Touchscreens and blind users

Reuters reports on a CES event emphasizing the needs of blind users and the risks of the touchscreen trend. Some excerpts:

The craze for touch-screen gadgets, sparked by Apple Inc's popular iPhone, is raising worries that a whole generation of consumer electronics will be out of the reach of the blind.
Motown icon Stevie Wonder and other advocates came to the world's biggest gadget fest, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, to convince vendors to consider the needs of the blind. [...]

Advocates argue that if product designers take into account blind needs, they would make electronics that are easier to use for the sighted as well.

The good news is that manufacturers do not need to put large sums of money into making products accessible, nor would they have to forsake innovation, said Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation For The Blind.

"We don't want to hold up technological progress," he said. "What we're saying is, think about the interface and set it up in such a way that it's simple .... The simpler you make the user interface of a product, it's going to reach more people sighted or blind." [...]

With the popularity of touch screens, once simple products such as televisions and stereos have become difficult for blind people to use as they often require navigation of multiple menus that need to be seen to be used effectively.

"That's an increasing problem with new digital devices. It's easy to add feature after feature that's buried under menu after submenu," said Mike Starling, chief technology officer of National Public Radio, which is working on accessible options.

Manufacturers have been putting touch screens in everything from calculators and watches to computers and music players.

Sendero Group President Mike May, who is blind, joked, "Can I ski 60 miles an hour downhill? Yes. Use a flat panel microwave? No." Sendero makes GPS navigational devices that have an audio output for the blind.

There are also screen readers that give an audio reading of a phone's menu. But Anne Taylor, director of access technologies at the National Federation for the Blind, says they do not yet help her to use a touch-screen phone.

She said the ability to use a device without needing to look at it could help sighted people who are driving or older people whose eyesight is starting to deteriorate.

While blind users can buy screen-reading software for $300 upward, it tends to only work on certain phones, often the most expensive smartphones. Sendero said accessible technology is often expensive, and about 70 percent of the U.S. blind population is unemployed.

Taylor is using CES as a forum to present vendors a set of suggestions for product design that she sees benefiting both sighted and blind consumers.

For example, manufacturers could include an easy-to-use start-over button, different sounds for different menus, and controls with good tactile feedback.

Link:Touch-screen gadgets alienate blind(Reuters)

Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

SELLING TO THE OTHER THREE BILLION A cellphone shop in Accra, Ghana, which carries and repairs a variety of handsets.
By SARA CORBETT

If you need to reach Jan Chipchase, the best, and sometimes only, way to get him is on his cellphone. The first time I spoke to him last fall, he was at home in his apartment in Tokyo. The next time, he was in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in West Africa. Several weeks after that, he was in Uzbekistan, by way of Tajikistan and China, and in short order he and his phone visited Helsinki, London and Los Angeles. If you decide not to call Jan Chipchase but rather to send e-mail, the odds are fairly good that you’ll get an “out of office” reply redirecting you back to his cellphone, with a notation about his current time zone — “GMT +9” or “GMT -8” — so that when you do call, you may do so at a courteous hour.

Keep in mind, though, that Jan Chipchase will probably be too busy with his job to talk much anyway. He could be bowling in Tupelo, Miss., or he could be rummaging through a woman’s purse in Shanghai. He might be busy examining the advertisements for prostitutes stuck up in a São Paulo phone booth, or maybe getting his ear hairs razored off at a barber shop in Vietnam. It really depends on the moment.

Chipchase is 38, a rangy native of Britain whose broad forehead and high-slung brows combine to give him the air of someone who is quick to be amazed, which in his line of work is something of an asset. For the last seven years, he has worked for the Finnish cellphone company Nokia as a “human-behavior researcher.” He’s also sometimes referred to as a “user anthropologist.” To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.

What amazes Chipchase is not the standard stuff that amazes big multinational corporations looking to turn an ever-bigger profit. Pretty much wherever he goes, he lugs a big-bodied digital Nikon camera with a couple of soup-can-size lenses so that he can take pictures of things that might be even remotely instructive back in Finland or at any of Nokia’s nine design studios around the world. Almost always, some explanation is necessary. A Mississippi bowling alley, he will say, is a social hub, a place rife with nuggets of information about how people communicate. A photograph of the contents of a woman’s handbag is more than that; it’s a window on her identity, what she considers essential, the weight she is willing to bear. The prostitute ads in the Brazilian phone booth? Those are just names, probably fake names, coupled with real cellphone numbers — lending to Chipchase’s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.

