Category: Design for All

Involving disabled people in the design of ICT tools and devices

by Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay (CROPPED)

The World Health Organisation currently estimates that around 1.3 billion people, or one in six people on Earth, “experience significant disability”. Designers who are creating devices and tools for people to use need to make sure that the products they develop can be used by as many people as possible, not just non-disabled people, to make sure that everyone can benefit from them.

Disabled people can face lots of barriers in the workplace including some that seem simple to address – problems using everyday ICT and other tech. While there are a lot of fantastic Assistive Technology (AT) products unfortunately not all are suitable and so are abandoned by disabled people as they don’t serve their needs.

One challenge is that some of the people who have been doing the designing might not have direct experience of disability themselves, so they are less able to think about their design from that perspective. Solutions to this can include making sure that disabled computer scientists and human-computer interaction researchers are part of the team of designers and creators in the first place, or by making it easier for other disabled people to be involved at an early stage of design. This means that their experience and ideas can contribute to making the end product more relevant and useful for them and others. Alongside this there is education and advocacy – helping more young computer scientists, technologists and human-computer interaction designers to start thinking early about how their future products can be more inclusive.

An EPSRC project “Inclusive Public Activities for information and Communication Technologies” has been looking at some practical ways to help. Run by Prof. Cathy Holloway and Dr. Maryam Bandukda and their wider team at UCL they have established a panel of disabled academics and professionals who can be ‘critical friends’ to researchers planning new projects. By co-creating a set of guidelines for researchers they are providing a useful resource but it also means that disabled voices are heard at an early stage of the design process so that projects start off in the right direction.

Prof. Holloway and Dr. Bandukda are based at the Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub) in the department of computer science at UCL. GDI Hub is a global leader in disability innovation and inclusion and has research reaching over 30 million people in 60 countries. The GDI Hub also educates people to increase awareness of disability, reduce stigma and lay the groundwork for more disability-aware designers to benefit people in the future with better products.

An activity that the UCL team ran in February 2024, for schools in East London, was a week-long inclusive ICT “Digital Skills and Technology Innovation” bootcamp. They invited students in Year 9 and above to learn about 3D printing, 3D modelling, laser cutting, AI and machine learning using Python, artificial reality and virtual reality experiences along with a chance to visit Google’s Accessible Discovery Centre and use their skills to “tackle real-world challenges”.

What are some examples of Assistive Technology?

Screen-reading software can help blind or visually impaired people by reading aloud the words on the page. This is something that can help sighted people too, your document can read itself to you while you do something else. The entire world of audio books exists for this reason! D/deaf people can take part more easily in Zoom conversations if text-to-caption software is available so they can read what’s being said. That can also help those whose hearing is fine but who speak a different language and might miss some words. Similarly you can dictate your clever ideas to your computer and device which will type it for you. This can be helpful for someone with limited use of their hands, or just someone who’d rather talk than type – this might also explain the popularity of devices and tools like Alexa or Siri.

Web designers want to (and may need to*) make their websites accessible to all their visitors. You can help too – a simple thing that you can do is to add ALT Text (alternative text) to images. If you ever share an image or gif to social media it’s really helpful to describe what’s in the image for screen readers so that people who can’t view it can still understand what you meant.

*Thanks to regulations that were adopted in 2018 the designers of public sector websites (e.g. government and local council websites where people pay their council tax or apply for benefits) must make sure that their pages meet certain accessibility standards because “​​people may not have a choice when using a public sector website or mobile app, so it’s important they work for everyone. The people who need them the most are often the people who find them hardest to use”.

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Careers

Examples of computer science and disability-related jobs

Both of the jobs listed below are CLOSED and are just for your information only.

  • [CLOSED] Islington Council, Digital Accessibility Apprentice (f/t), £24k, clos 7 July
    • Are you interested in web design and do you want to help empower disabled people to become fully engaged within the community? This is a great opportunity to learn about the rapidly growing digital accessibility industry. Qualified and experienced digital accessibility specialists are sought after.
  • [CLOSED] Global Disability Innovation Hub, Communications and Engagement Officer, £32k, London / hybrid, closed 4 July 2024
    • This role is focused on maximising comms-based engagement across the GDI Hub’s portfolio, supporting GDI Hub’s growing outreach across project-based deliverables and organisational comms channels (e.g. social media, websites, content generation).
Computer science & research

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Art Touch and Talk Tour Tech

A sculpture of a head and shouldrers, heavily textured with a network of lines and points
Image by NoName_13 from Pixabay

What could a blind or partially-sighted person get from a visit to an art gallery? Quite a lot if the art gallery puts their mind to it. Even more if they make use of technology. So much so, we may all want the enhanced experience.

The best art galleries provide special tours for blind and partially-sighted people. One kind involves a guide or curator explaining paintings and other works of art in depth. It is not exactly like a normal guided tour that might focus on the history or importance of a painting. The best will give both an overview of the history and importance whilst also giving a detailed description of the whole picture as well as the detail, emphasising how each part was painted. They might, for example, describe the brush strokes and technique as well as what is depicted. They help the viewer create a really detailed mental model of the painting.

