In the late 1970s a group at Smith-Kettlewell Institute developed a system that enables people with print-handicaps (visual/cognitive impairments, illiteracy, "wrong" language) to access the signs the rest of us take for granted.
We demonstrated the technology convincingly; then our job became getting it understood - so that it would be installed. That meant "Technical Communication" - which we found is a lot more than writing documentation or training manuals. We had to move from our professions as designers/innovators/visionaries into being advocates for changing the world. A roomful of blind engineers and their sighted friends was a start but it would take a lot more to put accessible signage on every street corner in the universe!
In the ensuing quarter century it became clear that when communicating about an access tool (actually, when communicating about anything!), you must do so accessibly - so that everyone can "get it".
This article traces the move from the usual "product announcement" through several species of communicative formats to the focus on making all Technical Communications accessible to everyone, everywhere, convincing professional Technical Communicators that in their work it is vital to attend to the important business of inclusion.
Our first paper (1979) about the system explains the evolution of the technology - from Alexander Graham Bell, who said in 1880 "the photophone is the greatest invention I have ever made; greater than the telephone" - to comparing RIAS (Remote Infra-red Audible Signage) with other methods of making the environment accessible (including radio, buried loops, and the navigation systems used by ships and airplanes).
We also had to (over and over!) explain that braille, in addition to only being usable by about a quarter of blind folks, was of no use in a space larger than an elevator because the problem of finding it was essentially insurmountable.
As we explained the workings and demonstrated our prototypes we soon learned that in order to spread the word about how all this stuff worked and what it might accomplish we were entering into an area fraught with inertial resistance to any kind of change on such a large scale as well as many built-in misconceptions about how PWD (People With Disabilities) were to be allowed into society.
The director of the project understood that getting signs installed would require a huge effort. He hit the road with working models as we made constant improvements. The barriers to widespread implementation would lie in politics: Technical Communication on a really large scale.
We created approximately a ton of verbiage and along the way refined our methods and broadened our reach. In doing this we learned that any message about accessibility must itself be accessible and that's the "why" of this article.
We wrote detailed explanations (1986-90) of the system's technical/social/economic aspects. We postulated the effects of gains in employment/inclusion of blind folks on our society's devaluational attitudes which date from Biblical times. What we didn't know was how long it would take!
I learned from the blind community: sighted folks' misunderstandings had the potential of thwarting blind guys' own directed goals of technological development. Just as the general community wonders how "the blind" can eat without sticking a fork in their lip, so we think that their main problem is running into stuff - it's not! It's orientation ("where am I?") and not "mobility" ("find the path/obstacle with my cane")
Rule #1: attend to your audience. If you're building something for blind people, you'd better include blind people in the design process!
I began writing little notes about what could happen for my blind pals if such a system were installed. I spun fantastic tales of a future in which it would be trivial for one to know what was around. I understood that if you knew what a water fountain was and a proximate sign said "water fountain" the rest was fairly straightforward.
There was no World Wide Web at the time so I couldn't imagine that one could know very much else than what a sign said just from being nearby. As the Web made its "all about everything" potential clear, the idea of using signs to provide information services beyond their primary content made their communication potential unbounded - of course it compounded the difficulty of our task because now we were claiming a completely new extension of the uses for signs.
After a couple decades, I had graduated to more grandiose presentations and put them on the Web. The steps towards getting things done demanded the presence of a different kind of communicator. I thought of myself as an "inside man", lurking in a windowless lab in San Francisco with almost no skills at organizing much of anything. I needed an "outside man", but most of them had their own entrepreneurial directions. Could I get lucky?
At a conference in D.C. I met just the right guy.
Without himself becoming the center of attraction, Ward goes all over the world spreading the word using the in-person version of Technical Communication. This caused an avalanche of visibility for the project: from local newspapers to "Sixty Minutes" - a PR person's dream of exposure. But it still takes a long time and unceasing presentations.
Companies were started and grant assistance grew into commerce and one magical day an engineer from Mitsubishi Precision said to me "I've read all your papers on the Web."
His flattery let me know that the project had moved up an order of magnitude and rather than just one aging Bohemian/Beatnik/Hippie ranting about a talking environment, there were dozens of engineers spending thousands of hours and millions of dollars putting the project into product form. Even the president of Mitsubishi was in on the dream!
Instead of a little few-person upstart start-up, we were a global enterprise.
