Meeting a Robot: Why Accessibility Matters Before They Join Our Lives

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Demographics tells us that we need help. Automating the physical world requires robots. We need them to be accessible!

There is a company here in Norway that makes humanoid robots and I was privileged to actually meet one a couple of days ago at an event with my day job. It was a “real” robot, not just a toy or a vacuum cleaner like thing – it was trying to look and move like a human.

Sorry, no videos or photos, we were asked to keep it for ourselves as launching may or may not be close.

After experiencing it in real life, I decided to reflect on the accessibility and universal design of humanoid robots, as it is obvious that robots need to be accessible to support inclusion, including people with disabilities. I wrote about accessibility of robots before, but it’s different when you meet a robot in real life.

I loved the idea of robots helping us with boring tasks in the physical world, freeing up our time at home to do other things, who doesn’t love that idea? But we need to be inclusive before we start inviting robots to our homes. They need to learn a lot. And with current artificial intelligence and machine learning progresses we need to make sure people with disabilities are realistically represented and involved in the co-design of robots as well. Otherwise we may end in a situation where accessibility and universal design will, again, tried to be bolted on. And we all know that adding accessibility afterwards does not have a chance and even when it may work – it is often more expensive and way less effective than when we shift accessibility “to the left” – to the start of planning and design.

There are a lot of potentials to include accessibility of robots from the start

My experience with the robot was very limited, but I could immediately reflect on some things that could be improved for interaction with people that have permanent, temporary or situational disabilities.

Interfaces towards people in the same space

I am very optimistic about the potentials for accessibility and universal design of robots that will live among us. Robots have, without doubt, a lot of obvious potentials for a lot of situations, starting with our homes and expanding to industry and beyond.

Besides making them safe we really need to make them accessible as well, so that their potentials will be available for people with disabilities. But we need to integrate accessibility now, before they even get to situations where they will discriminate people with disabilities.

We really must not repeat mistakes from the past where our ableism is at the core of our products – where lack of awareness produces products and services that discriminate people with disabilities, because “we didn’t know”. Accessibility awareness is unfortunately still the normal, and – obviously – society unfortunately needs regulations and legislation (stick instead of carrot) to at least start to consider the positive effects of accessibility. And this is unfortunately also the case with humanoid robots.

Even if I just met a robot for a couple of minutes – I already saw the inaccessibility. And as far as I know – the competition is not any better – so let’s do something about it!

The idea is that robots will hear and speak – to mimic the people around them. Which is great. But (!) – we have the technical possibilities to do so much more and make their interaction really universally designed and accessible. If we start now, it will cost us less and it will improve the lives of up to a quarter of people – people with permanent disabilities. Add also situational and temporary disabilities to the formula and you can quickly establish that the numbers may be much higher. And when we also consider the aging population we really should understand how important it will be for the robots to be accessible!

I also guess that a large part of the potential market will also be the health and social care sector. This is then yet another argument for accessibility and universal design.

Besides obvious concepts (like for example multi-language possibilities and possibilities to increase the sound level) and without using a lot of time I was immediately thinking about the following accessibility improvements:

  • Robots need to be able to communicate with sign languages, so that deaf and hard of hearing people can interact with them. Tactile signing should also be possible, for deaf blind people.
  • Robots should be able to emit audio and visual signaling, for example an alarm for emergencies where alarm is not only in audio form.
  • Robots should have a possibility to display text (and it should be possible to change the style and size of the text).
  • Robots should be able to communicate via accessible native mobile applications and similar interfaces (so that people depending on screen-readers and refreshable Braille displays could communicate with them).

These are just some ways that come in mind besides obvious ones, but we would need to co-design with people with different disabilities to establish further requirements and invite accessibility specialists to join in as well. I am yet to see Robot Accessibility Guidelines (RAG) to emerge, but am quite sure that they will be a fact with the increasing adoption of robots.

Any vendor that will recognize the potentials in early phase will certainly gain extreme market advantages against competitive robot vendors and will in my opinion also have the possibility to lead the regulative requirements that will soon need to be a fact.

If you are a vendor – I hope I got your attention and you recognized the fact that accessibility may be vital at the end – when your product will be evaluated beside others.

If you are on the procurement side – be sure to ask about accessibility of your future employees before it is too late and they will discriminate against people with disabilities.

If you are a representative of the government – make sure to initiate accessibility requirements for robots now, before it is too late!

Interfaces for operators

Additionally, I also reflected on the accessibility for the operators. Humanoid robots need to have support for human operators and as far as I can see this will be a required feature for quite a lot of time. Even if / when robots will be totally independent I think that people will want to have the possibility to control them manually.

But what if operator has a disability? Permanent, situational or temporary one? How will they be able to operate the robot then? Well, if the operator user interface is not universally designed and accessible, then we will have huge problems. Currently most of operator interfaces seem to be virtual reality (VR). Or at least augmented reality (AR). Which is not an easy take to make accessible at the moment. But we could at least try more.

I haven’t seen the operator interface, but as it is VR or AR, I am certain that it is not accessible. Which made me think about the lost opportunities. I don’t have the estimates on the number of robots that will slowly become our room mates. I guess that it will be like with all modern technology – very limited in start due to high prices and low trust – and then exponentially growing when society will get the numbers based on the efficiency and so on.

But it is obvious that the more robots we will have – the more operators we will need. And if operator interfaces are not accessible, we will – once again – discriminate against people with disabilities. They will perhaps once again be left out of the large job market, just because we didn’t think about making the operator interfaces (more) accessible.

So please, dear reader – if you have the possibility to influence this – please do. Robots will without a doubt make our lives better. We need to make sure that they will not leave out people with disabilities. Once again we need to spread the awareness, re-use, improve and expand the knowledge from WCAG and EN 301 549, get some help with EN 17161 and co-design the missing parts with people with disabilities, before it is too late.

Author: Bogdan Cerovac

I am IAAP certified Web Accessibility Specialist (from 2020) and was Google certified Mobile Web Specialist.

Work as digital agency co-owner web developer and accessibility lead.

Sole entrepreneur behind IDEA-lab Cerovac (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility lab) after work. Check out my Accessibility Services if you want me to help your with digital accessibility.

Also head of the expert council at Institute for Digital Accessibility A11Y.si (in Slovenian).

Living and working in Norway (🇳🇴), originally from Slovenia (🇸🇮), loves exploring the globe (🌐).

Nurturing the web from 1999, this blog from 2019.

More about me and how to contact me:

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