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Disabled People: IT Training
8.07 pm
Viscount Falkland asked Her Majesty’s Government what steps they propose to take to support the training of disabled people on computers in their own homes.
The noble Viscount said: My Lords, tonight I am introducing a short debate that has had some delay before reaching your Lordships’ House. I have no quarrel with that; the Government have difficulty in getting time for their business. We have been moved a couple of times, but we have today a small group of speakers and I thank everyone who has come to talk about computers and the disabled. Some noble Lords had intended to come who cannot, for various reasons, but we have gathered some others along the way.
One of the last letters of support I had was from Lady Darcy de Knayth who, unhappily, died just over a week ago. She was one of the outstanding personalities in your Lordships’ House and one of its outstanding speakers on disabled matters. She was much respected in this House and outside it, and we shall sorely miss her.
In my quite long career in this House I have never spoken on disabled matters. A number of Peers have asked me in the Corridors what brings me to the subject. The reason is that I happened to meet an old friend whom I had not seen for some time, who told me that in the intervening period since our previous meeting he had formed a charity called U Can Do IT. Peers who are speaking in the debate today may well have received a brief from that charity. It is one of a very few charities that devote themselves to the training of disabled people on computers in their own homes. I emphasise that it is in their own homes, because that is the point we are hoping to bring home tonight. We want to know if the Government have any fresh thinking in this area, where there is a great need for it. That is what has persuaded me to speak today.
The excellent briefing sent out by U Can Do IT covers the problem in three paragraphs. It states the reasons why it was formed in order to remedy what it sees as a great lack of understanding by successive Governments of the value of computers to the disabled. I agree, and I hope there will be agreement in the House today. One gets the feeling, perhaps not in this House but certainly in one’s social life, that people are a bit dismissive about the importance of computers. Some people take the attitude of how wonderful it is to have so much information and entertainment given to them, while others take a rather dinosaur-like approach and say, “The world is changing and this can be nothing but bad news for us”. However, for the disabled at home who find it
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Of course the disabled have access to computers; the Government have made a great deal to make computers available in libraries and other such places where people can go, and people can receive e-mails at call centres and so on. But more often than not it is mobility that makes it difficult for disabled people to benefit from the arrangements that have been made for them. This is a matter not only of their self-interest but of the state’s. Although the number of disabled people seems to be in doubt, there are certainly many who are perfectly able to contribute to society, to work, to pay tax and to be part of the general life of the nation. They are prevented from doing so—what a waste—because what makes it possible for them to do that is the computer. But in order to get them to use computers there has to be a decision to make training available at home.
That is the reason I have brought this debate to the House today. U Can Do IT tells us that it costs about £1,200 to train a disabled person to be competent to use a computer for their important everyday needs, such as getting in touch with their doctors and their national health centres, paying their bills and so on, but it goes much wider than that; it releases the disabled from the kind of estrangement from both their families and society that their condition brings them to, which creates a great deal of loneliness and probably depression among disabled people. All kinds of factors come together.
I would like the Minister to acknowledge that the current position is eminently wasteful. The voluntary sector alone cannot improve it. I do not know how people are trained by U Can Do IT or any other charities, but they raise money, as charities do, and train as many as are able. If it is going cost £1,200 to train a disabled person, they are not going to make an enormous impact on the problem. The Government have to come in.
It is cheering to see in the briefing that U Can Do IT put out that there is movement in government circles. There are two initiatives, one of them interesting and the other not so interesting. The first brings together the funding bodies, if I may call them such, or departments of state which provide support for disabled people—that is, the health and education departments, and the Department for Work and Pensions—in an initiative called “progress through partnership”, which is an excellent idea. One is always a little cynical about such developments because one knows how difficult it is to achieve between departments of state the immediate response that one requires, but it is an interesting idea.
There is also a policy which aims to bring equality to disabled people by 2025. That does not impress me too much, because we know that the short-termism in the country makes it unlikely that much will happen for disabled people. We need action now.
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There are signs that the Government are beginning to take an interest, and not before time. Disabled people will benefit from even a movement to meet the charities half way. If it were possible for the Government to produce half or even a quarter of the funding required to train each person at home, it would help. It would also give the soft benefits which are so important to people who live lonely lives, with difficulty in contacting the world as we know it around them and who do not get from computers the enjoyment, knowledge and entertainment which we all take for granted. I feel sure that tonight’s speakers, all of whom I thank for being here, would agree that this is a great gap in our service to the community which needs to be remedied quickly. I hope that the Minister can give us some good news on that front.
8.17 pm
Lord Giddens: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, on securing this debate and commiserate with him that so few noble Lords have seen fit to take part in it. We know that small is beautiful. Perhaps very small is very beautiful, but I am sure that there are limits to how far that principle can be pushed.
