AI in developing countries - Ben Clare

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Hello, welcome to this episode of New Horizons. I'm Vaughan Bennison. Thanks once again for joining us this week. We go once again back to the Round Table on Information Access for People with a Print Disability. It was held in Perth in May this year. And this week we hear from Ben Clare. You might recall that we spoke with Ben towards the end of last year in recognition of his work with people in the Pacific Island countries.

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Ben's presentation to the round table focuses on technology and its use in Pacific Island countries.

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So let's start with the Pacific, okay? Very different in regards to their journey with AI. They're at the very, very beginning of it. Most people still don't know what it is. Interestingly, the first encounters most people in the Pacific are having with AI are those social media apps where it asks you to rewrite or to write your posts with AI. And it's sort of funny, but it's a little bit tragic too, as to the results, this is happening. So an example of this was a friend, I had donated, I was really lucky to be able to donate a laptop to a friend who was going to university in Fiji. And when they, the post they wrote back to me just had emoji of angry faces, crying faces, disappointed faces, thumbs down and sad faces. And I'm thinking, Oh, what have I done? Right, I just gave you a laptop, right?

What it actually was, was I'm so happy, I could cry right now, really disappointed that our government didn't approve the funding to buy the laptop. So that's where the disappointed face came from, right? Really sad that I can't repay you for this great thing that you've done. So then boom, sad face went in there. Really upset that our education system's not up to the standard that it is in Australia. Angry face, right? So that failed, you know what it was? It's language, right? Though we were speaking in English, but it was so accented, right? And this shows how again, westernised we are with AI. We only focus on things like English and French and Spanish, right? Maybe Dutch, German, you know, Russian if you're lucky. So already we're leaving people out, right? They can't use the AI features as well as we can because their English is too accented.

And that could have been a really offensive post that I got. I could have been really upset about that. I certainly wrote back straight away and went, Oh, what's going on? You know, like it was quite frightening to get all those thumbs down and angry faces. Another, I guess, fail before we get into the positives was I was recently doing a research project on for the International Labor Organization, which is a UN agency based in Geneva about employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for people with disabilities in the Pacific. So I asked it as part of that to write me an essay about inclusive education in Fiji. Anyway, it came up with this thing that said, Inclusive education in Fiji is beautiful. It is lovely. Lots of people going to special schools, right?

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That might've been correct, right? But like, do you think you could hand that to Electra at uni? It was as plain as an Arab root biscuit, right? So there I was thinking, oh, I can cheat here a little bit and get some work done quickly. Hopeless, I had to write 50 pages from scratch. Long way to go before I think university people have to worry about plagiarism, I think. Currently available in the islands, a lot of the emerging technologies really is through the mobile phone, right? Your standard Samsung A2 or your Huawei Android phone, right? You can get them locally. iPhones are much less prolific in the islands for obvious reasons. They're just too expensive and they're not configurable enough, right?

You know, you've got to, to use them properly, you've got to have an ID and, you know, your iPhone ID and stuff and it's just a pain in the neck, right? So that's the key to getting emerging technologies into the Pacific and useful. And I just want to talk about some of the things where, and I'm using the analogy of a boat here because of course a lot of people in the islands get around on the boat. So the technology, the apps that are on the boat where people are using them and the ones that are missing the boat and they're the ones, they're these amazing apps that put things like payment gateways and country restrictions in place.

So you can't use them, right? And there's a lot of those out there that won't work. They'll only work in places like Australia or the US or whatever, right? Be My Eyes, this is something that's really taken off in the islands and it's quite exciting because those of you who know Be My Eyes know that one of its main functions is you can connect with a live volunteer and they'll help you find something you've dropped on the floor or whatever, right? Or tell you what colour your clothes are and help with mobility, all that sort of stuff, right? What's really nice about Be My Eyes is that you can have volunteers that speak your language from your country.

So in Samoa where I was recently, there's a Samoan lady who's volunteered herself to be a Be My Eyes volunteer. So anyone in Samoa who wants or even people in New Zealand or Australia who are Samoan speakers can link to her and they can speak her language. They speak their language. Really, really nice. It's free. It's usable. So they're on the boat, right? That organisation has recognised that people in developing countries can get a lot of use out of this. Same with Be My AI, right? That beautiful feature that just describes photos down to a tee. Sometimes they're not always right. They're pretty darned good, especially for personal use, right? So in the islands, this is great. People are going around snapping pictures of everything. Mobile phones are everywhere in the islands. They are pretty affordable. They're local, right? They're sold locally. So you've got that support base if they break down or you can get another one.