When I went to conferences of interest to blind folks, I kept getting people literally crying on my shoulder as I demonstrated an illustrative installation, usually in a hotel conference area hallway with meeting rooms outfitted with signs that spoke their name.
Many times I heard "this is the first time in my life that I actually feel oriented" or "it's almost like being able to see". Often they would express the usual misgivings about "not getting too up for a down" with "they'll never let us have these" and "but it would take millions of them to be of real use."
I needed to find out if they really wanted them or if I was just in the throes of what infects most mad inventors: Messiah-think. Could I get to the root of things?
I gave presentations at conferences on disability, I wrote for journals aimed at people with visual impairment, I became immersed in the DRM (Disability Rights Movement): people who were activists/advocates and who "lay across the tracks", usually about getting the built environment accessible for folks in wheelchairs - the "movement" was into making society change to accept PWD (People With Disabilities) as co-equal humans rather than de-valued outcasts.
Attitudes towards accessibility ("human right, not privilege through exclusivity") found very far-reaching policies mandating new attitudes and consequent requirements on the facilities in the built environment and even on attitudes concerning communication itself.
It is hard to imagine a more specific directive to those who design today's technical communications than the UN's declaration: "States have a responsibility to create the legal bases for measures to achieve the objectives of full participation and equality for persons with disabilities".
Hence the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) - which on careful reading seemed to require signage to be accessible to people who couldn't see/read it.
Just as it's important that we include PWD in all aspects of society, it has become central to achieving that end to ensure that "they" not be excluded by our Technical Communications.
By this time most technical communication took place in the "medium that changes everything": the internet.
Just as the built environment demanded attention so that PWD weren't systematically devalued and isolated from society, to its as well as their detriment, so the rapidly-deploying World Wide Web posed both the greatest promise for and threat to inclusion in the revolution in interactive communication: one could actually refer to citations in a document without going to a different area of the library. Hypertext moved from intellectual fantasy to trivially easy point/click reality.
How could we prevent this realized dream from becoming a nightmare if it excluded people who, while listening to a page being read to them by means of some form of text-to-speech technology were suddenly confronted with an interface that was designed without much attention to where the "here" is in "click here" - and what does "blue" signify; "how am I to make sense of something that repeatedly/mysteriously says 'image', 'image', image?"
It became obvious that in order to assure the effective usefulness of all this by blind folks, I had to participate in an effort to include them in every aspect of the design/implementation of the architecture of everything put on the Web.
I joined several Working Groups of the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). WAI recommendations/guidelines/checkpoints form the basis for most of the legislative/regulatory/policy criteria that lead towards an accessible Web - which leads in turn to a more usable Web for us all.
Along the way it became clear that the very means of intra-communicating about these matters by the people most affected was threatened by "retinal chauvinism" and other functional-barrier-producing societal vectors. And that's why I'm writing this for this particular audience.
Every "Technical Communication" must attend to the needs of those "others" or we all lose. Somewhere I'm quoted as saying: "Until everybody is connected, nobody is connected". Through such universal connectedness we can best do whatever it is that we ordinarily consider to be the "best of humanity": feeding babies who are in danger of starving and ending genocide/war.
Of course the details of achieving accessibility didn't keep me fascinated beyond a couple of years but the net result is that I wind up writing for you that it's vital to heed all this stuff.
We've had to mobilize an army to carry the message throughout the "establishment" so that it became expected that the transportation system would talk to its users and that the regulations/standards/policies of every aspect (public and private) of the environment would be made usable by everyone because we need all the help we can get.
The historically devalued/disenfranchised/excluded people have so much to offer all of us. It has become a drain to continue with the pretense that "we" (who have ready access to the tools of communication) are somehow sufficiently superior that we can ignore others' needs.
Once it became clear that the signs could, merely through having distinct individual numbers, link one to whatever information on the Web that the user sought, we found ourselves in the midst of a new concept: The Semantic Web - the means for mining all that information from indices of its meaning rather than merely its verbal content.
Because the Consortium was developing many architectural technologies for getting and presenting information, the acronymic overload visited on Technical Communicators became quite a challenge and now you must have at least a cursory understanding of many concepts that are becoming central to effectively doing your job.
In addition to the usual accessibility guidelines there are centralized repositories of various recommendations that enable preparing one's Technical Communications for delivery to anyone/anywhere/always regardless of the device being used to access it. The grander goals for the Semantic Web should inspire you to undertake making your Communications amenable to access by infomining machines as well as people.
