The users' PC will misinterpret it because it has no capacity for building on previous experiences, which enable humans to understand more ambiguous sentences.
Experience becomes an essential prerequisite for complete interpretation all of the time and NO machine has evolved to do this.
People with disabilities are being discriminated against due to poor provision of user-friendly technology. The Turing Lecture 2006 given by Chris Mairs, director of Data Connection, exposed this sad state of affairs and looked at how the situation could be improved.
In the UK there is a legal and social framework which protects the interests of its 8.6 million disabled people, including the disability discrimination act (1995). This insists that goods/services provided for the public must be accessible for all.
The Act covers all manner of technologies, including websites, but ironically does not compel technology manufacturers and designers to consider the disabled user; it only requires that reasonable adjustments are made to accommodate them.
A disabled person can enter an electrical retailer and be provided with help in choosing a product but when it comes to actually using it no account has been taken regarding its design for that person to use it.
Manufacturers need to change their habits and incorporate new disabled-friendly technology from day one and not try to add to or reconfigure their product at a later stage when its essentially too late and too costly to do so.
Ultimately, devices often exclude people who can't interact with them. Obviously specialist kits are available, but come complete with a hefty price tag that most can't afford.
Sometimes manufacturers don't see the opportunities around them; most obviously disabled people's vast spending power - £50 billion per annum in the UK alone.
However, smaller organizations are probably only ever going to move towards greater accessibility through increased legislation that is properly enforced.
Website designers too need to be led to produce content development tools integral to their sites, not as add-ons.
The disability rights commission website report for 2004 surveyed 1,000 publicly available websites. No site researched reached the highest compliance level and less than 19 per cent had made any effort to include visually impaired people.
In HTML one can tag the images but these still need to be very specific in content and context to provide useful information to someone who is visually impaired.
In order to improve this situation there needs to be appropriate structure behind the website design and web architects need to think carefully on how it should and can be read or interpreted.
Historically technological advances within mainstream digital technology have excluded disability groups, although have occasionally developed a technology that has accidentally been a boon to a particular group. For example, text messaging is very useful for deaf people.
Through Open design principles and equalities such as XML - tagged data and Resource Description Framework (RDF), for content interpretation, our original headline (OAPS…), can be broken down for the listener so that they can determine the true meaning of the phrase.
Opportunities introduced by VoIP and phones with LCD displays are improving existing problems with voice messaging, meaning that the menu can be displayed on a phone with a voice synthesizer on it too.
Ultimately if designers made things simpler for everyone, more than just minority groups would benefit from talking visual remote technologies. 60 percent of all blind/deaf people are over 65 years of age…so inevitably improving access to technology is to everyone's benefit.
The IET and BCS can help by acting as information centres to better inform designers and industry, by contributing time and skills in the promotion of open sourcing within the technology industry and in lobbying government.
Disability is diverse. As a consequence of this we can't possibly address accessibility for everyone all of the time.
Universal accessibility is impractical, however, it is ultimately in everyone's interests to try to improve the situation and if ethics is not the issue with manufacturers then potential increased revenues should be.
