Information accessibility, where have you come?

In the past 20 years, the Internet has developed rapidly, and we have entered a new era of the integration of cyberspace and physical space.

The advent of the digital age has brought new thresholds and new opportunities for groups such as the visually impaired, the hearing impaired, and the physically impaired. How to build barrier-free facilities in the digital age, so that they can use digital tools like ordinary people, and even transcend the obstacles they face, has become a challenging issue.

On January 10, 2022, Tencent Research Institute held a special forum on "Information Accessibility: From Urban Blind Roads to Digital Inclusion", discussing how digital technologies can help the disadvantaged groups.

Panelists:

Wang Weili is the founder of Beijing Hongdandan Cultural Service Center for the Visually Impaired

Chen Yan, General Manager of User Research and Experience Design Department of Tencent

Senior Product Manager of LI Sitong OPPO

Founder of Mao Mingrui Urban Quadrant

Xiao Wei is an expert researcher at Tencent Tianlai Laboratory

compere:

Wang Jianfei is a senior researcher at Tencent Research Institute

Helping the blind is also helping the blind

Wang Jianfei (Moderator): Good afternoon, and welcome to the Science and Technology for Good Innovation Week, jointly organized by Tencent Research Institute and Tencent Sustainable Social Value Innovation Division, today is the special forum "Information Accessibility: From Urban Blind Roads to Digital Inclusion".

As early as the 1950s, the mainland made a detailed explanation for the protection of the rights and interests of disabled groups from the height of the policy, and since about 1990, blind roads have become a hard indicator of urban road infrastructure on the mainland.

But today, with the rapid development of technology and the Internet, human habitat space has expanded into the dual realms of physical and virtual. Among them, network digital technology has brought many changes to our lives, especially for some disabled groups, including visually impaired, hearing impaired, cognitively impaired and other groups of people, making their choices for the future more diverse.

Information accessibility has become a new social buzzword. In real life, many people will feel that information accessibility has nothing to do with themselves, but according to the World Disability Report published by the World Bank and WHO in 2011, data show that about 11% of the time in average each person is "disabled" in their lifetime. When most of us enter old age, we will face visual, auditory, tactile and even cognitive impairments. Therefore, accessibility is not only to serve people who are born or acquired with disabilities, but also to take into account the elderly with mild to moderate disorders and everyone with short-term disabilities.

The purpose of our forum today is to explore some cases of value innovation and practical exploration in the field of accessibility.

Wang Weili: Let me briefly introduce myself to you. Since 2000, we began to pay attention to the blind group, in this process, we gradually found that the problem of the survival of the blind in accessibility, social education and employment, etc., so we began to think about how to make the blind group like a healthy person to get equal information, around this concept, we launched a series of follow-up activities and projects, which have continued to this day.

We ensure that visual storytelling such as the Mind Cinema (a film for the blind), the Mind Audio Library (producing digital information accessibility systems with international standards for voice books and text books, providing reading services for the blind), and providing artistic practices ensure that visually impaired people have the same equal access to information as the discerning people and satisfy their right to "see" the world.

Congenital blindness and acquired blindness are not the same in information analysis, congenital blindness he adapted from a young age and had to accept. Under this premise, he has formed a way of processing information, his way of thinking, and even his dreams are different from those of us with clear eyes.

Acquired blindness will have a lot of previous visual memories, and even visual associations, and he can connect what he hears with the memories of his previous visual practices and find some basis. But if some people who are blind in the day after a long time have no information to obtain, they will also lack visual information about this society.

The long-term lack of visual information can cause problems for blind people to analyze and think, resulting in this group being gradually marginalized by society. We are thinking that if they have visual supplements, such as making up for these missing information for them by telling, then their mental state will be as infinitely close as our clear-eyed people. Over time, the visually impaired group will be like us discerning people to obtain socially normalized information, reduce the distance from society, and live, learn and think normally.

In fact, the most important thing is that we want to let the visually impaired community understand what the world is really like through visual storytelling, and secondly, all volunteers involved in volunteering to help the blind will rethink the value of their lives, their true growth and needs.