Some noble Lords might have read the book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which has just been made into a quite exceptional film. It is written by Jean-Dominique Bauby, who had a massive stroke and could move only his left eyelid as a result. He wrote the whole book just by blinking his left eyelid when any letter of the alphabet was pointed out to him. It is a quite extraordinary and moving book, which has its quite earthy sections as well. Bauby died about two days after finishing that book. As someone who has long been interested in disability and what it means, it seems to me that there are some signal lessons there for those who would ponder disability, even in the quite restricted focus in which this debate is set.
There is a positive side to all disability. Jean-Dominique Bauby’s example shows that there is no disability so severe that with determination and application of the human will cannot be turned to some kind of productive outcome. The book is a quite remarkable example of that. The title means that his mind is the butterfly in the casket, in which he is unable to move—but the butterfly is free and so the author is able to produce something which, without that awful event happening to him, he probably would never have produced.
Secondly, there is a continuum between those whom we label disabled and those whom we label able-bodied or normal. This is very important for disability policy. Of course, in many cases we have to treat disabled people—and they have to understand themselves, as they do—as an excluded category. To be able-bodied means not to be in a particular state but to have a capacity, which merges along a continuum even with someone who is as extraordinarily disabled as Jean-Dominique Bauby was.
Thirdly, and crucially for this debate, what examples show about those who have managed extraordinary achievements while suffering the most extreme disabilities
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The noble Viscount mentioned the figure that U Can Do IT circulated to us, which shows that the Government are doing an enormous amount for disabled people. I checked on the website, www.direct.gov.uk, where there is an excellent section aimed at disabled people and outlining all the programmes available to them. They do not of course cover completely housebound people—and I shall come on to that because it is the subject of the debate—but they do add up to an extraordinary determination from the Government to help disabled people, especially in using information technology to get them back into work. Some of the programmes mentioned include residential training for disabled adults, with a view to helping the long-term unemployed; legislation to ensure that disabled employees have equal access to accompany training programmes; disabled students’ allowances and funding for specialised equipment to make using computers easier—for example, for blind or visually impaired people; online centres, which are accessible from home, to help to develop further IT skills; and, most recently, the new deal for disabled people, in which each individual gets to work with a job broker.
As U Can Do IT and other voluntary groups and NGOs point out, however, government policy does not seem to extend directly into the home. I have three comments and three questions that I would ask the Minister to respond to. As organisations such as Disability Alliance and U Can Do IT point out, in the home IT training seems to be left mainly to such organisations or charities as U Can Do IT, which said in the circular that it sent to us that it did not have that much money to do all the things that it needed to do. It made some interesting points—for example, that many disabled people can get hold of computers; it is not really a problem for them to do that, but the problem is to find training to be able to use them. It also made the point that disabled people are hard to reach. That is, it is not easy to find out where the people are who need access to such training and they are not always able themselves to make their needs known, for whatever reason. My first question for the Minister is: are any resources being put into tracing people who might profit from in-home training, and how systematic is the deployment of such resources?
Secondly, when we talk of IT training in the home we also need to think about the children. Many disabled children are able to get to school, but some are not. Even those who are able to get to school would profit from an IT-literate household. All the studies that we have of children show that those with a good learning environment have a much higher average attainment
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Thirdly, for IT training for disabled people within the home, it is not enough just to concentrate on the issues raised by U Can Do IT and other charities. We must focus on business and IT software companies as well. An interesting report from the United Nations showed that 97 per cent of websites did not provide minimum standards of accessibility for certain categories of disabled people—the visually impaired, for example. Not many websites provide text that allows for visually impaired people to read tables, pictures and other kinds of text. That systematically inhibits the use of website material to which “normal” people have ready access. Have the Government developed any policies to encourage IT software companies to make their materials more available to categories of disabled people who at the moment cannot use them?
8.27 pm
Lord Low of Dalston: My Lords, this debate is tailor-made for me to speak in, so I warmly congratulate the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, on having secured it. I certainly agree with him that the importance of the subject is not properly indicated by the number of people who have signed up to speak in the debate. Let us hope with the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, that it is not only a case of small is beautiful—or even very small is very beautiful—but of quality rather than quantity. I say that the debate is tailor-made for me because I speak from personal experience of the vital part that technology plays today in the lives of blind and partially sighted people. Straightaway, I declare an interest as chairman of the Royal National Institute of Blind People.
Technology is having a fundamental impact on the lives of all of us—the way we work, shop, obtain information and even make and communicate with friends is being transformed. However, that is of particular importance to disabled people, for whom it is not just a different way of doing things, but the means to escape from the social and economic exclusion that many of us have traditionally faced. Blind and partially sighted people make use of computers and the internet with the help of assistive technology. Screen readers tell you what is on the screen by means of synthesised speech and screen magnifiers enlarge what is on the screen for a partially sighted person. Those of us who read Braille can use electronic Braille displays attached to our computers, or even portable computers with the same facility. Indeed, I regularly demonstrate this in this Chamber for all to see. I am not doing so tonight because I prepared my notes in Braille, which I prefer to do if I can get them ready in time because it enables me to speak more fluently. However, the notes were prepared with the aid of information technology.