And also in remote locations, they are an option because there's a lot of solar power now available. So people can actually charge their phones and use them a lot more. So even in very remote locations, the mobile phone is the way to get things out. So that's working beautifully. I'll give you an example where something almost worked. The I fell into a massive hole when I was doing some work on this. Again, back to my work in Samoa, I was running training on the Marrakesh Treaty. And I decided to teach everyone how to use the word accessibility check -up. So I did this massive talk about it. I demonstrated it because I had my laptop there. And then I said to everyone, right, I want you all to write a document and then I want you to check it for accessibility.

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Off you go, right? So I was there sitting there, you know, drinking my Milo and chilling out for a couple of minutes because, you know, I had a bit of a sore throat after talking for hours. And then everyone said, oh, we've got Office 2007. So I wasn't there, right? Hadn't even thought. So this is an issue. People are using really, especially on computers, people are using really old copies of stuff because you don't have to register it online or you don't have to buy the... So this is an example of missing the boat, right? The technology's there, but there's a barrier. It's not always financial. It can be geographic as well. 

Another one that that misses the boat is voice stream scan. Okay, now we love that program. So cool. I love it for scanning receipts when I'm claiming taxi receipts or whatever for work. It's brilliant. The cost isn't too prohibitive. I think most Islanders would pay that to use that. They can't. It's not available in their currency or in their country. So there's no point showing it off to them because it's not going to work. But the potential for that program to work in the islands, people can use these programs, use their phone cameras to scan documents, printed documents, and then go on to their computer, put them onto their computers and edit them ready for embossing.

Okay, it saves a lot of time rather than buying scanners, printers, that sort of thing. So I really want to push that technology because that would get the turnaround for document scanning much quicker. Not having access to a particular app could actually stop a complete, you know, education from happening because people give up to they go, Oh, no, that's not for us. Obviously, it's only for the, you know, people in Australia or New Zealand or whatever, you know, that the expenditure from government on assistive devices and education for people with disabilities is almost nil. It's like zero. I'm not talking like a couple of thousand, I'm talking 0.000, how many zeros you like. The government said is up to the NGO, non-government sector, to fund things like that. And it's all ad hoc.

So you may have some money one year, but then it all disappears. And we know that these are all consumables, assistive devices, right? They're not something that you can just give out to people to share. You can't give a mobile phone for six people to share, for example, right? So once you give one away or to someone, it's no longer available for anyone else, right? So you've got to have lots of it. You've got to have, you know, even the cane, which is, you know, as low tech as it comes, just getting them into country is really, really difficult.
AI, what can it do? One thing we get really good at working in the islands is workarounds. That word work around, it's everywhere, right? You are in a, you're doing a training, you come up with a barrier and you think, hmm, how do we work around that?

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And it could be like, people don't have registered copies of Microsoft Word or years ago before in NVDA, and God bless their hearts, Mick and Jamie. Jaws used to run in 40 minute mode. And while that gave everyone a chance to have a cup of tea while we rebooted the computers, it was the most disruptive thing in the world, right? I found on the web, Libra Office, essentially it's a free version of Office, and you can actually create as well as read word documents. That's what I mean about workarounds. You do look for things that can be installed on devices without these, please add your credit card number, because most people don't have a credit card, right? You are in the wrong country, or this is only available in US dollars, that is a shocker, or Australian dollars. 

Their currencies are so weak. Usually they're about two or three to one, right? So three, and that's Australian dollars. In the Solomons, it's $6. So six Solomon dollars equals one Australian dollar. And I'll tell you what blows your mind when you buy a Coke and it's like $25, or a pizza that's $490. The idea of this presentation was to let you know things that are working, not working, and whether we can investigate as we move forward these emerging technologies and see how they can be adapted for use by our friends in developing countries.

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Ben Clare there, and once again thank you to the Roundtable on Information Access for People with a Print Disability for allowing us the use of this material, and my thanks also to John Simpson who attended the Roundtable conference this year and recorded the presentations that we've been bringing you over the last couple of months. There are still more to come and we'll hear again from the Roundtable in future programs. If you've got any ideas for New Horizons, anything you'd like to hear more about, do let me know, you can send me an email: new.horizons@bca.org.au ... new dot horizons at BCA dot org dot AU.

If you'd like to get in touch with Blind Citizens Australia, you can call 1800 033 660, 1800 033 660 - or email bca@bca.org.au. In the meantime, I'll talk to you again next week.

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