Adventures in Touch Screens

We increasingly live in flatland: sleek, shiny and smooth, probably featuring gorilla glass. It is a world in which disabled people, especially those with sight impairment, are second-class citizens, even where they are considered at all. For those of us struggling to manage in yet another hostile environment, this is no news; as with other areas of social oppression, however, it needs to be explained to those who do not experience it. And as I was reminded forcibly the other day, in a very different context, even those of us who are living with it sometimes need to step back and reflect on just how problematic the situation is.

I have been trying to find ways of coping with the problem of an increasingly touch-oriented environment for years, and I have decided to try to do something about it. To be clear, there is absolutely nothing that dictates the use of touch screens, touch control panels or their ilk. This is a pure example of the social model of disability: what disables us are the choices that other people make, rather than (or, perhaps, in addition to) actual impairments. And speaking as a Green, it is also an environmental model of disability. (Quick explainer for the uninitiated: lots of people still want to claim that Greens should not have social policy, and complain loudly when they do: this is again a pure example of how social and environmental policy are complementary lenses on the same problem.) I will address this both in terms of recent domestic issues and in terms of professional experiences.

One final word of preamble. It might seem perverse to tackle discrimination against sight-impaired people (but not exclusively us) in terms of an apparent focus on other (unimpaired) types of sensory experience. But you would be wrong. For the truth about touch screens in the wild is that they are overwhelmingly visual tools, which feature no tactile experience at all nor any auditory feedback. Wait, I hear you cry, what about accessibility features on phones? I will come back to that. In the first place, let me turn to the world outside of iOS and Android.

Contents

• [Proof by Induction]{#induction)
• Unreasonable Adjustments
• Fanboying the Flames

Proof by Induction

We moved flat two and a half years ago. We liked our old flat. Sure, it had gappy, broken floorboards and the tenement roof needed replacing, and (my partner assures me) it needed a thorough redecoration, but one thing we had done was overhaul the kitchen, which meant adequate storage and, the point of this anecdote, cooking appliances that I could still operate. This did include a gas hob (yes, fellow greens, I know, but memories of blackouts and huddling around the gas hob died hard) and, since most of my cooking is stove-top, I could work it. I confess (social workers look away now, but actually they aren't bothering to check in since 2007, so no worries) I would often, latterly, check the levels by waving my hand over the flames, but it worked. I could cook for a family of four, and I could even work the oven and inflict my baking on an unsuspecting audience. The new flat, which we moved into for an extra room and the potential to create a second bathroom, as the teens and tweens had discovered the joys of washing, had clearly been given a shiny, gimcrack overhaul in kitchen and bathroom in order to sell it, and we kinda knew what we were walking into. The kitchen, which we thought would be tolerable until we could afford to redo it, featured an induction hob.

Induction hobs are, in many ways, a good thing. They are, as electric hobs go, efficient, and can be part of a transition to a more sustainable future, if you are buying electricity from renewable sources (or, indeed, using your own renewables). So we were not unhappy in principle, even if it meant a change to cooking habits and replacing a couple of pans. We could live with that. Yet, the main reason why people install induction hobs, it seems, and certainly the expectations of manufacturers, is that they look cool: a flat panel which barely rises from the worktop. This particular model features eight closely clustered touch points, marked by faint grey circles: on/off, four burners, up and down controls and ... the child lock. There are also LED indicators for levels, but I have never seen them and am taking these entirely on trust from my sighted colleagues. The net result is that it is next to impossible for me to select burners, control levels, or even use it at all. The on/off button is sometimes usable, but is nestling between one burner and the up button, which means that it is trivially easy to max out a burner by mistake or turn off the hob when desperately trying to locate a burner to turn it down; worse, the child lock is nestling between our most-used burner and the down button. So, accidentally raise the levels, and then lock them in place instead of frantically trying to lower them. I have gone from being the main cook in the house to being unable to cook without borrowing someone's eyes every ten minutes or so. Too often, I have given up or avoided cooking in frustration. And let's face it, there is a lot to be frustrated and upset about these days, and so this is not helping.

