Accessible ICT procurement: David Swayne and Jonathan Craig

Speaker 1 00:07 (program theme)

It's up to you and me to shine a guiding light and lead the way United by our cause we have power to pursue what we believe We'll achieve the realisation of our dreams...

Speaker 1 00:28

Hello welcome to New Horizons, I'm Vaughan Bennison. In this week's program we delve into accessible ICT procurement, featuring a session from the Roundtable on Information Access for People with a Print Disability. This session features David Swayne, Disability Policy Officer at the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, and New Horizons regular Jonathan Craig.

Speaker 2 00:49

Procurement offers the opportunity to drive market forces in a particular direction, where the buyer sets the terms for the types of things they wish to buy. At a large enough scale, this can shift whole supply chains all the way down to the product design stage to conform to what the buyer wants because money is a very powerful thing. In this case, we want accessible technology and we want accessible communication systems and platforms. ACAN has been involved alongside others in advocating for the inclusion of policy that ensures the procurement of accessible technology for some time.

Improving procurement rules surrounding technology is really important to us because the technology used when we communicate with each other and how we share information is always shifting. In an already mostly unregulated market when it comes to accessibility, where the accessibility of websites and technology, as we know are hit and miss at present, there is and will continue to be substantial volumes of inaccessible technology and inaccessible information out there.

I became familiar with using procurement policy to drive accessible technology when I was working in the higher education space a few years ago. As brought forward by Vision Australia and others, students and staff continually came up against barriers as new software or technology was purchased and deployed or even existing items just couldn't be fixed and often that was because of the very way they were designed.

02:10

Universities do have the power to shift really large sections of the IT market. They spend $2 billion a year on IT and so I was the project lead for the development of guidance material to support universities to improve how they purchase IT including how they buy websites and procure web content if it's externally procured. The idea of this was that if every university changed their procurement practice, it would shift the market so that the market would be demanded upon to create accessible products and services in the Australian IT market.

During the process, we worked with people who are very knowledgeable, passionate, capable in the space. Some of you in this room, thank you very much, who helped us to develop something that holds up as good guidance material, even generally speaking, which was the accessible ICT procurement guide for higher ed. But since this work in the tertiary sector, I've thankfully moved across to work for ACAN late last year and do have an opportunity to advocate in this space, but the reason I change roles can't go unsaid because it really plays into this whole policy and law situation.

I change roles because the program that was funded to do the work to support improving ICT procurement policy in universities was defunded in the last budget and last year. In the audience last year was my colleague now next to me, Jonathan. One of the questions Jonathan asked was something along the lines of, what would it take to make this happen on a much larger scale? Is it law reform or is the Disability Discrimination Act capable of doing what it needs to do? I think from conversations that have occurred over these days and previous years, we know that the DDA can't drive systemic change on the scale that's required when it comes to technology. Despite efforts and with support from the peak IT body, university uptake of the guidance was not complete.

And with some already, there were leaders in the space and doing very well. There were some early adopters of the guidance material. And then to best of our knowledge, some didn't engage at all. And so we had an incomplete adoption of policy at the organisational level, which of course then isn't powerful enough to drive the change in the marketplace. And just from chats with former colleagues, inaccessible technology continues to occur in universities. We know of someone who started work, I think, four weeks ago and couldn't do their induction due to issues with how the technology was built.

04:28

Certainly, these experiences in trying to drive a market shift with guidance and encouragement led to us peering over the ocean in envy at the improvements in laws that are occurring currently. Legal developments continue to unfold mostly in Europe and in the US that are already starting to drive accessibility globally. But here in Australia, we haven't yet decided to make it directly unlawful to provide inaccessible technology or information. Now, I think in this crowd, it's not a contentious assertion to make that that's true. But depending on who you say that to, people may argue that it is unlawful to discriminate against people with disability in Australia or that it is government policy to procure accessible technology.

However, if the practical mechanism of enforcement can't stop it happening at a large enough scale and focuses on one person and one issue at a time, and if the pace of technological development is exponential with no requirement to create accessible technology, the outlook is not good. But there is some good news and I've talked about policy. However, this is what the policy handbook will tell you is small P policy, which means like organisational departmental, but not law per se. So the following is a bit of an update for you on that.

As you know, advocates and accessibility professionals have worked to adopt, promote and implement standards in policy at the organisation and government levels over many years and this has been getting progressively better in theory. For example, the federal government's digital service standard includes reviewing compliance regarding accessibility and procurement and deployment of technology, efforts underway in state governments, notably New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia. In the private sector, you might have heard that the Australian Disability Network in collaboration with Aussie Way developed an ICT charter which launched recently and eight Australian companies have signed it to say that they'll procure and develop and deploy accessible technology for staff and customers.

