CHAPTER 1

       40 years–Highlights and a Brief Review

       THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

      Digital technology has maked an enormous difference in the lives of a great many people, but significant numbers of people have been excluded, or have excluded themselves, from these benefits. These include many older and disabled people and other minority groups including people from certain cultures and those with very poor educational achievements. This has been called the Digital Divide. As government and commerce increasingly rely on the internet, these groups are becoming more and more disenfranchised.

      In the later part of the first decade of the 2000s, a range of initiatives were introduced to encourage such people to use Information Technology (IT) including advertising, provision of broadband in homes, and educational courses. A major problem, however, is that most information technology has not been designed with these groups of people in mind. They are either scared of it and/or do not think they will ever be able to use it. In order to play their part in reducing the Digital Divide, designers need take on the challenge of including the requirements of these “extra-ordinary” people in their practices.

      IT systems have been developed to support older and disabled people for many years, and this book contains an historic review of research in some areas in the field. One important lesson from this research is that rules and guidelines for including disadvantaged people in designs are sometimes less than adequate.

       Orthodoxy is the Grave of Intelligence. (Bertrand Russell)

      This book highlights insights and lessons learnt from over 40 years leading a group researching into and developing computer systems for older and disabled people. With the goal of influencing the mind sets of designers, it focuses on ideas on which to ponder, rather than describing an exhaustive research methodology.

1.1 AN INTERDISCIPLINARY EDUCATION

      I was very fortunate whilst at University to have been, more or less, forced into what turned out to be an interdisciplinary education. I was too young to be trained as a computer engineer but I did learn to touch type before going up to University—in the vain hope that I would type out my lecture notes each evening. This early decision has been immensely helpful to me as a software engineer, and, in more recent times, for any writing tasks. (All students learning to touch type would, I believe, make a significant improvement to their efficiency—but in the UK this is not happening).

      I had been very much focussed on science and engineering at school and read Electrical Engineering at Birmingham University. This was a traditional course, and was at the time (1959-1962) when transistors were gradually being introduced into such courses. So, I was taught about power transmission, valves (vacuum tubes), and transistors, but not computers or integrated circuits. On being awarded a BSc in 1962, I was offered a PhD studentship in that Department. My supervisor (Prof. Jack Allanson) was interested in how sound was reproduced on the cortex. He persuaded me to perform some experiments which involved playing sounds to human subjects and noting their responses. Thus, I had to learn about experimental psychology, both experimental methods and statistical analysis of results.

      It had been agreed that, at the half-way point of my PhD, I would return to more traditional electrical engineering. Another staff member, however, had different ideas. He wanted some experiments done on how people recognised sonar images, and it was made clear to me that it would fit in better with a three-year PhD—as I was already up to speed on perceptual experiments. I was disappointed, but agreed to go down that path which resulted in my PhD being entirely in “Subjective Pattern Recognition”, with little or no engineering.

       Everything might be for the best in this the best of all possible worlds. (Pangloss revised: Voltaire)

      At the end of my student days I was a trained electrical engineer and, by happenstance, a self-taught experimental psychologist. Such an interdisciplinary background was unusual in those days. This combination, however, proved to be very beneficial in my career, and, towards the end of it, the concept of “inter-disciplinary research” had become very popular. So my reluctant decision proved to be a very good one—my first example of an apparent set-back turning out to be for the best in the long run.

1.2 INDUSTRY—SPEECH RECOGNITION RESEARCH

      In 1965 my background in people, sound and engineering secured me a job in an industrial research laboratory that was funded to develop a speech recognition system. This was at a time when most researchers saw speech recognition as a relatively simple technical problem which “would be solved in two years, and make much money in five years”. This view of speech recognition continued throughout the rest of the last century but commercial success was very elusive. Interestingly, however, some of the earliest examples of commercial success of speech technology (synthesis and recognition) were as aids for people with disabilities. I was, and remain, very conscious of the complexity of speech and of the advantages of speech recognition—except in limited and carefully controlled situations [Newell, A., 1992a]. I was in a research environment whose aims did not fit with my views of what could be achieved, and the contribution that I, and the group I was part of, were able to make to that very overly-ambitious project was not great.

      There were, however, many advantages: the project purchased one of the first laboratory