Therefore, we help the blind both to help the blind and to help the discerning people, and the ultimate solution is the problem of people's mental blindness.

Wang Jianfei (Moderator): Thanks to Mr. Dawei's sharing, I heard about the Hongdan Mind Theater in a podcast before, and when the visually impaired group watches the movie, the staff of Hongdandan will have a narrator in the theater. The narrator reads out the information on the screen between the actor's special lines, as if telling a child a story.

When we communicate with the accessibility teams of various companies, we will find that information accessibility is actually a very complex thing at the product level, it is not like a blind road, once paved, the visually impaired group can use it immediately. This will involve the use of logic problems that hinder users.

Industry exploration of information accessibility

Yan Chen: Let me share with you Tencent's practice and exploration of information accessibility. We've been following visually impaired users since 2011, observing how they use our products and thinking about the difference between their interaction logic and our able-bodied people.

Our earliest practical work in accessibility is to strive to accurately locate all the functions on the program to the specific buttons, and the key hints corresponding to this function can be read by the screen reading software. In addition, recent research has found that unlocking verification codes when using smartphones and "seeing" product information clearly when shopping are the most common and urgent problems in their daily lives for visually impaired groups. To this end, our team is always exploring specific solutions.

For the visually impaired group to unlock the verification code can not be like the clear-eyed people with arithmetic, identify objects, draw specific curves and other operations, we continue to explore how to solve such problems, try to design a countdown to wait for verification of the method, so that the visually impaired group can log in without operation, and in terms of data security, our technical department will make evasion for malicious operations and dangerous operations, so as to ensure the safety of the digital property of the visually impaired group.

The other is an innovative project that we have spent a long time exploring, trying to use mobile phone cameras to help visually impaired people identify some information in the real world.

Through user research, we specifically understand the various obstacle scenarios and moments in the life of visually impaired users, such as when they are outdoors, and have just shared that their daily obstacles such as how to recognize traffic lights on the road, whether they can successfully pass the zebra crossing, and take the bus to find navigation, etc., these are the problems they will encounter in the outdoors. Even in the familiar indoor home environment, they will encounter some problems, such as familiar with how to operate the appliance, generally speaking, he tries several times, the location does not change, the button has been tried, or after someone has brought it, they can basically recognize it by their own sense of touch. But we also found that some problems are very collapsible for them, such as identifying the information, ingredients, expiration dates, etc. on food or medicine, and we wonder if we can help them remove such obstacles through our technology. Our technical team tries to use OCR technology to help the visually impaired community quickly understand the information they need to pay attention to by scanning the language of the product. At present, the product has been tested, and it is necessary to continuously adjust the algorithm and increase data accumulation to optimize.

In addition, we hope that in the research and development stage can quickly find our users, for example, when the product needs to be adapted to aging, it will use the elderly user sample accumulated by Tencent questionnaire over the years, which can quickly help the product positioning problem to find the product direction, and also hope that our elderly user sample library can help other products to investigate.

In the process of doing barrier-free project research, many years ago, there was a big sister who deeply touched me. She is a very optimistic blind person, when we visited her, she expressed to us that because of products such as QQ, help them open a door, they can do a lot of communication and communication with the outside world through QQ, her happiness has greatly infected us, making us have a greater sense of achievement in our work, encouraging us to stick to this matter all the time.

Wang Jianfei (moderator): Thanks to teacher Chen Yan's sharing, in fact, when the smart phone was just introduced, many people would worry about whether the mobile phone without the physical button would make it difficult for the disabled people to use. Smartphone manufacturers in mainland China have long been concerned about the field of information accessibility, and OPPO has recently successfully explored further solutions compared with more basic mobile phone screen reading software.

Li Sitong: Hello everyone, I am Li Sitong, product manager of OPPO. Before getting into the topic, I want to share a story with you.

A colleague once sent me a PPT and said, "The places that have been modified are marked in red." "But I searched the full text and didn't find it, only to find out later that he marked it green." As you must have guessed, in fact, this colleague of mine is colorblind.