One visually-impaired guide who now gives such tours at galleries such as Tate Britain, Lisa Squirrel, has argued that these tours give a much deeper and richer understanding of the art than a normal tour and certainly more than someone just looking at the pictures and reading the text as they wander around. Lisa studied Art History at university and before visiting a gallery herself reads lots and lots about the works and artists she will visit. She found that guided tours by sighted experts using guided hand movements in front of a painting helped her build really good internal models of the works in her mind. Combined with her extensive knowledge from reading, she wasn’t building just a picture of the image depicted but of the way it was painted too. She gained a deep understanding of the works she explored including what was special about them.

The other kind of tour art galleries provide is a touching tour. It involves blind and partially-sighted visitors being allowed to touch selected works of art as part of a guided tour where a curator also explains the art. Blind art lover, Georgina Kleege, has suggested that touch tours give a much richer experience than a normal tour, and should also be put on for all for this reason. It is again about more than just feeling the shape and so “working out its form that”seeing” what a sighted person would take in at a glance. It is about gaining a whole different sensory experience of the work: its texture, for example, not a lesser version just of what it looks like.

How might technology help? Well, the company, NeuroDigital Technologies, has developed a haptic glove system for the purpose. Haptic gloves are gloves that contain vibration pads that stimulate the skin of the person in different, very fine ways so as to fool the wearer’s brain into thinking it is touching things of different shapes and textures. Their system has over a thousand different vibration patterns to simulate different feelings of touching surfaces. They also contain sensors that determine the precise position of the gloves in space as the person moves their hands around.

The team behind the idea scanned several works of art using very accurate laser scanners that build up a 3D picture of the thing being scanned. From this they created a 3D model of the work. This then allowed a person wearing to feel as though they were touching the actual sculpture feeling all the detail. More than that the team could augment the experience to give enhanced feelings in places in shadow, for example, or to emphasise different parts of the work.

A similar system could be applied to historical artifacts too: allowing people to “feel” not just see the Rosetta Stone, for example. Perhaps it could also be applied to paintings to allow a person to feel the brush strokes in a way that could just not otherwise be done. This would give an enhanced version of the experience Lisa felt was so useful of having her hand guided in front of a painting and the brush strokes and areas being described. Different colours might also be coded with different vibration patterns in this way allowing a series of different enhanced touch tours of a painting, first exploring its colours, then its brush strokes, and so on.

What about talking tours? Can technology help there? AIs can already describe pictures, but early versions at least were trained on the descriptions people have given to images on the Internet: “a black cat sitting on top of the TV looking cute”, The Mona Lisa: a young woman staring at you”. That in itself wouldn’t cut it. Neither would training the AI on the normal brief descriptions on the gallery walls next to works of art. However, art books and websites are full of detail and more recent AIs can give very detailed descriptions of art works if asked. These descriptions include what the picture looks like overall, the components, colours, brushstrokes and composition, symbolism, historical context and more (at least for famous paintings). With specific training from curators and art historians the AIs will only get better. What is still missing for a blind person though from the kind of experience Lisa has when experiencing painting with a guide, is the link to the actual picture in space – having the guide move her hand in front of the painting as the parts are described. However, all that is needed to fill that gap is to combine a chat-based AI with a haptic glove system (and provide a way to link descriptions to spatial locations on the image). Then, the descriptions can be linked to positions of a hand moving in space in front of a virtual version of the picture. Combine that with the kind of system already invented to help blind people navigate, where vibrations on a walking stick indicate directions and times to turn, and the gloves can then not only give haptic sensations of the picture in front of the picture or sculpture, but also guide the person’s movement over it.

Whether you have such an experience in a gallery, in front of the work of art, or in your own front room, blind and partially sighted people could soon be getting much better experiences of art than sighted people. At which point, as Georgina Kleege, suggested for normal touch tours, everyone else will likely want the full “blind” experience too.

Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

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Accessible Technology in the Voting Booth

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by Daniel Gill, Queen Mary University of London

Voting at an election: people deposting their voting slip
Image AI generated by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay

On Thursday 4th July 2024, millions of adults around the UK went to their local polling station to vote for their representative in the House of Commons. However, for the 18% of adults who have a disability, this can be considerably more challenging. While the right of voters to vote independently and secretly is so important, many blind and partially sighted people cannot do so without assistance. Thankfully this is changing, and this election was hailed as the most accessible yet. So how does technology enable blind and partially sighted people to vote independently?

 There are two main challenges when it comes to voting for blind and partially sighted people. The names of candidates are listed down the left-hand side, so firstly, a voter needs to find the row of the person who they want to vote for. They then, secondly, need to put a cross in the box to the right. The image below gives an example of what the ballot paper looks like:

A mock up of a "CS4FN" voting slip with candidates HOPPER, Grace TURING, Alan Mathison BENIOFF, Paul Anthony Lovelace, Ada

To solve the first problem, we can turn to audio. An audio device can be used to play a recording of the candidates as the appear on the ballot paper. Some charities also provide a phone number to call before the election, with a person who can read this list out. This is great, of course, but it does rely on the voter remembering the position of the person that they want to vote for. A blind or partially sighted voted is also allowed to use a text reader device, or perhaps a smart phone with a special app, to read out what is on the ballot paper in the booth.