I wrote a little primer for colleagues in the EOWG (Education and Outreach Working Group) describing what became PointLink™ - explaining what we expect to be the future of the Web.
Just as our dreams for an accessible planet are still unrealized, so this vision is yet to be fulfilled: so we must share its promise in articles like this and hope to enlist another army - this time of communicators - to get us all together.
Each effort to make it clear that utility is best served by heavy indexing so that anyone with a need/yen to know what you're communicating about can have trivially easy access thereto, makes us all richer/safer/productive. We can move more rapidly to singing/dancing/playing just like Nature intended.
Always preaching, chiding my fellow Communicators about the same things this article espouses. After a while it gets strident and the impatience with continuing instances of willful avoidance of practices promoting access glares through.
Talking Signs are beginning to make an impact all over the world but their acceptance is still in large measure pity-based. It's not widely understood that "all connect or none are truly connected." And it's been over twenty years!
It turns out that the actual ADA law makes it clear that wherever there's a publicly placed sign (including, one would presume, the ones painted on the utility poles that read "bus stop"), there must be equivalently accessible signage for those who can't read said sign. It also turns out that the process of making the law enforceable demands corollary "regulations" so that officials who purchase the printed signs have some guidance as to what constitutes compliance.
The function of crafting those regulations falls to "The Access Board". Like most political units, they are subject to countervailing forces - only one of which is the need of blind people to find bus stops.
My first experience with bureaucracies in Washington, D.C. wasn't very productive. I naively arrived with a set of signs programmed with the door numbers of all the offices in an appropriate section of the very department that funded their development. They were the NIDRR (National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research).
They sent me to the ATBCB (Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board).
They informed me that in order to put (even temporarily) anything on the walls of a government building demanded permission from the GAO (General Accountability Office). In order to get permission from them to stage a demonstration required something akin to a hearing, with appropriate notices.
Of course, everyone essentially laughed me out of town and the carefully contrived demonstration never took place.
That was in 1980.
One medium of Technical Communication is a petition to the appropriate agency explaining why they are supposed to include this now rather obvious and well-tested accessibility aid in their regulations.
This had almost as much effect as the 1980 demonstration.
Another is to organize folks to show up at local hearings of the Board to testify before them about why/how this should all be done.
Such notions as "it's the law" and "we really need access to signage information that you folks with retinas have" formed the basis for yet another "Technical Communication" - one that seems different from yours, but is part of the communicative process.
The gains made through the efforts at communicating about this system to the blind community, the general public and legislators/regulators has been encouraging. One lesson is that the goals have moved along with the growth of the available tools/technology.
Our main focus at this time is on providing access to the public transportation system because being able to get around is central to the advancement of PWD into their rightful place in society instead of on its fringes, relegated to second-class citizenship.
One of our jobs as Technical Communicators is to bring knowledge/hope to this so-long-maligned group of our fellows. Now that activists/advocates/academics are joined in the task, it devolves on us to support their efforts at inclusion for everybody - at long last!
Sometimes you might find yourself helping to write/modify an "act of congress" which gets a foot in the door (1998).
Along with the ADA, there's other important legislation that will inevitably affect your job as you further the goals of inclusion. Along with clarifying regulations and the policies of non-governmental entities we have a great deal of "talking the talk". Getting the dance to go with this song is in large measure within our grasp.
Every time we communicate we must do so as accessibly as possible, not just because it's the law or because it's the "right thing to do", but because we need to set an example with our professional behavior that complements our ethical codes.
A lot of what we are doing now is to communicate the testimonials of those most affected by Talking Signs installation. Of course we make use of the emotional aspect of what this means to them but still try not to shamelessly exploit it in some garish manner.
Much of what we uncover for this purpose is from the Web: unsolicited support from completely unexpected sources.
Dr. Marston's prescription for a usable transit system came as a pleasant surprise to me. We were connected with other academic studies of how well the system worked but I had never met Jim until after he had published this work.
Since then he has made a career of essentially tooting our horn all over the world. His own deteriorating visual acuity has also been a motivator.
As one designs communications to be used by diverse audiences with disparate display systems, it becomes clear that the Communicator has the responsibility to reach all of the potential audience.
We must counter the forces who hold that this is some sort of add-on rather than a necessary/integral part of the design process. Accessibility is not a "feature" that is somehow optional, but an essential ingredient that has profound side effects - particularly in the areas of usability/efficiency.