Here is the conundrum: keep the renewable-friendly but inaccessible induction hob, replace with an efficient but old-school electric hob (and I have fond memories of one in a College house which shorted out the entire building if you used a particular burner) or reinstall gas, which aside from environmental issues was definitely unsafe for me. We tried doctoring the hobwith sticky tactile markers, but they have a miniscule shelf life, and are vulnerable to being knocked off or washed off at the slightest provocation. They also require a sighted person to apply them, of course. We looked for a replacement induction hob, but found it incredibly difficult to find any model that did not have similar touch controls. My partner searched support forums where she found that it was a known issue, but that was about it.

Two and a half years on, and a particularly enraging incident led me furiously to search for a model with knobs or dials once again. In line with my partner's gloomy prognostications, initial searches were not helpful. If you search for induction hobs with knobs or dials, you are likely to be offered a non-induction, conventional electric hob. Eventually I followed a link to the RNIB shop. If this is such a known issue, surely the RNIB would offer something clunky and over-priced to a captive market? Even that is too much to ask. They do offer an induction burner, but—wait for it—it is a single burner which you can plug into the wall and is clearly not meant to be a family or household device. Apparently sight-impaired people just need to warm up a can of beans or something, while trying to eke out an existence on non-existent benefits.

I persisted,however, and eventually I found what appears to be the holy grail: an induction hob with four dials for the burners, no child-lock (yay!) and a single touch surface for on/off. I can live with that. I am not going to make too many confident predictions, but the electrician we had out to quote for installing it did confirm that it was an actual induction hob, and that he had never in his working life ever seen one like it. I am hugely excited about potentially getting an important part of my life back, and I will provide details of the model if it fulfils expectations. Incidentally, it is not sold as an accessibility product, and so there is no price premium. Fingers crossed.

Unreasonable Adjustments

Arguably, the saga of the induction hob was somewhat self-inflicted, but is testament to how easy it is to try to work with what there is rather than improve the environment in which we live and work. Let me now turn to a context where service providers have a statutory duty to make such adjustments. As any disabled person will know, persuading your employer to make such ‘reasonable adjustments’ is, to put it mildly, a hit-and-miss affair, and fundamentally depends on whether there are specific people in the food chaing who are prepared to go into bat for you. And I take this opportunity to thank my Head of School Administration, who has been brilliant since taking the post. That is, however, mainly of local significance within the university. I am going to talk about university policy, where changes have made it worse for staff, not better. I have increasingly been realising that the driver for university EDI policy and practice is not making life better for staff or students, but legal compliance. As with other protected characteristics, this should worry us.

There is some important context here. First, the university has a longstanding tension between locally and centrally managed space. The view of university management is that space would be used most efficiently if it were managed by a central administrative body, who allocate rooms according to a mysterious process which takes months and ends up with people teaching all over the campus without the benefit of a teleportation device to move from one class to another. Local units have been desperately clinging onto space wich they have historically controlled, in the interests of, among other things, accessibility and familiarity for staff and students. The response of central management is to make it difficult to refurbish such locally managed space, which means some very outdated and occasionally barely functional equipment. Second, the university has been building a lot more teaching (and other) space, especially on the Western Infirmary site, but also the massive new James McCune Smith building on University Avenue. So there are a lot of new rooms, with new equipment.

I have experienced many of the new buildings, and I can report, dear reader, that they are fundamentally inaccessible from the point-of-view of navigation. It is not just me—sighted colleagues frequently are at a loss, and I had the enjoyable experience earlier this week of trying to get out of one such building (witha sighted helper in fact) and encountering one of the university's Vice-Principals, who had earlier left the same meeting, trying equally unsuccessfully to find their way. I have mentioned this, er, feature of university procurement of new buildings to our Equality and Diversity Unit, whose response was that they have a process and appropriate specification for new buildings. So that's alright then. But it is not the physical layout that I am focusing on here, so much as the equipment in them.