There's also a recent activity from Aussie Way in creating the PAL, the Product Accessibility List and the idea of this is to help procurement and accessibility professionals get a quick environmental scan of the types of products they wish to buy and how accessible they might be, so it's a great starting point. And also, we know that the Human Rights Commission has engaged in Topia to review an advisory note that sits underneath the Disability Discrimination Act which originally focused only on web accessibility but the draft material in the new updated advisory talks more about technology in general which is positive.

07:05

There's six and a half thousand known technology start-ups in our economy and that's being fueled by $24 billion of venture capital across a five-year period, and none of these companies are required to create accessible products. So I think it's fair to argue that in an environment where state and federal governments have digital transformation strategies, our laws need to proactively provide a minimum protection against exclusionary digital technologies and platforms.

This argument has been pitched before, it's not new, you will have heard it, but perhaps what was missing was an open window of opportunity. Late last year, Jonathan and I met to discuss the Disability Royal Commission final report and recommendations that might have an impact on this and we agree that there's recommendations that could lead to improvements in this space and I'd like to hand to Jonathan just to give a bit of an overview from your end, Jonathan, if I can.

Speaker 3 08:01

I remember being in uni in the early 2010s, Blackboard, iFrames, Adobe Flash, Fun Times for Everyone. I thought things would be so different by now, and when the 2019 online but off -track report from Vision Australia came out, I was shocked by how the same things were still happening several years later. And then when the ICT procurement guidelines came out, I thought that was the hand grenade that would change everything, and it wasn't. And that's the difference between small p policy and law. There was only one DRC recommendation that explicitly mentioned print disability.

However, when we looked into it, there are quite a number of recommendations that we think will make a difference. And that's where that conversation began. And we came across this idea in recommendation 7 .23 that the government should make sure that anything that it buys is accessible. The National Disability Insurance Agency, they should be best in class. They are now onto their third business system, and only with this system are they really starting to build in accessibility from the ground up, which is awesome, by the way.

But I'm sure that there are still problems, but compare this to the first NDIA business system where we know that there were people who were employed by the NDIA who had to have their colleagues input any information or output any information to them. Imagine how dispiriting that would be. Looking into it further, the conversations that we had showed that the Disability Discrimination Act in its current form is not doing what it needs to do. I've heard about a case where someone took the Australian Electoral Commission to DDA mediation based on an inaccessible CAPTCHA on their website.

10:27

That was nearly a decade ago. That CAPTCHA is still there. So even our government, as many standards as we can implement, they are not. doing it. There are many, many people with very good will, many, many people doing really awesome things, but we're not there yet. And the Disability Discrimination Act, it is so difficult to put through a complaint via that approach. And looking at the register, many of those complaints result in a financial compensation and a letter of apology, but they don't necessarily result in change.

The Disability Royal Commission does have ideas about how this might work. One of the key, most interesting ideas is the idea of a Disability Rights Act, which is essentially designed to implement the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability that the government signed into law. They also recommended a positive duty to promote inclusion and a positive duty to provide accessible information. So the Royal Commission said that whenever a Commonwealth entity provides information, it should deliver it in at least two accessible formats.

Now, we would want more than that, but imagine if even that was happening every time the government was delivering information. The Disability Discrimination Act, similarly, also gets put under the microscope with the Royal Commission recommending small but significant changes, not least removing the word reasonable from the idea of reasonable adjustment. So once we started to link all of these recommendations together and think about what the future would look like and think about the fact that the future is coming, the next technology like augmented reality could be just around the corner.

And we don't want to be asking whether it will be a blessing or a curse. We want to be making it a blessing. So we know that the purchases that government makes really influence the market, really influence what businesses do. We know that we would like to see a Disability Rights Act go further than the Royal Commission said, slightly further, and to say that any entity that receives significant Commonwealth funding, for example, universities, should also be required to provide accessible information to its students.

13:22

Now, we've started a working group and we have created a position statement and we would like to have as many organisations as possible from in this room and elsewhere put their logos to that position statement because we think that there is opportunity for us here to create genuine change and create genuine legal obligations on government and entities that receive government funding to provide accessible information. And this would create a real change, like the change that is on the horizon with the European Accessibility Act in Australia.

Speaker 1 14:09

If you'd like to get in touch with Blind Citizens Australia, you can call 1800 033 660 ... 1800 033 660. You can of course email bca@bca.org.au ... BCA at BCA dot org dot AU. In the meantime, I'll talk to you again next week.