Ladies and Gentlemen, good afternoon. I am glad that I have been given the opportunity to speak here today, because the topic of public transport in general and rail transport in particular is one that is of great relevance to all of us in today's society, yet we find that people with disabilities can be severely disenfranchised in their access to this facility and as a result might face significant barriers to fulfilment and participation in an ever faster moving world.
The last few centuries, mankind has seen technological progress like never before in history. These advances in science and technology have dramatically changed the way we work, the way we organise our economies, yes even the way we entertain ourselves. The radical change that the Industrial Revolution has brought to the world is certainly overall seen as a benevolent evolution, one that has empowered us and has transformed the face of society. And of course one cannot deny that when coal, iron and steam laid the foundations of our modern railways, they brought with them great economical development, something that has contributed to shaping the social fabric of today by providing the resources that support our contemporary vision of inclusive societies.
Yet, despite this tale of progress and advancement, we cannot ignore that there is a darker side to the coin as well. For, with every gain that science and technology have delivered, the rift between those of us who have been able to take advantage of it and those that were excluded from it, has grown. People with disabilities have unfortunately often been at the wrong side of the split, as a consequence of the fact that designs and implementations of services and equipment have often not taken their abilities and preferences into account.
We need to address this issue, and we need to do it vigorously and expediently, and that is why I wanted to speak to you today. This short talk is one of the many needed to raise sufficient awareness amongst all stakeholders, an attempt to engage with all relevant parties, so that we can work together, constructively, to try and make sure that we will be lowering existing barriers, and hopefully so that we can prevent new barriers from being raised as technology moves forward. It's also an appeal for all of you to engage more with user groups all across the spectrum of abilities, so that over time we will see less and less people being disenfranchised as a result of not being able to fully use public transport.
While nothing what I have to say today is not applicable in a generic sense, in my role as Director of New Technologies at RNID, you'll forgive me if I focus my comments on deaf and hard of hearing people as a user group. But despite that specific angle, nothing what I have to say contradicts requirements for other groups, nor would what I have to propose put undue burdens on transport providers, equipment manufacturers or service operators.
Deaf and hard of hearing people constitute a very large group of citizens. In the UK alone there are 9 million people with a permanent hearing loss or Tinnitus, while in Europe the number is well over 80 million. That means that about one in seven individuals in Europe is potentially affected by railway services that would not be fully inclusive to people with a hearing loss.
As you would expect from such a large number, it's also a very diverse group. Individual profiles range from those who were born deaf to those who acquired a hearing loss at a later stage of their life, in many cases as a result of the ageing process. There is a subset of this group that uses sign language to communicate, while others have learned to lipread and speak the language of the land. Hearing losses range from profoundly deaf over severe and mild to light. This assorted consumer group unfortunately also comprises ever more younger people, who have damaged their hearing beyond repair through exposure to unsafe levels of sound, because of personal stereos that can be heard three seats down the row or by going to clubs and other venues that play their music at volumes that would be unacceptable in any other environment.
Nevertheless, while we are talking about an extremely large group of people, with literally tens of millions affected in Europe alone, and the numbers steadily growing, we are also talking about a group that is often forgotten when it comes to accessibility and usability questions. Consequently, deaf and hard of hearing people are frequently severely disenfranchised, because their needs and requirements are not taken into account when services, equipment and products are being designed and built.
This problem is further compounded by the fact that many of the barriers that this user group faces, have a direct association with health and safety and thus potentially could be life-threatening impediments rather than a mere inconvenience. But even where health and safety are not immediately affected, I believe no one here would disagree with me if I say that in our modern world, we have come to accept that no one should be excluded from participation and opportunity as a result of their specific abilities and preferences. In the end, everyone is entitled to a fully equivalent experience when using public transport, whether or not they are hearing or deaf, seeing or blind, able-bodied or sitting in a wheelchair.
It won't come as a surprise to you when I say that the majority of the barriers that deaf and hard of hearing people face when using transport, result from communication related aspects of the transport experience. While in the last decades a great deal of work has been done on such important things as physical access to platforms and trains, deaf people face accessibility and usability barriers of a different kind - barriers that have not really been comprehensively and in an integrated fashion been addressed so far.
For deaf people, their ability to use public transport is greatly impacted by the specific hurdles that they have to overcome in terms of both getting information about the journey, as well as carrying out the various transactions that come with travelling on the railways.
The whole transport experience can of course be divided in different phases, from the pre-travel stages of information gathering, planning and ticket booking and purchasing, over the actual journey itself and through to any post-travel requirement. At every stage of this process, deaf and hard of hearing people face specific and often hugely disadvantaging obstacles. Before one travels, one wants relevant information about time tables, routes, possible detours or special situations, promotional offers etc. Yet, how do you access the phone lines that offer this information when you are deaf and your rail operator has no textphone access point or your country does not offer text-to-speech relay services yet? If you are a British Sign Language user, your first language is British Sign Language, not English. BSL is not based on English and does not map easily to English, it's a completely different language and for many BSL users English is as foreign a language as it is for me as a born Belgian living and working in the UK. So, as a Sign Language user, how do you access complicated information based on the spoken language of the land you live in, yet not written to be plain, clear lingo, but instead full of jargon and incomprehensible constructions?