Lots of blind and partially impaired people are able to read braille: a way of representing English words using bumps on the paper (read more about braille in this CS4FN article). One might think that this would solve all the problems, but, in fact, there is a requirement that all the ballot papers for each constituency have a standard design to ensure they can be counted efficiently and without error.

The solution to the second problem is far more practical: the excitingly named tactile voting device. This is a simple plastic device which is placed on top of the ballot paper. Each of the boxes on the ballot paper (as shown to the right of the image above), has a flap above it with its position number embossed on it. When the voter finds the number of the person they want to vote for, they simply turn over the flap, and are guided by a perfectly aligned square guide to where the box is. The voter can then use that guide to draw the cross in the box.

This whole process is considerably more complicated than it is for those without disabilities – and you might be thinking, “there must be an easier way!” Introducing the McGonagle Reader (MGR)! This device combines both solutions into one device that can be used in the voting booth. Like the tactile voting device, it has flaps which cover each of the boxes for drawing the cross. But, next to those, buttons, which, when pressed, read out the information of the candidate for that row. This can save lots of time, removing the need to remember the position of each candidate – a voter can simply go down the page and find who they want to vote for and turn over the correct flap.

When people have the right to vote, it is especially important to ensure that they have the ability to use that right. This means that no matter the cost or the logistics, everyone should have access to the tools they need to vote for their representative. Progress is now being made but a lot more work still needs to be done.

To help ensure this happens in future, the RNIB want to know the experiences of those who voted or didn’t vote in the UK 2024 general election – see the survey linked from the RNIB page here.

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Pac-Man and Games for Girls

In the beginning video games were designed for boys…and then came Pac-Man.

Pac-man eating dots
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Before mobile games, game consoles and PC based games, video games first took off in arcades. Arcade games were very big earning 39 billion dollars at their peak in the 1980s. Games were loaded into bespoke coin-operated arcade machines. For a game to do well someone had to buy the machines, whether actual gaming arcades or bars, cafes, colleges, shopping malls, … Then someone had to play them. Originally boys played arcade games the most and so games were targeted at them. Most games had a focus on shooting things: games like asteroids and space invaders or had some link to sports based on the original arcade game Pong. Girls were largely ignored by the designers… But then came Pac-Man. 

Pac-Man, created by a team led by Toru Iwatani,  is a maze game where the player controls the Pac-Man character as it moves around a maze, eating dots while being chased by the ghosts: Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. Special power pellets around the maze, when eaten, allow Pac-Man to chase the ghosts for a while instead of being chased.

Pac-Man ultimately made around $19 million dollars in today’s money making it the biggest money making video arcade game of all time. How did it do it? It was the first game that was played by more females than males. It showed that girls would enjoy playing games if only the right kind of games were developed. Suddenly, and rather ironically given its name, there was a reason for the manufacturers to take notice of girls, not just boys.

A Pac-man like ghost
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

It revolutionised games in many ways, showing the potential of different kinds of features to give it this much broader appeal. Most obviously Pac-Man did this by turning the tide away from shoot-em up space games and sports games to action games where characters were the star of the game, and that was one of its inventor Toru Iwatani’s key aims. To play you control Pac-Man rather than just a gun, blaster, tennis racket or golf club. It paved the way for Donkey Kong, Super Mario, and the rest (so if you love Mario and all his friends, then thank Pac-Man). Ultimately, it forged the path for the whole idea of avatars in games too. 

It was the first game to use power ups where, by collecting certain objects, the character gains extra powers for a short time. The ghosts were also characters controlled by simple AI – they didn’t just behave randomly or follow some fixed algorithm controlling their path, but reacted to what the player does, and each had their own personality in the way they behaved.

Because of its success, maze and character-based adventure games became popular among manufacturers, but more importantly designers became more adventurous and creative about what a video game could be. It was also the first big step towards the long road to women being fully accepted to work in the games industry. Not bad for a character based on a combination of a pizza and the Japanese symbol for “mouth”.

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

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T. V. Raman and his virtual guide dogs

Guide dog silhouette with binary superimposed
Image by PC modifying dog from Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

It’s 1989, a year with lots of milestones in Computer Science. In March, Tim Berners-Lee puts down in writing the idea of an “information management system”, later to become the world wide web. In July, Nintendo releases the Game Boy in North America selling 118 million units worldwide over its 14-year production.

Come autumn, a 24-year-old arrives in Ithaca, US, home of Cornell University. He would be able to feel the cool September air as it blows off Cayuga Lake, smell the aromas from Ithaca’s 190 species of trees, and listen to a range of genres in the city’s live music scene. However,, he couldn’t take in the natural beauty of the city in its entirety as he started his PhD … because he was blind. That did not stop him going on to have a gigantic impact on  the lives of blind and partially sighted people worldwide.

T. V. Raman was born in Pune, India, in 1965. He had been partially sighted from birth, but at the age of 14 he became blind due to a disease called glaucoma. Throughout his life, however, he has not let this stop him.

While he was partially sighted, he was able to read and write – but as his sight worsened, and with the help of his brother, mentors, and aides, he was still able to continue learning from textbooks, and solve problems which were read to him. At the height of its popularity, in the early 1980s, he also learned how to solve a specially customised Rubik’s cube, and could do so in about 30 seconds.