Last summer, Chipchase sat through a monsoon-season downpour inside the one-room home of a shoe salesman and his family, who live in the sprawling Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Using an interpreter who spoke Tamil, he quizzed them about the food they ate, the money they had, where they got their water and their power and whom they kept in touch with and why. He was particularly interested in the fact that the family owned a cellphone, purchased several months earlier so that the father, who made the equivalent of $88 a month, could run errands more efficiently for his boss at the shoe shop. The father also occasionally called his wife, ringing her at a pay phone that sat 15 yards from their house. Chipchase noted that not only did the father carry his phone inside a plastic bag to keep it safe in the pummeling seasonal rains but that they also had to hang their belongings on the wall in part because of a lack of floor space and to protect them from the monsoon water and raw sewage that sometimes got tracked inside. He took some 800 photographs of the salesman and his family over about eight hours and later, back at his hotel, dumped them all onto a hard drive for use back inside the corporate mother ship. Maybe the family’s next cellphone, he mused, should have some sort of hook as an accessory so it, like everything else in the home, could be suspended above the floor.

This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers, while Nokia’s researchers, including Chipchase, more often have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner’s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they’re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.

more:(2/8)http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13anthropology-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2

Texting a signal of wider trends (bbc.co.uk, 11 January 2009 )

Ask anyone over 25 what digit they use to ring a doorbell and most people will pop up their index finger.

But ask a youngster and they are much more likely to extend a thumb.

"Where texting is happening they use the thumb," Anand Chandrasekher, head of Intel's ultra mobility group, told BBC News at CES.

For Mr Chandrasekher the change from index finger to thumb overturns decades of practice.

It shows the growing importance of mobile technology and how it can shift behaviour and who will be the big users of it in the future.

"The next generation of computer users is kids and the way they use it is totally different," he said, adding that the mania for texting, mobiles and the net was a symptom of a larger shift.

"If you look at what's happening underneath we think it's about the internet and the internet becoming pervasive," said Mr Chandrasekher. "People want it wherever they are."

But, he said, few people seem to want to use a mobile phone, even a smartphone, to get at all their online stuff.

Research by Intel suggests that 80% of people with a smartphone get frustrated when accessing the net with one.

The reason, he said, was because they only got a portion of what they were used to when they sat down in front of a desktop.

That frustration, said Mr Chandrasekher, helped to explain the growing interest in so-called netbooks - small machines that do a good job of connecting to the web but, before now, have lacked the processing horsepower of their laptop and desktop brethren.

Statistics released at CES by the Consumer Electronics Association show that in 2008 the sales of netbooks jumped by 63%.

The CEA said, in the US, about 10 million of the cut-down computers were sold. It expects sales of the machines to almost double in 2009.

This year it also expects that 63% of computers sold in the US will be portable.

"I remember three or four years ago there were models out there and they did not take off," said HP spokesman Reagan Lucas, "and here we are at the beginning of 2009 and the segment has really taken off."

But, he said, people were careful shoppers when they go looking for a netbook and were keen to get as many features as possible into the gadget they buy

"Everyone wants the mostest for the leastest," he said.

Netbooks launches

At CES, HP showed off its Mini 1000 series of netbooks that come with either a solid state or standard hard drive, 92% size keyboard and are based around Intel's Atom 270 chip that is optimised for smaller devices.

The Mini 1000 Mi series run a Linux-based interface that gives owners access to a few key common tasks, such as e-mail, web browsing, media watching and sharing.

CES also saw the launch of netbooks such as the Asus Eee T91, the pricey Sony Vaio VGN P500, Dell Mini Inspiron 910 and many, many others.

Mr Chandrasekher said many of the smaller computers shown off at CES and due to go on sale in 2009 go beyond the basic capabilities of the first generation of netbooks.

The next version of Intel's Atom chip would cut power consumption by up to 10 times, claimed Mr Chandrasekher and do much to make netbooks more capable computers.

"It might sound paradoxical," said Mr Chandrasekher, "but it took a lot of processing power to make a gadget's graphical interface easy to use.

"There's a lot of intelligence that can be put in to help with that," he said.

Younger generation 'key'

Intel is not alone in trying to limit the compromises people make when buying a netbook. At CES graphics specialist Nvidia demonstrated a prototype machine based around its Tegra chip family.

"We see an opportunity in this product segment as the performance is pretty bad in most cases," said Stuart Bonnema, technical marketing manager for Nvidia's mobile products group.

"The graphics are designed for Outlook and Excel rather than performance."

The Tegra chipset, based around the ARM 11 processor design, uses dedicated hardware to handle graphics rather than rely on the basic abilities bound to a netbooks core processor. Without that dedicated silicon, said Mr Bonnema, videos or films would be unwatchable on a netbook.

"It'll play back video at three or four frames per second that is supposed to be running at 24," he said.

Decent video and media handling abilities were likely going to be crucial for the younger generation of netbook users, said Mr Bonnema.

"It's likely they will be used to watch video or create and edit clips for YouTube," he said.

The first netbooks with the Tegra chipset onboard should appear before June 2009, said Mr Bonnema.