You might offer websites with information, but if the video clips and other audible information available on them do not have subtitles or any other provision to make them accessible to people with a hearing loss, how are they supposed to get the necessary information out of them?
While most rail stations have some form of text display these days, all too often they do not offer a fully equivalent rendition of spoken announcements. Yes, they might show schedule information and even be updated when platforms change, but how many of the messages that are being broadcast over the tannoy system are effectively in real-time delivered to those boards as well? The answer is appallingly few, and hundreds of thousands of rail journeys every year go amiss for deaf and hard of hearing individuals because of this lack of visual counterpart for spoken messages.
And when those customers would then want to contact support desks or file a complaint, they often face the same barriers they already had to overcome in order to contact your services before the start of the journey.
Do we really believe that in the 21st century this is acceptable? Are we really going to hide ourselves behind the frankly totally worn, dilapidated arguments about how public address systems haven't yet been fitted with systems to make textual presentation on the visual displays possible?
Let me give you a few more, very specific, examples. First of all, a great deal of improvement for deaf and hard of hearing customers could be achieved through simple organisational measures like making sure that all customer facing staff would be fully deaf and disability aware. Including such awareness training in your induction processes is trivial, yet it could prevent such embarrassing situations where deaf customers are being treated by counter personnel as being dumb or, even worse, drunk or drugged because they speak not as fluently as hearing people or might want to write their requests down and hand them over on a piece of paper. It would also help your staff to do such simple things like facing the deaf or hard of hearing person when they are speaking to them, and keeping hands and pens away from their faces while speaking, so that the customer can see their lips and faces and thus follow what your staff are saying. It would help them to realise that just shouting at a deaf person is not the right way to communicate with them.
I already mentioned public address systems. It is not just that the messages broadcast over them are not rendered in an equivalent way on the visual displays, it's also the often appalling quality of their audio and the lack of loop systems for hearing aid users. Many hard of hearing people would be able to listen to them, if only their clarity of sound would be of acceptable, 21st century, levels and if loops would be available. I have been in places where public address systems are extremely good, offer decent volume, very good clarity of tone, and have provisions for volume control so that they perform well both in noisy and in quiet environments. So, it can be done.
This whole business of public address systems highlights an underlying syndrome of delivering information, especially real-time travel information, in a very unimodal way. Isn't it time that service providers and station operators start to think about proper, multimodal information delivery mechanisms, fully integrated and able to deal with real-time information across a variety of delivery channels?
Many stations and even trains also provide help points, or information kiosks and the like. That is of course a great idea, except when if you want help from them, you can't get it because it happens not to support your specific profile of abilities and preferences. Help points or emergency passenger alarms with an intercom system only are useless for many deaf and hard of hearing people. More modern, computer based kiosks often use audio feedback, without which you can't really use them. Was it really that hard to think a little bit deeper about the interface design and make it properly accessible and usable?
Door warning systems are another feature that all too often expose an embarrassing level of short-sightedness. They have been fitted with a buzzer that sounds when the doors are about to close, yet a small warning light or other visual indication was apparently too expensive - at a cost of what, a thousand of a percent of the price of the carriage? Is it even that high? I doubt it. Yet, still we see train staff looking shocked by seeing a deaf customer who has just been caught out by the closing doors!
So, what specific features would help deaf and hard of hearing people while travelling on the railways? Firstly, making sure that any audible information is also presented in an equivalent way in a visual or textual format. Equivalent is of course the key word. It means that you need to deliver those non-audio channels in such a way, in terms of timing, content and availability that they can offer the traveller a fully comparable experience as hearing users. Being unable to listen to announcements, audible warning systems and other sounds should not in any way hamper one's ability to conduct a successful and gratifying journey.
All staff that have customer facing roles, like counter clerks, train and platform guards, information point staff and so on, should have had proper deaf and disability awareness training, which could be done as part of the induction course and should be kept up to date as part of ongoing training and job development tuition. It is remarkable how much the customer experience for deaf and hard of hearing people can be improved just by having staff around that will recognise their profile and are able to respond to their needs in an appropriate, non-stigmatising manner.
All service providers and operators should also see to it that their info and support channels are fully accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people. Not everyone is able to use voice phones, so make sure you provide textphone access and that you and your staff are fully aware of the existence of relay services in telephone networks, like for example RNID Typetalk in the UK, that allow text to voice transcoding for textphone users that need to call voice numbers.
However, accessibility for deaf people is not just a sensory issue, it has in many countries language aspects too. Remember what I said earlier on about sign language users: in many European regions, sign language bears no relationship to the spoken language of the land, but instead is a completely different vernacular, with its own syntactic, lexical and semantic rules and its own grammar. That means that even if you do provide textual information, in leaflets, on websites or in any other form, you should use plain, clear language and avoid jargon or complicated constructions.