Raman soon developed an interest in mathematics, and around 1983 started studying for a Maths degree at the University of Pune. On finishing in 1987, he studied for a Masters degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, this time in Computer Science and Maths. It was with the help of student volunteers he was able to learn from textbooks and assistance with programming was provided by an able volunteer. 

Today people with no vision often use a screen reader to hear what is on a screen. It not everyone is lucky enough to have so much help as Raman and screen readers play the part of all those human volunteers who helped him. Raman himself played a big part in their development.

Modern screen readers allow you to navigate the screen part-by-part, with important information and content read to you. Many of these systems are built into operating systems, such as the Narrator in Windows (which uses a huge number of keyboard shortcuts), and Google TalkBack for Android devices (where rubbing the screen, vibration, and audio hints are used). These simpler screen readers might already be installed on your system – if so have a go with them!

While Raman was learning programming, such screen readers were still in their infancy. It was only in the 1980s that a team at IBM developed a screen reader for the command-line interface of the IBM DOS (which Raman would later use), and it would be many years before screen readers were available for the much more challenging graphical user interfaces we’re so accustomed to today.

It was at Cornell University where Raman settled on his career-long research interest: accessibility. He originally intended to do an Applied Mathematics PhD, but then discovered the need for ways to use speech technology to read complicated documents, especially those with embedded mathematics. For his dissertation, he therefore developed the Audio System for Technical Readings (ASTER) to solve the problem.

What he realised was that when looking at information visually our eyes are active taking in information from different places but the display is passive. With an audio interface this is reversed with the ear passive and the display actively choosing the order of information presented. This makes it impossible to get a high level view first and then dive into particular detail. This is a big problem when ‘reading’ maths by listening to it. His system solved the problem using audio formatting which allows the listener to browse the structure of information first.

He named this program after his first guide dog, Aster, which he obtained, alongside a talking computer, in early 1990. Both supported him throughout his PhD. For this work, he received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, a prestigious yearly worldwide celebrating the best PhD dissertation in computer science and related fields.

Following on from this work, he developed a program called Emacspeak, an audio desktop, which, unlike a screen reader, takes existing programs and makes them work with audio outputs. It makes use of Emacs, a family of text editors (think notepad, but with lots more features), as well as a programming language called Lisp. Raman has continued to develop Emacspeak ever since and the program is often bundled within Linux operating system installations. Like ASTER, versions of this program are dedicated to his guide dogs.

Following his PhD, Raman worked briefly with Adobe Systems and IBM, but, since 2005, has worked with Google on auditory user interfaces, accessibility, and usability. In 2014, alongside Google colleagues, he published a paper on a new application called JustSpeak, a system for navigating the Android operating system with voice commands. He has also gone back to his roots, integrating mathematical speech into the ChromeVox, the screen reader built into Chromebook devices.

Despite growing up in a time of limited access to computers for blind and visually impaired people, Raman was able, with the help of his brother and student volunteers, to learn how to program, solve a Rubik’s cube, and solve complex maths problems. With early screen readers he was also able to build tools for fellow blind and visually impaired people, and then benefit himself from his own tools to achieve even more.

Guide dogs can transform the lives of blind and partially sighted people by allowing them to do things in the physical world that they otherwise could not do. T. V. Raman’s tools provide a similar transformation in the digital world, changing lives for the better.

– Daniel Gill, Queen Mary University of London

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Designing for autistic people

by Daniel Gill and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

What should you be thinking about when designing for a specific group with specific needs, such as autistic people? Queen Mary students were set this task and on the whole did well. The lessons though are useful when designing any technology, whether apps or gadgets.

A futuristic but complicated interface
A futuristic but complicated interface with lots of features: feature bloat?
Image by Tung Lam from Pixabay

The Interactive Systems Design module at QMUL includes a term-long realistic team interaction design project with the teaching team acting as clients. The topic changes each year but is always open-ended and aimed at helping some specific group of people. The idea is to give experience designing for a clear user group not just for anyone. A key requirement is always that the design, above all, must be very easy to use, without help. It should be intuitively obvious how to use it. At the end of the module, each team pitches their design in a short presentation as well as a client report.

This year the aim was to create something to support autistic people. What their design does, and how, was left to the teams to decide from their early research and prototyping. They had to identify a need themselves. As a consequence, the teams came up with a wide range of applications and tools to support autistic people in very different ways.

How do you come up with an idea for a design? It should be based on research. The teams had to follow a specific (if simplified) process. The first step was to find out as much as they could about the user group and other stakeholders being designed for: here autistic people and, if appropriate, their carers. The key thing is to identify their unmet goals and needs. There are lots of ways to do this: from book research (charities, for example, often provide good background information) and informally talking to people from the stakeholder group, to more rigorous methods of formal interviews, focus groups and even ethnography (where you embed yourself in a community).