By insisting on tools that promote this undertaking you will be stretching the envelope and in addition to making your work accessible, you will make the client more aware of the societal impact of all these techniques fostering inclusivity.
In addition to those laws/regulations/policies concerning accessibility, there are a great many company policies, so many clients of Technical Communicators will be aware of the importance of your work complying in these matters.
In fact it will almost certainly be a selling point for your services if you can show that your work reaches this larger, heretofore oft-ignored population.
There will be readers who access the Web in ways different from you. As you become more familiar with the importance of Device Independence for accessibility reasons, it will help your "reach" as it becomes evident that the possible means of getting to your communications are more than just reading them on a desktop monitor or even in a book/manual/article.
The available technologies that are emerging faster than you can become aware of them will make what's in use now seem archaic in just a few years and by approaching "universal design" through the accessibility/usability/device-independence portal you will be able to keep up or ahead.
As more people do their information acquisition in novel situations (commuting or even vacationing) it will not be unusual to learn that your materials are more often listened to than read. They will "read" your Communication in other media than the one in which you create.
Because you are covering all the display bases, there will be less retrofitting and we know that it's much better to design for change in the beginning rather than cobbling on adaptations later.
What you mean to communicate is paramount the "how" must serve the "what".
The best advice you can get in this area comes from the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee who said in a keynote address in 2000 "If you write what you mean instead of what you want done with it, it can be repurposed so much better."
At that time the very notion of "repurposing" was rarely considered but now it is very important. That's why you want to deal with the semantics of your message, both as a conscious means of communicating better and as a basis for indexing your content by its meaning - the now-famous "Semantic Web".
Most people who write "the manual" or "help screens" go nameless and even the famous "©" seldom sullies their work, not to mention "®" or "™"! But in the main, we don't care - we're just trying to communicate the information to as many people who need it as is within our power.
You are the messenger, not the "star of the show"
The consumer of the information must be #1. One of the most dangerous mindsets you can have is to think of communication as a top-down affair, like a TV broadcast.
Until you learn from what you teach, you are not doing the best possible job.
One of the least effective developments of the Web as a largely visual medium has been the tendency for it to wind up in the hands of print/graphic designers who often sacrifice substance on the altar of style. Content is king, style/format/medium are its handmaidens.
The very essence of communication is to furnish the content to the user in an easy-to-get form. When the appearance furthers that goal it's fine but when it dominates it becomes a tail-wagged dog.
Insist that the client understand the benefits/costs of obeying/following rules. One of the most powerful lessons learned by Corporate America in the past few decades is that it is much cheaper to "get it right" from the start. If attention isn't paid to rules governing accessibility now the later legal consequences can rival what happened to asbestos and tobacco companies: ruin through litigation.
The trend of the laws concerning accessibility to information by PWD is very clear and the clients can pay less for proper presentations now or pay more to defend their oversights later.
It is desirable to explain what you're doing to achieve wide/diverse audiences, both because it makes your reasons clear and because the resultant "right thing to do" message is good Public Relations.
Again it can't be stressed too often: accessible communication is cheaper than legal briefs/depositions/litigation.
When you try to communicate with people who have significant interests in their own activities connected with what you're speaking to, you should "bond" with them if possible. The best way to get a message across is to be a part of those receiving the message.
You are not supposed to have the detachment from your subject that you would if you were a journalist. It's OK for a performer to simultaneously be part of her own audience!
When you are part of other groups who might have some effect on the goals of your audience, you should speak for them in your group. This will lend credence to your communication.
It's all right to be seen as even an apologist for those for whom you furnish information.
Whenever you tell an audience something, you should let your communication reveal its structure in the process.
You should always invite feedback from your audience.
Even the most arcane bits of information might prove some day to be of historical/educational interest. In saying what you mean you can furnish semantic links to the body of your work.
The devil's in the details and an integral part of authoring is indexing.
Annotate your Communication for deeper understandability so that those who want to look deeper can have guidance on where to look.
You should provide resources that underlie your resource.
Enable modificational feedback from the audience so that you can profit from their responses.
The audience/author divide has the same kind of artificiality as the teacher/student relationship. Teachers learn from students - authors should learn from readers.
Because of the availability/power of current and proposed tools for Technical Communication, you are able to do, almost by yourself, what would have taken a fairly large organization to accomplish in olden times.
You might enlist the services of artists/illustrators and even other presentation specialists, but as long as you keep in mind that it's the message that's the message and the medium but its stage, you will shape the shape of the future by your efforts in the now. Just remember: