Dr John Low, Chief Executive, RNID
Ladies and Gentlemen
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to RNIDs first European conference on Access to the Information Society for deaf and hard of hearing people.
This is the first time that RNID has organised a conference of this type on access to the information society for deaf and hard of hearing people. It is always a challenge, organizing a conference, when you need communication support for so many different types of needs. And I am delighted to have 3 interpreters, or is it 4, or 5 who are supporting me this morning and also our speech to text operators and lipspeakers. There is a loop system in the room. I hope everyone is able to participate by understanding what is being said today.
My name is John Low, I am the Chief Executive at RNID, the largest charity in the UK working with deaf and hard of hearing people.
Deafness and hearing loss is a very significant issue in Europe. By 2005 there will be over 81 and half million Europeans with a hearing loss and this figure is also set to increase rapidly. By 2015 the figure will be over 90 and a half million. This means that as in the UK, over one in seven Europeans have a hearing loss.
This why RNID is active in campaigning at a European level and it is great to see so many of our European partners and key stakeholders here today. We have learnt a lot from them and achieved a lot working with them over the last few years.
The daily lives of deaf and hard of hearing people are increasingly influenced by the European Union not least in the area of the Information Society. This is a major area of activity not least because of Europe's commitment to increase growth and competitiveness and create knowledge based European economy. This has become known as the Lisbon agenda and creating an Information Society for All constitutes a major part of it. It is vital, that the one in seven deaf and hard of hearing people, and disabled people more generally, are given a stake in this process, which is driving so much of Europe's policy making activity.
New technology has huge potential to transform the lives of deaf and hard of hearing people and help create a fully integrated society. However, the danger is that unless technology is fully accessible and based on design for all principles it will create new barriers for disabled people rather than bringing down old ones.
The purpose of today's meeting is to develop a common European strategy in broadcasting and telecommunications, two major gateways to the information society for everyone, but even more vitally for deaf and hard of hearing people. Television is vital in both defining and giving access to the cultural landscape of modern societies. In the words of European Commissioner Viviane Reding "Information, democratic dialogue and cultural and social values. These words reveal the important role of broadcasting in our societies. It is not simply an industry like any other".
However, apart from a few countries such as the UK there are very low levels of subtitling and sign language on television in Europe. At an EU level, increases could be encouraged by instituting an EU Action Plan to encourage increased access to TV for disabled people co-ordinated by the European Commission and based on annual reports from member states on levels of subtitling, sign language and other assistive services.
Last year RNID and RNIB and our European partners sent a submission on this proposal to the European Commission on this proposal during the review of the Television Without Frontiers directive. We also made a presentation to the Contact Committee for this directive.
I am pleased that the Commission has agreed to continue discussing the issue of disability access in the Television Without Frontiers Contact Committee this year. However, we have also been told that the issue does not fall within the remit of the Television Without Frontiers directive and is a matter for member states under the principle of subsidiarity.
However, given that this directive regulates TV content in the EU we hope that the European Commission and member states will do what they can to encourage increases in subtitling and sign language and spread best practice across the whole of Europe.
RNIDs' domestic campaign around the UK Communications Act has paved the way for high levels of subtitling across all platforms in the UK and many people benefit. Our research shows that 5 million people use subtitles regularly and 1 million people not watch television without subtitles. It also shows that if broadcasters promoted subtitling services and how to access them more even more people would use the service.
We are extremely fortunate to have Erkki Liikanen as our keynote speaker today because he has done so much to support initiatives for disabled people during his time as European Commissioner for Enterprise and Information Society.
A culmination of this, during the European Year of Disabled People in 2003, was the establishment of an Inclusion Committee to look at the barriers to the Information Society for Disabled People and how to overcome them. The committee submitted a report to Communications Committee made up of EU member states representatives at the end of 2003.
Disability groups involved in drawing up this report very much hope that EU member states on Communications Committee will act on the recommendations in the report within their own country and it shows there that even basic telecommunication and broadcasting services ought to be, ought to take advantage, or take account of the needs of disabled people
The INCOM report contains a number of crucial recommendations on television and telecommunications. While Commissioner Liikanen's responsibilities do not include television content, he is responsible for the EU electronic communications regulatory framework that encompasses digital TV equipment. He has given a lot of support to the CENELEC 'TV for All' European report which has identified the technical requirements necessary to give deaf and hard of hearing people easy access to subtitling and sign language services on TV receiving equipment.
This excellent report was written by Gerry Stallard, who has along history in subtitling and has been very supportive of our work.
Broadly, the TV for All report highlights the technical measures necessary to make digital TV accessible to disabled people. Disability groups involved in this initiative, including RNID, believe very strongly that standards should be drawn up on the basis of the reports findings and we also hope that industry will give its full backing to the report. We understand that Commissioner Liikanen will ask his services to establish a checklist of support activities for accessibility and to try to allocate tasks to research, standardisation and dialogue in regulatory and industry groups in order to spread best practice. We look forward to learning more about this in his speech today.
However, this again brings us back to content, namely the amount of subtitling and sign language on television in Europe. As Commissioner Liikanen himself has pointed out even if the technical standards exist to cover the provision of subtitling and sign language on TV, that does not mean broadcasters in member states have to provide these services.
Commissioner Liikanen is not responsible for content issues but we hope he will do what he can to encourage broadcasters to increase the levels of subtitling and also sign language interpretation and presentation on television in EU member states.
In the area of telecommunications, a major issue that needs to be resolved is agreement of a universal interactive text communication to give deaf people the same level of access to the telephone network that hearing people enjoy. This means enabling them to communicate via real time text on mobile and fixed line telephones in the same way that hearing people have interactive voice conversations.
Over the last decade, mobile communications have completely changed the way we live, work and entertain ourselves. Being able to communicate while in the move is no longer a luxury for a few, but has become an essential requirement for every citizen who wants to fully participate in society.
Only 10 years ago, there was a celebration that GSM had finally reached 1m people 1m handsets had been sold. By the end of this year, 1.6 billion people will have a mobile telephone. That is 25 per cent of the world's population. It is no longer a luxury or an addition for a few people, but core to our society.
Currently, the vast majority of deaf mobile phone users have to rely on SMS to communicate. However, this technology has no quality of service attached to it- you have no guarantee that your message has been sent- and because it is based on the 'store and forward' principle it is totally inadequate in emergency situations.
Allowing deaf and hard of hearing, and speech impaired people to communicate via text over the phone is relatively straightforward from a technical point of view; but the barrier to implementation is the incompatible technical protocols covering text communication on mobile fixed line and Internet systems. The absence of a universal text solution means that textphones are expensive, they are not widely available and work on a range of incompatible protocols and this is 2004. You would have thought we had it fixed by now! We have third generation mobile networks being rolled out but there is no provision in them to accommodate the needs of deaf people.
A universally accepted technical specification needs to be drawn up for text communication. This can only be resolved at a European level. The solution must encompass both telecommunications networks and terminals. They are currently regulated under separate directives and there is no unified approach. This is a major obstacle to resolving the text communication issue.
RNID believes that the best solution is the adoption of the standard T.140 over IP as defined in RFC2793 offers the best possible solution and we will be learning more about this in the next presentation by Guido Gybels and in the telecoms workshop.
As with subtitling on television, technological barriers are not the main problem but rather a lack of will on the part of legislators, standardisers, regulators and industry. What is required is concerted action by the European Commission, member states, standards organisations, manufacturers and service providers in partnership with groups for disabled people as well as a realisation that accessible technology will open up a huge market of consumers.
But not only will fully accessible technology in broadcasting and telecommunications benefit deaf and hard of hearing people but also it will provide improved services to all consumers. For example, research shows that subtitling is very beneficial to many hearing people such as children learning to read and people watching television in a second language so that they can both listen to and read dialogue.
Consider the huge popularity of SMS messaging among mobile phone users. The service was only introduced by mobile operators to take up some of the spare capacity in the network. At first it was free and the only people who used it were the nerd people who got to the back of the instruction manual that came with the phone. Yet today in the UK alone, over 60 million text messages are sent every day.
A massive 20.5 billion SMS messages were sent over the four main mobile networks in the UK in 2003, according to the Mobile Data Association, with 1.9 billion sent in December alone.
I imagine that a live, interactive texting facility would be a very popular feature and that it would be used very extensively by all SMS users. Indeed, a recent survey in the UK found that text messages have superseded phone calls as the most common use for a mobile phone among young people.
Therefore, subtitling on television and interactive text communication on telecommunications networks and services are vital to give the one in seven deaf and hard of hearing people in Europe access to the Information Society. However, it is also important not to pigeon hole these technologies but rather introduce them into the mainstream for to the benefit of all consumers.
We very much want today's conference to be an interactive event; if you haven't done so, lift the arm rest on your seat and you will discover a microphone and head set, so that all of you have a chance to speak. There is no excuse! and that will be true throughout the day. Please, share freely. We want to tap into your expertise, we want to help you to interact with each other, and we will pick your brains during the 2 workshops after this plenary event. And they will give you a chance to quiz our panels of experts who have come along and we hope after lunch to present the results of those workshops to commissioner Erkki Liikanen when he arrives.
I have a great passion for deaf and hard of hearing people. Some say to me "of course, television news should be subtitled so that deaf people can be informed of what is going on in the world." Well certainly, I would not want a deaf person to be walking around after 9/11 wondering what all the fuss was about because they didn't have the knowledge that everyone else had. But that is not the key point. Our society is based on television; we use reality television, we use game shows, we have soap operas - you may not like them, you may think they are rubbish, but it doesn't matter, they are part of our society. Can you imagine going to work the following morning or meeting friends for coffee and not going what has been happening in our society? To be so completely excluded. Why do we do this to deaf people? Why do we exclude them from our society? Imagine not being able to call an ambulance from your mobile phone? Maybe you are lucky enough to be in an area where you can send an SMS to an ambulance service - I don't know of any - but you will never know whether that message has actually got through until the vehicle arrives or doesn't arrive. Why do we isolate people in this society when technically it is possible and the barriers are there for us to tear down and to move forward to create an inclusive society for the benefit of all.
Before we all go work in the workshops I would like to hand over to Dr. Guido Gybels, Director of New Technology at RNID who will set the scene for today's conference and give us a presentation on the key themes for the conference.
I do hope that you will find today's proceedings interesting and useful in pushing the crucial debate forward on access to information and communication technology for deaf and hard of hearing people.
Thank you
Speech held at the occasion of the European Conference on "Access to the Information Society" in the Residence Palace, Brussels, on 25 February 2004.