We lecture a lot in Glasgow. Most of us know it is a poor way to teach, but with first year classes north of 300, and a student:staff ratio of nearly 30:1, with no sign of slowing down, lectures are not going away any time soon. The revolt against online teaching at the time of Covid has meant that universities' pressure to move online has evaporated or gone into reverse. When we have the opportunity to use smaller groups, we are still beholden to the use of screens, data projectors and even visualisers, in addition to our traditional whiteboards (and I think there may even be some chalkboards in places still). You might think that many of these devices would be enabling for the sight-impaired, who no longer have to worry about what they are writing on the board. But you would be wrong.

The first problem is that the fixed PCs in all rooms lack any accessibility features by default. So, let's plug in our own laptop which we can use. But wait! Where is the cable? It is in a different location again, because we are in a different room. So, now that we are plugged in, I need to activate the screen and switch to laptop. Leaving aside such trivialities as locating the control panel, what do I press? There is no tactile or auditory feedback, and like most touchscreens they are press once and take the consequences. There are no braille markings for those who celebrate. I particularly enjoy the phenomenon of students doing presentations and appealing to me for help. What can I say? ‘Your guess is going to be considerably better than mine.’

But it is even worse. Some years ago, the University made a half-hearted effort to standardise the control panels for classroom IT equipment. Partly because the kit in my local space has not been upgraded in years, we still have those control panels. They are not perfect, but you can at least tell where the button is, you don't get to turn something on merely by brushing it, and the buttons are in the same order, if you can remember. Some are even different shapes. It would not be beyond the bounds of possibility to add some braille tape to improve them further. That is at least two iterations of university equipment ago, and the centrally allocated space features at least one other vintage type of button/dial panel and, in new and refurbished space, two different types of touch screen, which have been active choices by those who provision our centrally-managed space and are apparently the preferred option at this time. In at least one of those panels, the order and nature of the buttons changes depending on the room. What this means is that I am unable to use the teaching rooms in the university as an independent worker. I have to have a sighted assistant or plead with students to help.

I do have a support worker through Access to Work, but my contact hours are greater than the contracted hours that Access to Work pay for. In any case, I should not have to rely on a support worker simply to press a couple of buttons, which is a colossal waste of everyone's time and money, as well as fairly demeaning to the dignity of disabled staff. Furthermore, there are many other things which I can usefully work with my support worker on, and in any case, given our various schedules, it is not always possible for absolutely every class to be covered. (And let me say, to be absolutely clear, my support worker is an absolute star.)

Here is one example from a second-level course I convene and on which I lecture. There was one day on which I was unsupported, and I turn up a little late because I took a wrong turning, and thenfloundered with a control panel setup which I had not myself used before. Eventually, a student took pity on me and pressed a button or two. On the course feedback, one student complained about staff being apparently unable to use the equipment in the classroom and (snarkily) that the university should invest in training its staff properly.Honey, I was coding in assembly language when I was half your age; it is not a question of technical competence. I can't see the control panel, but presumably you can see my white stick?

So this is a situation in which the university has not only not made reasonable adjustments , but has actively made unreasonable adjustments. I do not know, and I doubt anyone would or could tell me, whether this was a decision made on grounds of cost, shininess, or what was most readily available on the market. Whatever the aetiology, it has made my working life a great deal worse, combined with the layout of buildings and the centralising of allocation of teaching space by an algorithm or process that works against disabled students and staff in particular, but is loathed by many non-disabled people for many of the same reasons. These were and are all choices—and yet the university believes (apparently) that it is compliant with the law. If so, the law is an ass, and the university is not fulfilling its moral obligations to disabled people.