1. In the study, we found that 16% of the global population is color-dysite, 68% is normal color vision, and the remaining 16% is extremely sensitive to color vision.

2. Because of the influence of genetics, the most common red-green blindness will appear on the X chromosome, and will be passed on to their sons with non-color-dyschromic mothers, so there will be more male colorblindness than women, about 1 in every 12 male users, and 1 in every 200 women, in this proportion around the world.

They may have difficulty telling whether an apple is sweet by color, wonder if pedestrians can pass at intersections, or have trouble telling whether they are friend or foe when playing a game.

However, the difficulties of color vision disorder groups are not as obvious as visual impairment and physical disability in front of our eyes, and they are ignored by more people. But a group of people who have not spoken out or been paid attention should not be ignored. So we are thinking, as a terminal mobile phone manufacturer, what changes can be made?

We decided to provide users with a smart screen that can adjust the screen parameters according to the user's type of color blindness. But problems followed. Many colorblind friends don't know which color perception they really have a problem with.

Looking at the mobile phone industry, the existing technology can only allow users to choose the type of color blindness and the strength and weakness of the adjustment, but if the user does not know which type of color blindness they are, they do not know how to choose. At present, the false homochromatic color map detection method commonly used in medicine can detect which type of color dyschromia the user belongs to, but it is not known how serious it is.

Therefore, our first step is to use a scientific method to let users know their type of color blindness, and then give a screen adjustment plan. This is a regrettable point for the entire industry, and it is also a technical challenge. But for OPPO, it is a responsibility and mission, and we need to take this step to solve this problem.

Based on the characteristics of the cone, we found the most accurate Munsell color chess detection method in the color industry, and migrated the simplified D15 method of this technology to mobile phones. The breakthroughs in the process have made us all more confident. Finally, the detection scheme of OPPO color vision disorder and the 766 color compensation scheme of 10000 screens developed by OPPO were realized. In the entire effect test, the user's color discrimination ability has increased from the original accuracy rate of about 20% to 80%.

The thousand-person thousand-screen function has been equipped with the OPPO Find X3 series in March this year, and we also completed the development of the existing detection capability SDK last month, and can apply this ability to more hardware devices and software content APP, so that users around the world can experience OPPO's thousand-person screen. In fact, thousands of screens have just taken a step, we are conducting in-depth population research with the Accessibility Research Association, hoping that with the advancement of technology and the optimization of algorithms, in the future iteration version, it will give more help to people with color vision disorders.

In addition, OPPO has always paid close attention to the functional needs of accessibility, providing people with disabilities with a variety of experiences that assist mobile phone operation. At present, 21 Google native accessibility features have been provided, and 3 features have been provided. Includes thousands of screens, voice captions, and accessible color modes. In the future, we will continue to pay attention to the needs of people with disabilities, assume the corporate responsibility of promoting the popularization of information accessibility, and practice the brand concept of "science and technology for people, good for the world" to serve global users.

Wang Jianfei (Moderator): Last year, when Tencent was doing a case study on science and technology for good, it noticed such a practical case, which did not directly help the visually impaired community, but used a tool such as smart blind cane to optimize the planning and governance of blind lanes and barrier-free facilities in cities.

Using digital technology to feed back groups of people with disabilities

Mao Mingrui: We did such a project before, designed and produced a blind guide cane equipped with GPS and radar waves for the visually impaired community, which can help the visually impaired community to travel more efficiently and safely, which is its significance at the individual level; but in fact, what we are thinking about is how to promote the digital transformation of the entire social barrier-free environment.

With the user's permission, the cane records the reflected data and location information of the radar wave during use, and then the collected data is back to the server and synthesized into a map through a background algorithm, in this way, we can know the blind person's activity area, walking route, and where obstacles or barrier-free connection problems are encountered during walking.