Many of the QMUL teams came up with designs that clearly supported autistic people, but some projects were only quite loosely linked with autism. While the needs of autistic people were considered in the concept and design, they did not fully focus on supporting autistic people. More feedback directly from autistic people, both at the start and throughout the process, would have likely made the applications much more suitable. (That of course is quite hard in this kind of student role-playing scenario, though some groups were able to do so.) That though is key idea the module is aiming to teach – how important it is to involve users and their concerns closely throughout the design process, both in coming up with designs and evaluating them. Old fashioned waterfall models from software engineering, where designs are only tested with users at the end, are just not good enough.

From the research, the teams were then required to create design personas. These are detailed, realistic but fictional people with names, families, and lives. The more realistic the character the better (computer scientists need to be good at fiction too!) Personas are intended to represent the people being designed for in a concrete and tangible way throughout the design process. They help to ensure the designers do design for real people not some abstract tangible person that shape shifts to the needs of their ideas. Doing the latter can lead to concepts being pushed forward just because the designer is excited by their ideas rather than because they are actually useful. Throughout the design the team refer back to them – does this idea work for Mo and the things he is trying to do? 

An important part of good persona design lies around stereotypes. The QMUL groups avoided stereotypes of autistic people. One group went further, though: they included the positive traits that their autistic persona had, not just negative ones. They didn’t see their users in a simplistic way. Thinking about positive attributes is really, really important if designing for neurodivergent people, but also for those with physical disabilities too, to help make them a realistic person. That group’s persona was therefore outstanding. Alan Cooper, who came up with the idea of design personas, argued that stereotypes (such as a nurse persona being female) were good in that they could give people a quick and solid idea of the person. However, this is a very debatable view. It seems to go against the whole idea of personas. Most likely you miss the richness of real people and end up designing for a fictional person that doesn’t represent that group of people at all. The aim of personas is to help the designers see the world from the perspective of their users, so here of autistic people. A stereotype can only diminish that.

Multicolour jigsaw ribbon
Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

Another core lesson of the module is the importance of avoiding feature bloat. Lots of software and gadgets are far harder to use than need be because they are packed with features: features that are hardly ever, possibly never, used. What could have been simple to use apps, focusing on some key tasks, instead are turned into ‘do everything’ apps. A really good video call app instead becomes a file store, a messaging place, chat rooms, a phone booth, a calendar, a movie player, and more. Suddenly it’s much harder to make video calls. Because there are so many features and so many modes all needing their own controls the important things the design was supposed to help you do become hard to do (think of a TV remote control – the more features the more buttons until important ones are lost). That undermines the aim that good design should make key tasks intuitively easy. The difficulty when designing such systems is balancing the desire to put as many helpful features as possible into a single application, and the complexity that this adds. That can be bad for neurotypical people, who may find it hard to use. For neurodivergent people it can be much worse – they can find themselves overwhelmed. When presented with such a system, if they can use it at all, they might have to develop their own strategies to overcome the information overload caused. For example, they might need to learn the interface bit-by-bit. For something being designed specifically for neurodiverse people, that should never happen. Some of the applications of the QMUL teams were too complicated like this. This seems to be one of the hardest things for designers to learn, as adding ideas, adding features seems to be a good thing, it is certainly vitally important not to make this mistake if designing for autistic people. 

Perhaps one of the most important points that arose from the designs was that many of the applications presented were designed to help autistic people change to fit into the world. While this would certainly be beneficial, it is important to realise that such systems are only necessary because the world is generally not welcoming for autistic people. It is much better if technology is designed to change the world instead. 

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AMPER: AI helping future you remember past you

by Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

Old photos image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay

Have you ever heard a grown up say “I’d completely forgotten about that!” and then share a story from some long-forgotten memory? While most of us can remember all sorts of things from our own life history it sometimes takes a particular cue for us to suddenly recall something that we’d not thought about for years or even decades. 

As we go through life we add more and more memories to our own personal library, but those memories aren’t neatly organised like books on a shelf. For example, can you remember what you were doing on Thursday 20th September 2018 (or can you think of a way that would help you find out)? You’re more likely to be able to remember what you were doing on the last Tuesday in December 2018 (but only because it was Christmas Day!). You might not spontaneously recall a particular toy from your childhood but if someone were to put it in your hands the memories about how you played with it might come flooding back.

Accessing old memories

In Alzheimer’s Disease (a type of dementia) people find it harder to form new memories or retain more recent information which can make daily life difficult and bewildering and they may lose their self-confidence. Their older memories, the ones that were made when they were younger, are often less affected however. The memories are still there but might need drawing out with a prompt, to help bring them to the surface.

old newspaper
Perhaps a newspaper advert will jog your memory in years to come… Image by G.C. from Pixabay

An EPSRC-funded project at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland is developing a tablet-based ‘story facilitator’ agent (a software program designed to adapt its response to human interaction) which contains artificial intelligence to help people with Alzheimer’s disease and their carers. The device, called ‘AMPER’*, could improve wellbeing and a sense of self in people with dementia by helping them to uncover their ‘autobiographical memories’, about their own life and experiences – and also help their carers remember them ‘before the disease’.

