had originally planned, so I would like to end it with some quotes from Ian Hamilton, who may be one of the most informative and eloquent advocates for game accessibility. This interview was posted on Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2018. The Right to Play:
“Accessibility in gaming is important because gaming is important. It’s a huge part of our culture and society, so it would be an equally huge deal to be excluded from it. It’s a $100 billion industry (for context, the global music industry is worth $16 billion and box office cinema $40 billion) — a great deal of revenue can be gained or lost through accessibility. Another important reason is of course the difference it makes to people’s lives. Games offer access to recreation, culture, socialising. These are things that many people take for granted, but if for any reason your access to any of those is restricted in day to day life, being able to access them through games instead can make games a really powerful contributor to your quality of life.”
Part 1: Technology, Accessibility, and People with Disabilities as Early Adopters and Adapters
When it comes to accessibility for people with disabilities (PWD), digital technologies are a double-edged sword, being equally capable of either allowing or preventing access, and yet people with disabilities are often technology’s early adopters and adapters, and sometimes themselves inventors. To illustrate this point, let’s take a quick tour of a technology that almost everyone uses every day, your smartphone.
If you enjoy listening to your MP3 player, its technological ancestor, the phonograph, along with the first telephone speaker, was invented by Thomas Edison, who was himself almost entirely deaf . The keypad, even in its twenty-first century virtual form, is still based upon the design of the mechanical typewriter, invented in the early nineteenth century by Pellegino Turri for his blind friend, the Countess Carolina Fantoni de Fivizzano, who wrote him letters using the machine. Lastly, grad students everywhere may empathize with Wayne Westerman and John Elias, who developed the touchscreen when Westerman developed repetitive stress disorder while writing his doctoral dissertation. It was this technology which was bought by Apple in 2005 and integrated into their own research to become the touchscreen used in Apple’s iPhone and iPad
For more on the subject of PWD becoming early adopters and adapters of technology, including the text-to-speech I’ve been using since the 1990s, see the paper The Evolution of Assistive Technology into Everyday Products by Nicolas Steenhout.
Did I say that was the last smartphone technology which began as assistive technology?
There is one more: Alexa herself started life as Amy, a text-to-speech program used to read news to blind people in Britain. Amazon acquired Amy when it acquired The Polish company Ivona Software in 2013 .
Back in 2013, however, no one, not even the Wall Street Journal, had any idea what kind of transformation Amy was going to go through on her way to becoming Alexa. WSJ thought Amazon was just going to integrate Amy into the Kindle ebook reader, while other tech Web sites such as Tech Crunch thought Amazon was looking to developing their own version of Siri, and still others dismissed Amazon’s final product, the Echo, as nothing but a geeky way to play music.
Perhaps, if someone had bothered asking a blind person what she would do with a cheap talking device with access to just about every news source, radio station, and podcast, not to mention many devices, connected to the Internet, she could have given them a hint. Most blind people, and many people with disabilities in general, are futurists, in addition to being optimists, and automatically start thinking about what they could do with any accessible technology that falls into their hands. Make it simple to use and then, unbelievably, price a basic version at $50, and often half that price, and almost anything begins to seem possible.
I need to take a moment here and describe the state of assistive technology for blind people in general. Media loves telling stories about the wonderful things blind people can do with their assistive technology, but no one ever mentions the price tag. Most screen reader programs, like JAWS, cost $1000. Kurzweil 1000, a software program that scans and reads text, cost $1000. The HIMS ebook reader I recently bought cost $500, and that is an amazingly unstable piece of hardware that crashes more often than a bumper car. It becomes clear why an iPhone, enabled with Siri, with its robust OS and free tech support for people with disabilities, has a huge dedicated following of blind consumers, but an iPhone still costs around $500 for the cheaper models. In addition, both assistive tech and iPhones have a pretty steep learning curve, a hundred things you have to know by memory in order to use them. For these reasons, these technologies can be a challenge to access, both in their price tags and their learning curves.
Then along comes the Echo Dot, with Alexa, and it costs $50, a tenth of most accessible ebook readers, and one twentieth of a screen reader, and all you have to do to start it is plug it in and talk to it. Even compared to Siri, it is amazingly inexpensive and easy to use.
And then there are all those games…
Yes, I’m finally getting to the games part of this paper: I apologize for taking you the long way around but hey, the route that takes twice as long is often the only accessible route, so welcome to my world.
I admit, I’m not really a gamer, not even a casual gamer, really. Video games were kind of spoiled for me the time I was playing one with my husband (I would make the choices and he would operate the controls), and I confusedly asked, “So, in most cases, the answer is steal it, kill it, or set it on fire?” and he acknowledged that this was indeed the case with most video games. So, as I’ve said, I’m not really a gamer, but my husband is, and my housemates are, as are many of my friends, and playing games together is one of the main ways in which people socialize, so there are times I would like to share that experience.
Think about it like this: of all the computer and online games any one of you has ever played, maybe one or two--or none--would be accessible to me, as a blind person and, of all the memories you have of playing games with family and friends, a blind person would have only a fraction of those.
Yet, access to games, like access to built environments, is often still dismissed as a subject which is not of particular interest, importance, or relevance to most people, despite the fact that, as in the case of access to buildings, there are now laws concerning access to games. The most common way of dismissing the subject is for critics to claim that accessibility to games can’t possibly be of concern when people with disabilities have more serious issues to deal with. Yet there are many sources which demonstrate that many people with disabilities believe access to games is of great importance. A few of these are AudioGames.net and AbleGamers.org, most of whom work with developers to make games more accessible. As many gamers with disabilities point out, reasons for playing games can include: socializing online is more accessible than travelling outside the home, a form of mental exercise, and even helping to cope with chronic pain.
The big software and game developing companies, such as Electronic Arts , are also starting to have working groups dedicated to the subject of accessible gaming, with Microsoft dedicating their commercial airing during the 2019 Superbowl to show off their new adaptive games controller, along with images of kids with disabilities using it. While we might cast a cynical eye, as it were, upon Microsoft’s use of adorable kids with disabilities to help sell their adaptive controller, there also needs to be the acknowledgement that January 2019 was the date that the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CAA), regarding companies’ requirement to include some accessibility features in all games, became active, after years of waivers requested by game companies.
This general purpose legislation, however, only applies to text chat, voice chat, and video chat. Consumers themselves are demanding increased accessibility features and, as described in this online article 5 Ways Accessibility in Video Games is Evolving, many game developers are beginning to recognize how improved accessibility makes for a better game.
On the day I am posting this, May 16, it is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, with many events occurring both on and offline, and companies such as Apple acknowledging what’s being done and what’s still left to do.
This first part of my paper is already getting longer than I had originally planned, so I would like to end it with some quotes from Ian Hamilton, who may be one of the most informative and eloquent advocates for game accessibility. This interview was posted on Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2018. The Right to Play:
“Accessibility in gaming is important because gaming is important. It’s a huge part of our culture and society, so it would be an equally huge deal to be excluded from it. It’s a $100 billion industry (for context, the global music industry is worth $16 billion and box office cinema $40 billion) — a great deal of revenue can be gained or lost through accessibility. Another important reason is of course the difference it makes to people’s lives. Games offer access to recreation, culture, socialising. These are things that many people take for granted, but if for any reason your access to any of those is restricted in day to day life, being able to access them through games instead can make games a really powerful contributor to your quality of life.”