I would also like to ask you to give special attention to health and safety issues, specifically emergency procedures. Broadcasting a message urging users to leave the train or the platform is all very well, but remember that your deaf customers might not be able to hear it. It wouldn't be the first time that after an evacuation, a deaf person is left behind all on his or her own, just because no one realised that their apparent easy-going and relaxed attitude was no display of defiance of the danger, but simply a result of the fact that the individual in question hadn't heard the call for evacuation. Using visual alerting systems for deaf people, with strobe lights or vibration devices, in combination with properly trained staff that are aware of the possibility of having deaf or hard of hearing people on board or on the platform, could mean the difference between life and death.
And finally, I already mentioned the fact that not all hard of hearing people are completely unable to use sound. However, for many of them, the ability to understand audible information is directly related to the quality of the sound and to the presence of loops where applicable. Clear messages, with at least 20dB difference between foreground and background noise - obviously making sure you don't exceed safety limits - are key to success here, as are induction loops.
I can hear you all say: well, that is all very interesting, but how do I balance the needs of so many different user groups against each other while at the same time keeping my costs and efforts under control? The answer to that is simple: you should start to realise that there is no such thing as an "average" user. Every individual is unique, and our abilities and preferences are not just statically defined by things like the level of hearing loss, sight impairment or mobility, it's an equally dynamic issue, whereby our specific abilities can change depending on the circumstances and context. If I'm at a platform where trains are running past, then I'm deafened by the noise and would benefit from having alternative channels available where I can see in text what is being relayed over the public address system. So, in that particular situation, for all intended purposes, I share the profile of many deaf and hard of hearing users.
If we accept that there is no singular profile for your customers, then the obvious conclusion is that in designing and building equipment and in setting up and running services, you should use fully inclusive design principles. Some people call it design-for-all, others refer to it as universal design, but the name doesn't really matter that much. What is important is that it is the principle of human-centred, user-focused design. Unfortunately, it is also often misunderstood. Inclusive design is not creating an amalgam of different systems and provisions; it is not doing a lot of isolated work for individual user groups. It is not an esoteric, highly expensive, practically impossible utopic school of thought. It is simply an approach to the design of mainstream equipment and services that are accessible to, and usable by, as many people as reasonably possible without the need for special adaptation. At the heart of it lies the involvement of users: involving them, from the earliest stages of design and implementation, in the definition of user requirements, in testing of the systems, in making decisions about the interfaces, execution paths and any other aspect of the system. Inclusive design means that engineers and manufacturers develop systems not based on what they want as designers and technicians, not driven by technology, but based on what people need as users.
That of course requires a proper understanding of what the user needs are. There are plenty of user groups around that would be only too happy to share their expertise and knowledge about specific customer groups. So, please, make sure you involve them from the earliest stages of design and implementation. And of course, it is not enough to speak to user groups at the start of your project, you need to continue to involve them, including during testing and evaluation. Remember that inclusive design is about integrating the concept of user needs into your whole project, it is not about bolted-on, last minute fixes or additions. There is a great economic incentive for using inclusive design because creating something with accessibility and usability in mind from the start is much more cost-effective and painless than if you have to make something accessible and usable after it has been built.
And let me give you another economic incentive: it has been proven time and again that equipment and services that have been built in an inclusive way do not just benefit individuals or specific user groups like people with disabilities, but are actually delivering more satisfactory, hugely improved user experiences to all users, regardless of abilities and preferences. That results not just in enhanced customer satisfaction, something that could be a crucial advantage in highly competitive markets, but also reduces your efforts and costs for support and handling of complaints.
In addition, for those who think that carrots are not enough, there are already legal obligations in terms of accessibility in some European member states and it is highly likely that in the next few years this will be reinforced through more legal and regulatory initiatives.
Society is more and more coming round to the view that it is no longer acceptable that we are systematically excluding large user groups from opportunity and fulfilment just because of the fact that they happen to be deaf, or blind, or sitting in a wheelchair. You might prefer to ignore these tendencies, but if you do so you will not only be caught out because the equipment and services you offer will soon be not competitive anymore in a market that demands better customer experiences all the time, you might also find yourself in breach of the law in more and more countries throughout Europe and indeed throughout the world.
I realise that shifting our thinking, changing established policies and procedures in design and manufacturing might come with an additional short-time cost and effort. But think about the impact you could make! Public transport is an essential commodity in our modern world. By making sure no one, irrespective of abilities and preferences, is excluded from the benefits that progress potentially can bring to society, we will create a more equal environment for everyone. We will be creating a world where each individual would be able to participate to the fullest extent and thus could realise their full potential. Surely that is a worthy cause for all of us!
Thank you for your attention.
Speech by Guido Gybels, given at the Railway Interiors Expo, Köln Messe, Köln, Germany on 30 November 2004.
Slides for: Deaf People and Rail Transport. (Microsoft Powerpoint 2000 Show 4.19MB)