Our ‘reminiscence bump’

We form some of our most important memories between our teenage years and early adulthood – we start to develop our own interests in music and the subjects that we like studying, we might experience first loves, perhaps going to university, starting a career and maybe a family. We also all live through a particular period of time where we’re each experiencing the same world events as others of the same age, and those experiences are fitted into our ‘memory banks’ too. If someone was born in the 1950s then their ‘reminiscence bump’ will be events from the 1970s and 1980s – those memories are usually more available and therefore people affected by Alzheimer’s disease would be able to access them until more advanced stages of the disease process. Big important things that, when we’re older, we’ll remember more easily if prompted.

In years to come you might remember fun nights out with friends.
Image by ericbarns from Pixabay

Talking and reminiscing about past life events can help people with dementia by reinforcing their self-identity, and increasing their ability to communicate – at a time when they might otherwise feel rather lost and distressed. 

“AMPER will explore the potential for AI to help access an individual’s personal memories residing in the still viable regions of the brain by creating natural, relatable stories. These will be tailored to their unique life experiences, age, social context and changing needs to encourage reminiscing.”

Dr Mei Yii Lim, who came up with the idea for AMPER(3).

Saving your preferences

AMPER comes pre-loaded with publicly available information (such as photographs, news clippings or videos) about world events that would be familiar to an older person. It’s also given information about the person’s likes and interests. It offers examples of these as suggested discussion prompts and the person with Alzheimer’s disease can decide with their carer what they might want to explore and talk about. Here comes the clever bit – AMPER also contains an AI feature that lets it adapt to the person with dementia. If the person selects certain things to talk about instead of others then in future the AI can suggest more things that are related to their preferences over less preferred things. Each choice the person with dementia makes now reinforces what the AI will show them in future. That might include preferences for watching a video or looking at photos over reading something, and the AI can adjust to shorter attention spans if necessary. 

“Reminiscence therapy is a way of coordinated storytelling with people who have dementia, in which you exercise their early memories which tend to be retained much longer than more recent ones, and produce an interesting interactive experience for them, often using supporting materials — so you might use photographs for instance”

Prof Ruth Aylett, the AMPER project’s lead at Heriot-Watt University(4).

When we look at a photograph, for example, the memories it brings up haven’t been organised neatly in our brain like a database. Our memories form connections with all our other memories, more like the branches of a tree. We might remember the people that we’re with in the photo, then remember other fun events we had with them, perhaps places that we visited and the sights and smells we experienced there. AMPER’s AI can mimic the way our memories branch and show new information prompts based on the person’s previous interactions.

​​Although AMPER can help someone with dementia rediscover themselves and their memories it can also help carers in care homes (who didn’t know them when they were younger) learn more about the person they’re caring for.

*AMPER stands for ‘Agent-based Memory Prosthesis to Encourage Reminiscing’.

Suggested classroom activities – find some prompts!

  • What’s the first big news story you and your class remember hearing about? Do you think you will remember that in 60 years’ time?
  • What sort of information about world or local events might you gather to help prompt the memories for someone born in 1942, 1959, 1973 or 1997? (Remember that their reminiscence bump will peak in the 15 to 30 years after they were born – some of them may still be in the process of making their memories the first time!).

See also

If you live near Blackheath in South East London why not visit the Age Exchange and reminiscence centre which is an arts charity providing creative group activities for those living with dementia and their carers. It has a very nice cafe.

Related careers

The AMPER project is interdisciplinary, mixing robots and technology with psychology, healthcare and medical regulation.

We have information about four similar-ish job roles on our TechDevJobs blog that might be of interest. This was a group of job adverts for roles in the Netherlands related to the ‘Dramaturgy^ for Devices’ project. This is a project linking technology with the performing arts to adapt robots’ behaviour and improve their social interaction and communication skills.

Below is a list of four job adverts (which have now closed!) which include information about the job description, the types of people that the employers were looking for and the way in which they wanted them to apply. You can find our full list of jobs that involve computer science directly or indirectly here.

^Dramaturgy refers to the study of the theatre, plays and other artistic performances.

Dramaturgy for Devices – job descriptions

More on …

1. Agent-based Memory Prosthesis to Encourage Reminiscing (AMPER) Gateway to Research
2. The Digital Human: Reminiscence (13 November 2023) BBC Sounds – a radio programme that talks about the AMPER Project.
3. Storytelling AI set to improve wellbeing of people with dementia (14 March 2022) Heriot-Watt University news
4. AMPER project to improve life for people with dementia (14 January 2022) The Engineer

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

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The gender shades audit

by Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

Face recognition technology is used widely, such as at passport controls and by police forces. What if it isn’t as good at recognising faces as it has been claimed to be? Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru tested three different commercial systems and found that they were much more likely to wrongly classify darker skinned female faces compared to lighter or darker skinned male faces. The systems were not reliable.

Different skin tone cosmetics
Image by Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay

Face recognition systems are trained to detect, classify and even recognise faces based on a bank of photographs of people. Joy and Timnit examined two banks of images used to train the systems and found that around 80 percent of the photos used were of people with lighter coloured skin. If the photographs aren’t fairly balanced in terms of having a range of people of different gender and ethnicity then the resulting technologies will inherit that bias too. The systems examined were being trained to recognise light skinned people.