We hope that these blind canes with radar scans and data backhaul can expand production in the future, Beijing has 100,000 visually impaired people, if we can produce 100,000 blind canes to send to them, and rely on their backhaul data, we can accurately know the living areas and problems encountered by the visually impaired people, so that in the construction of barrier-free environments, the public financial funds are accurately invested in the blind people's activity areas and travel problem nodes, which can reduce the cost of urban transformation. At the same time, it can also effectively enhance the sense of acquisition of the visually impaired group.

In addition, we have built a knowledge graph for the existing various normative standards for barrier-free construction, with these map databases, we can cooperate with the Internet map, so that each type of facility is associated with the corresponding requirements of barrier-free construction, so that we may be able to let the public feedback through simple options to give us whether each facility meets the requirements of barrier-free construction, such as whether the restaurant has a ramp, whether there is a handrail, whether the mall has a barrier-free toilet, etc. This can not only realize the assessment and monitoring of the barrier-free environment of the city, but also enhance the awareness of accessibility in the whole society. On the one hand, the digital construction of the information barrier-free social environment relies on the support of a large number of user behavior data, on the other hand, we need to create an ecology for the whole people to participate in the construction of the barrier-free environment, so that everyone can participate in solving this problem together.

Wang Jianfei (Moderator): Thanks to the sharing of teacher Mao Mingrui, there are many cases similar to the use of digital technology to feed back the disabled group, and there are many in real life, and they are not limited to the field of visual impairment.

Tencent Tianlai Lab did a series of explorations for the hearing impaired community last year, let's take a look at some of their explorations on technology empowerment in the field of hearing impairment in the past year.

Xiao Wei: The predecessor of Tencent Conference Tianlai Lab is the audio team of Tencent Multimedia Lab, we are now mainly serving Tencent Conference, TRTC and other products, we hope to provide users with complete audio solutions, so that users can hear clearly and hear the truth.

In terms of information accessibility, our original intention is that since we have accumulated so many communication and audio technologies, why not take them out to do some transformations, and then serve the hearing impaired users and make some contributions to society.

In fact, in our daily lives, the problem of hearing impairment is always with us. Statistics show that a person from the beginning of poor hearing, to the real diagnosis of serious hearing problems, the average time of this process is about 7 years, so hearing health problems should attract everyone's attention, especially when wearing headphones for a long time or long-term exposure to excessive noise environment, you should pay regular attention to your hearing state, regularly give your ears a "holiday".

Tencent Conference Tianlai Lab announced an App that integrates audiometry, assisted listening, and remote rehabilitation last year. Users can easily view their current hearing health with their mobile phones.

Based on precise measurements, our app can apply different assistive listening gains to specific frequency bands based on individual hearing loss status, providing personalized assistive listening. After testing, in test scenarios such as Lin's six tones, the single tone recognition rate can be improved by about 66%.

In addition, during our 2021 Ear Day, based on digital audiometry technology, we conducted a big data analysis of the hearing state in China. We observe a phenomenon, according to the general law, are we not saying that with age, the average hearing level of a person will show a monotonous decline in relationship?

However, after a comparative analysis of the low-scoring populations of various age groups, we found that the average hearing state of the low-scoring people in the range of 20-30 years old, and the average hearing status of some 30-year-old 40-year-old low-scoring people, is even worse.

This phenomenon prompts us to think about the reasons for this, in fact, this may be related to what we call noise violence, for example, many of our young people like to wear headphones, this headset may have to listen to more than ten hours a day, we may have some entertainment noise, there are some architectural noise, etc., this may affect our so-called young people's overall hearing state, don't forget that they will also become 30-40 years old in the future, they will become the backbone of a society, If we think so, we should pay attention to the hearing health problems of young age groups.

Simply put, whether you are listening to the song software, or watching the video, you don't adjust the volume too much, here actually gives a threshold, because the time relationship we do not expand, here is actually a problem of consciousness, even if you like to listen to the song, we also recommend wearing headphones every day time, 70% of the volume value button listening to the song time is not more than 6 hours, in fact, this is quite important. And the scope of safe metering just mentioned we also hope that each APP can have a similar intelligent alarm.