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Thus a blind person no longer needs help to go round the supermarket; they can do it online with the help of assistive technology. Likewise, they can read the newspaper online. Social networking websites such as Facebook provide an opportunity to make new friends without the difficulty of finding the way to new places or spotting likely looking people on the other side of the room, and friends communicate by e-mail rather than relying on others to read print letters they cannot read for themselves.
For a blind or partially sighted person to benefit from all this, they need their own computer and specialist software and they need to know how to make it all work together. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, was absolutely right to say that it is not enough to have the computer—people need training. Indeed, a blind or partially sighted person needs not just the computer and the training but the specialist software as well. This does not come cheaply. For example, JAWS, the market leading screen reader, costs around £800 and training how to use it all can cost more than the equipment itself.
Nowhere has technology the potential to open doors more than in the world of work, where computers are central to the way most businesses now operate. If you are lucky enough to have a job, the Government provide valuable help through the Access to Work scheme. This buys most of the specialist equipment you need and some training in how to use it, and the disabled students’ allowance provides similar help in education. But for those not in education or employment—sadly, the great majority because most people lose their sight late in life and those who do not find it very difficult to get work—things are very different. The need is just as great. Finding vital information or doing business online is more and more part of the very fabric of life. Think of your tax return. But unless you have the money to buy the specialist software and equipment you need—and many disabled people, being on benefit, do not—you will not be able to take advantage of the opportunities technology offers and will be even more excluded than before. It will be back to the supermarket aisle and begging help from shop assistants or friends, back to waiting for someone to come round and read the post, and back to out-of-date extracts from newspapers read on to tape by volunteers rather than today’s paper online.
In the sight-loss field, RNIB, Action for Blind People and other charities provide some support but, as your Lordships will readily understand, charitable resources are stretched very thinly and we can assist only a small number of people. Many people turn to their local further education college to learn key skills, but provision of courses for people with sight problems is extremely patchy. I was encouraged, as I think we all were, to hear from the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, of the splendid work being carried out by U Can Do IT. However, ultimately we need a more comprehensive solution. The Government hope to get people off incapacity benefit and into work and achieve their aim of equal participation for disabled people by 2025. I repose a little more confidence in that initiative than the noble Viscount. I do not think that the Government intend to wait until 2025 and
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The declaration from the 2006 Riga ministerial conference on ICT for an inclusive society drew attention to the deficit in ICT use among excluded groups in Europe. For example, only 10 per cent of people over 65 use the internet, as against 68 per cent of those aged 16 to 24. In line with the Riga declaration, the Government need to address that deficit, prioritising the elderly and disabled, as part of their e-inclusion strategy. We need a government scheme similar to Access to Work to support disabled people at home, no less than those in work or education, in accessing the information society.
I am not in favour of a general restructuring of disability benefits, but the disability living allowance could contain a communication component as well as a mobility component and a care component. Or a scheme along the lines of the Motability scheme could be introduced to enable people to commute their DLA to purchase IT equipment. We must strongly encourage and do more to encourage further education colleges and learning centres to better provide for people with sight problems, for whom information and communication technology is so important as a gateway to information, learning and employment.
8.36 pm
Lord Addington: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for bringing the subject forward, and I thank those noble Lords who have spoken. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, always makes a good thrust into the general philosophy of things. Even if I wanted to, I would not dare contradict the noble Lord, Lord Low, on this one, because he knows what is going on.
The computing revolution is potentially of great benefit to many people who have been excluded from traditional ways of interacting with society, such as those with visual impairment. I do not know how many times I have been involved in debates on visual impairment when the difficulty of travel for those who have sight problems has come up. They are probably the top group who have difficulty in accessing travel and other activities. It is difficult for them if something is based on a screen that you must look at. Unless you embrace the ongoing technology, that group is potentially excluded.
The noble Lord, Lord Low, got there before me when he pointed out that there have been many technological changes that mean that there is no need for this group or any other group to be excluded for very much longer. Technologically, the answers are available to us; that is text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology, which are now very well developed. As a dyslexic, I have a dictation device on my computer, which is now about two years old. It is probably functioning reasonably well, but the British Dyslexia Association more or less said, “What on earth are you doing with that steam-driven technology? It is two years old; we have stuff that
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A number of heavy brochures arrive on one’s desk in Parliament, and I have here a large green one entitled, Training for Trainers: A Guide for ICT Trainers Working with Sight Impaired Students. It arrived on my desk before the debate was tabled and I am very glad that it was not one of the ones that I immediately recycled. When thumbing through it, I discovered that it goes through the problems that a trainer has when dealing with a person with sight problems. It goes through a series of points that are very familiar to me in this field. It says that first you should ask the person you are dealing with about their communication strategy and that you should try to interact with them and change the way you proceed in the classroom. It mentions a series of other things which will mean that for you that person and his or her learning patterns will be different. They will have trouble accessing what you are doing. Therefore, in an ordinary classroom in which visual aids are used—for example, a blackboard—reference to a training manual will be required.
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