The pilot parliaments benchmark

Joy and Timnit decided to create their own set of images and wanted to ensure that these covered a wide range of skin tones and had an equal mix of men and women (‘gender parity’). They did this using photographs of members of parliaments around the world which are known to have a reasonably equal mix of men and women. They selected parliaments both from countries with mainly darker skinned people (Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa) and from countries with mainly lighter skinned people (Iceland, Finland and Sweden).

They labelled all the photos according to gender (they had to make some assumptions based on name and appearance if pronouns weren’t available) and used a special scale called the Fitzpatrick scale to classify skin tones (see Different Shades below). The result was a set of photographs labelled as dark male, dark female, light male, light female, with a roughly equal mix across all four categories: this time, 53 per cent of the people were light skinned (male and female).

Testing times

Joy and Timnit tested the three commercial face recognition systems against their new database of photographs (a fair test of a wide range of faces that a recognition system might come across) and this is where they found that the systems were less able to correctly identify particular groups of people. The systems were very good at spotting lighter skinned men, and darker skinned men, but were less able to correctly identify darker skinned women, and women overall. The tools, trained on sets of data that had a bias built into them, inherited those biases and this affected how well they worked.

As a result of Joy and Timnit’s research there is now much more recognition of the problem, and what this might mean for the ways in which face recognition technology is used. There is some good news, though. The three companies made changes to improve their systems and several US cities have already banned the use of this technology in criminal investigations, with more likely to follow. People worldwide are more aware of the limitations of face recognition programs and the harms to which they may be (perhaps unintentionally) put, with calls for better regulation.

Different Shades
The Fitzpatrick skin tone scale is used by skin specialists to classify how someone’s skin responds to ultraviolet light. There are six points on the scale with 1 being the lightest skin and 6 being the darkest. People whose skin tone has a lower Fitzpatrick score are more likely to burn in the sun and are at greater risk of skin cancer. People with higher scores have darker skin which is less likely to burn and have a lower risk of skin cancer. A variation of the Fitzpatrick scale, with five points, is used to create the skin tone emojis that you’ll find on most messaging apps in addition to the ‘default’ yellow.

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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1. 

Collecting mini-beasts and pocket monsters

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

A Pokemon creature int he grass
Image by  Ramadhan Notonegoro from Pixabay

Satoshi Tajiri created one of the biggest money-making media franchises of all time. It all started with his love of nature and, in particular, mini-beasts. It also eventually took gamers back into the fresh air.

As a child, Satoshi Tajiri, loved finding and collecting minibeasts, so spent lots of time outside, exploring nature. But, as Japan became more and more built up, his insect searching haunts disappeared. As the natural world disappeared he was drawn instead inside to video game arcades and those games became a new obsession. He became a super-fan of games and even created a game fanzine called Game Freak where he shared tips on playing different games. It wasn’t just something he sold to friends either: one issue sold 10,000 copies. An artist, Ken Sugimori, who started as a reader of the magazine, ultimately joined Satoshi, illustrating the magazine for him.

Rather than just writing about games, they wanted to create better ones themselves, so morphed Game Freak into a computer game company, ultimately turning it into one of the most successful ever. The cause of that success was their game Pokemon, designed by Satoshi with characters drawn by Ken. It took the idea of that first obsession, collecting minibeasts, and put it into a fun game with a difference.

It wasn’t about killing things, but moving around a game world searching for, taming and collecting monsters. The really creative idea, though, came from the idea of trading. There were two versions of the game and you couldn’t find all the creatures in your own version. To get a full set you had to talk to other people and trade from your collection. It was designed to be a social game from the outset.

It has been suggested that Satoshi is neuro-diverse. Whether he is or not, autistic people (as well as everyone else) found that Pokemon was a great way to make friends, something autistic people often find difficult. Pokemon, also became more than just a game, turning into a massive media franchise, with trading cards to collect, an animated series and a live action film. It also later sparked a second game craze when Pokemon Go was released. It combined the original idea with augmented reality, taking all those gamers back outside for real, searching for (virtual) beasts in the real world.

 

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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1. 

Stretching your keyboard – getting more out of QWERTY

by Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

A QWERTY keyboard after smartphone keyboards starting with keys q w e r t y on the top row
A smartphone’s on-screen keyboard layout, called QWERTY after the first six letters on the top line. Image by CS4FN after smartphone QWERTY keyboards.

If you’ve ever sent a text on a phone or written an essay on a computer you’ve most likely come across the ‘QWERTY’ keyboard layout. It looks like this on a smartphone.

This layout has been around in one form or another since the 1870s and was first used in old mechanical typewriters where pressing a letter on the keyboard caused a hinged metal arm with that same letter embossed at the end to swing into place, thwacking a ribbon coated with ink, to make an impression on the paper. It was quite loud!

The QWERTY keyboard isn’t just used by English speakers but can easily be used by anyone whose language is based on the same A,B,C Latin alphabet (so French, Spanish, German etc). All the letters that an English-speaker needs are right there in front of them on the keyboard and with QWERTY… WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).  There’s a one-to-one mapping of key to letter: if you tap the A key you get a letter A appearing on screen, click the M key and an M appears. (To get a lowercase letter you just tap the key but to make it uppercase you need to tap two keys; the up arrow (‘shift’) key plus the letter).