For many elderly people, high-frequency hearing loss is one of the hearing diseases with the highest probability of occurring in them, and many times the elderly cannot hear clearly because they cannot perceive part of the frequency of sound, especially in noisy environments, and some sounds with characteristic timbres will lead to a further decline in the sound perception ability of the elderly group.

In addition, the biggest pain point of hearing impaired users is noise interference, in the noise environment, the hearing impaired users' perception of the accuracy of speech expression is much worse than that of normal users, and the stronger the noise interference, the more unclear it is to hear. We try to do "voice enhancement" through the way of "enhanced speech", the user hears the voice segment with noise after retaining the noise suppression, using our latest AI voice enhancement technology, you can effectively suppress noise under the premise of retaining voice, whether it is music interference sound, or human voice interference, or even wind noise, can be effectively suppressed, so as to make the voice clearer.

What else can be done about the disabled?

Wang Jianfei (Moderator): Thanks to Teacher Xiao Wei's sharing, we will enter the free discussion session. I just had a question I would like to ask Mr. Xiao Wei to ask, in the process of communication between you and the hearing impaired group, you will find that they have some different demands for this ordinary digital product?

Xiao Wei: After I communicated with them, I found that the biggest feeling was that the communication with them was relatively smooth first, and it was also thanks to the help of various hearing aids at present. These friends also hope to have a better sound experience and improve the quality of life. At present, many devices or apps have some attempts in accessibility. More needs to be done in this regard. For example, you may want to do some so-called user data research to know the pain points of these friends' experience. I think this is pretty critical.

Moderator: Then Follow up with Xiao Wei's answer, I would like to ask Teacher Chen Yan, for the obstacle group, some ordinary user research methods and data may not be so applicable to them, because it is difficult for us to identify and select the data of the obstacle group from the background data, so how do we usually find the special user needs of the obstacle group?

Chen Yan: Under the current trend of the entire Internet, practicing Tencent's vision and mission: user-oriented, technology for good, requires us to always observe and explore these users. QQ groups are a way for us to collect problems from users who are in the way of obstacles. They will often ask us some questions about the use of the product in the group, including what they need, or what errors our program has, all kinds. Second, we regularly maintain and update the sample library of people with different disabilities, and we can send them research requests. We sometimes invite them in the form of interviews to tell us about problems in the process of using the product. Like the "Tencent as a Companion" project I mentioned before, we take the initiative to approach their daily lives, observe and record their daily lives, find their pain points, and think about how to solve them.

For Tencent, the cultural gene of user participation in product/service co-creation has always been with us, which is also a research and development habit that Tencent has adhered to for more than ten years.

Moderator: I have a question I would like to ask Mr. Dawei, the rapid development of the Internet has brought earth-shaking changes to our social life, so for the visually impaired, what impact will the rapid development of digital tools have on them? Do they have any different demands on the use of digital tools/products?

Moderator: I have one more question for Mr. Mao Mingrui, the City Quadrant should still be considered a startup. When we did the research on science and technology for good before, in fact, there were many projects that we investigated, and they said that this information accessibility may be something that a large factory can do, how did you think of doing it at that time?

Mao Mingrui: Before I started my business, I was a planner who was mainly using some new technical methods to study and analyze the city's spatial problems, governance problems, planning problems, etc. Later we called this ability the ability of urban physical examination, we treated the city as an organic life, to see what diseases the city had, how to treat it.

To carry out urban physical examination, it first needs a value system to assess whether the city is good or bad, and the inclusiveness of the city is a very important value. But how we measure urban inclusion has become a very important issue, so we began to pay attention to the city's age-friendly, child-friendly, new professional youth-friendly, etc., of course, but also the issue of disability-friendly and barrier-free environment.

When I have the opportunity to contact the users of HongdanDan Culture To help the blind, I actively want to cooperate with them, from their point of view, to see what problems our city has in terms of inclusiveness and accessibility, which problems we may not be able to perceive without contact with the visually impaired, or there is no way to really experience them from their standpoint.

So we combined our technical capabilities with the needs of this group and some scenarios to a limited extent, and we have our current work.