As a coda, there has been much fanfare in official communiqués about how the management are going to make a greater push for accessibility as part of room allocation. So I have had the email seeking to find out more about my needs, and fingers being wagged at our long-suffering administrator to ensure that my needs are included in the room booking requests. I have replied pointing out that my needs have not changed, and that no information in the booking request form is going to address the structural problems that the system imposes. That is a policy decision. As with so much else in the equalities space, it is a matter of will and principle, and not legal box-ticking.

Fanboying the Flames

I mentioned my issues with touch screens online the other day, and was met with a tech fanboy response that my problem was that I useAndroid rather than iOS. Now, of course this wildly missed the point, which is that touch screens are now endemic, but in its way highlighted both the nature of the problem and the difficulties we have in confronting and addressing it. The triumph of the smartphone and tablet has meant that touch screens are now the default, regardless of whether they are appropriate for the use case (which is, I submit, rare). This is not a new phenomenon—over a decade ago, I watched my then-toddler try to use my (non-touch) laptop as a touch screen, and it brought it vividly home to me how embedded such assumptions had become. Recently, there was some Treasury Committee report which was angsting about the decline of cash and its implications for some members of the population, which is fair, but have they ever tried using a touch screen payment device? Of course not. It is faintly reassuring to me that some car manufacturers are reversing their rush to embrace touch controls, but obviously that is not something I am personally going to benefit from. (Side note: I do not want self-driving cars either; I want readily available, accessible and staffed public transport.)

It is true that Apple have invested a certain amount in making their products more accessible, although the last statistics I saw on screenreaders on the desktop suggested that both Apple and Linux offerings lagged behind the JAWS behemoth; as a long-time devotee of Linux, and becoming ever-more old-school in my use of the command-line, I am sticking with what I know (and, personally, the last time I used Windows with Navigator, it induced a massive panic attack, but I digress). As for smart phones and tablets, it fundamentally remains an issue of waving your finger(s) over a flat surface in an optimistic fashion and usig educated guesswork and muscle memory to hit the right areas for auditory feedback, should it appear. Android is not perfect by any means, but the main aggravation is, I think, not an iOS/Android issue. The problem is the lack of websites and apps that follow accessibility guidelines and offer clearly laid out, structurally marked up pages. Believe me, provision of alt text (a justifiable obsession on Mastodon for which I am grateful) is only the tip of the iceberg. The other issue is typing. I can do Perkins input at a stretch [for the uninitiated, this is chord-based input traditionally used with braillers and braille displays/keyboards], but lugging around my braille display for casual interactions with the phone is a problem. My phone has started refusing to allow communication with usb devices before the unlocking of the password, so I can't even hear which buttons I am pressing on the screen without letting the entire Subway carriage know.

The answer to the latter might, then, be a smaller, cheaper braille display/Perkins input, if it could be allowed to communicate. But neither in the custom security policies nor in provision of such devices are big tech your friend. Google, Samsung and Apple depend on selling large volumes (of kit, of data), not the human rights and lived experience of a minority. Even the cheapest device is not cheap, and I am someone with a privileged position and a salary well above median earnings. It is only with strong laws on equality and diversity that we have the limited gains that we have, and even those are strictly limited. As events in the US and UK have shown, those rights and that progress are fragile things, and the rush of companies and institutions to embrace the roll back of rights is all too apparent.

Somesocialist friends will say the problem is capitalism, which needs to be dismantled; they criticise the liberals who want a rights-based order, which needs to be defended; they criticise the anarchists who say that we make progress by our hands or none , and that we need to self-organize. For me, we need all of these things, but above all we need people to give a shit and then do something about it. I incline to the anarchist view out of necessity rather than conviction. It is not that I believe that there is a lack of decency or empathy, or even morality among the wider public, but because of a lack of organisation and will, it is easily drowned out and balkanised by voices of hate. , If you are in a minority, you have to care and organise because you have no choice and (too often) no-one is coming to save you. I wish it were otherwise. I hope you do too.