A French or Spanish speaking person could also buy an adapted keyboard that includes letters like É and Ñ, or they can just use a combination of keys to make those letters appear on screen (see Key Combinations below). But what about writers of other languages which don’t use the Latin alphabet? The QWERTY keyboard, by itself, isn’t much use for them so it potentially excludes a huge number of people from using it.

In the English language the letter A never alters its shape depending on which letter goes before or comes after it. (There are 39 lower case letter ‘a’s and 3 upper case ‘A’s in this paragraph and, apart from the difference in case, they all look exactly the same.) That’s not the case for other languages such as Arabic or Hindi where letters can change shape depending on the adjacent letters. With some languages the letters might even change vertical position, instead of being all on the same line as in English.

Early attempts to make writing in other languages easier assumed that non-English alphabets could be adapted to fit into the dominant QWERTY keyboard, with letters that are used less frequently being ignored and other letters being simplified to suit. That isn’t very satisfactory and speakers of other languages were concerned that their own language might become simplified or standardised to fit in with Western technology, a form of ‘digital colonialism’.

But in the 1940s other solutions emerged. The design for one Chinese typewriter avoided QWERTY’s ‘one key equals one letter’ (which couldn’t work for languages like Chinese or Japanese which use thousands of characters – impossible to fit onto one keyboard, see picture at the end!).

Rather than using the keys to print one letter, the user typed a key to begin the process of finding a character. A range of options would be displayed and the user would select another key from among them, with the options narrowing until they arrived at the character they wanted. Luckily this early ‘retrieval system’ of typing actually only took a few keystrokes to bring up the right character, otherwise it would have taken ages.

This is a way of using a keyboard to type words rather than letters, saving time by only displaying possible options. It’s also an early example of ‘autocomplete’ now used on many devices to speed things up by displaying the most likely word for the user to tap, which saves them typing it.

For example in English the letter Q is generally* always followed by the letter U to produce words like QUAIL, QUICK or QUOTE. There are only a handful of letters that can follow QU – the letter Z wouldn’t be any use but most of the vowels would be. You might be shown A, E, I or O and if you selected A then you’ve further restricted what the word could be (QUACK, QUARTZ, QUARTET etc).

In fact one modern typing system, designed for typists with physical disabilities, also uses this concept of ‘retrieval’, relying on a combination of letter frequency (how often a letter is used in the English language) and probabilistic predictions (about how likely a particular letter is to come next in an English word). Dasher is a computer program that lets someone write text without using a keyboard, instead a mouse, joystick, touchscreen or a gaze-tracker (a device that tracks the person’s eye position) can be used.

Letters are presented on-screen in alphabetic order from top to bottom on the right hand side (lowercase first, then upper case) and punctuation marks. The user ‘drives’ through the word by first pushing the cursor towards the first letter, then the next possible set of letters appear to choose from, and so on until each word is completed. You can see it in action in this video on the Dasher Interface.

Key combinations

The use of software to expand the usefulness of QWERTY keyboards is now commonplace with programs pre-installed onto devices which run in the background. These IMEs or Input Method Editors can convert a set of keystrokes into a character that’s not available on the keyboard itself. For example, while I can type SHIFT+8 to display the asterisk (*) symbol that sits on the 8 key there’s no degree symbol (as in 30°C) on my keyboard. On a Windows computer I can create it using the numeric keypad on the right of some keyboards, holding down the ALT key while typing the sequence 0176. While I’m typing the numbers nothing appears but once I complete the sequence and release the ALT key the ° appears on the screen.

English language keyboard image by john forcier from Pixabay, showing the numeric keypad highlighted in yellow with the two Alt keys and the 'num lock' key highlighted in pink. Num lock ('numeric lock') needs to be switched on for the keypad to work, then use the Alt key plus a combination of letters on the numeric keypad to produce a range of additional 'alt code' characters.
English language keyboard image by john forcier from Pixabay highlighted by CS4FN, showing the numeric keypad highlighted in yellow with the two Alt keys and the ‘num lock’ key highlighted in pink. Num lock (‘numeric lock’) needs to be switched on for the keypad to work, then use the Alt key plus a combination of letters on the numeric keypad to produce a range of additional ‘alt code‘ characters.

When Japanese speakers type they use the main ‘ABC’ letters on the keyboard, but the principle is the same – a combination of keys produces a sequence of letters that the IME converts to the correct character. Or perhaps they could use Google Japan’s April Fool solution from 2010, which surrounded the user in half a dozen massive keyboards with hundreds of keys a little like sitting on a massive drum kit!

*QWERTY is a ‘word’ which starts with a Q that’s not followed by a U of course…

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The ‘retrieval system’ of typing mentioned above, which lets the user get to the word or characters more quickly, is similar to the general problem solving strategy called ‘Divide and Conquer’. You can read more about that and other search algorithms in our free booklet ‘Searching to Speak‘ (PDF) which explores how the design of an algorithm could allow someone with locked-in syndrome to communicate. Locked-in syndrome is a condition resulting from a stroke where a person is totally paralysed. They can see, hear and think but cannot speak. How could a person with Locked-in syndrome write a book? How might they do it if they knew some computational thinking?

EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.