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BBC Radio 4 In Touch |
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Listen to this programmeFactsheet of this programmeTranscript of this programme Print this page FactsheetIn TouchRadio 4 TX Day and Date Tuesday 130606 TX Time 20:40 - 21:00 Line Identity 0800 044 044 Presenter: Gary O'Donoghue Producer: Cheryl Gabriel CONTRIBUTORS Julie Howell (Digital Development Manager, RNIB) Nick Lansley (IT Manager, Tesco.com) Tom Walker (Tesco Customer) Liz Ball (Project Co-ordinator, See me, hear me campaign) Denise Leigh (Opera Singer) TESCO: In Touch looks at the changes Tesco has made to its accessible website and find out whether blind shoppers feel it's now easier to use. SENSE: In Touch hear from the deafblind charity Sense on a new campaign called See me, hear me which aims to empower deafblind people to take action to bring about the changes they want to see, and part of that will be aimed at transport providers. DENISE LEIGH: In Touch also talk to Denise Leigh, one of the winners of Operatunity . CONTACTS TESCO http://www.tesco.com/access/ RNIB Royal National Institute of the Blind 105 Judd Street London WC1H 9NE Talk & Support Services telephone number: 0845 3303723 Helpline: 0845 766 9999 ( UK callers only - Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm ) Tel: 0207 388 1266 (switchboard/overseas callers) Web: www.rnib.org.uk DEAFBLIND UK National Centre for Deaf Blindness John and Lucille van Geest Place Cygnet Road Hampton Peterborough PE7 8FD http://deafblind.org.uk SENSE UK DEAFBLIND CHARITY 11-13 Clifton Terrace, Finsbury Park , London N4 3SR Tel: 0207 272 7774 Liz Ball; Project Co-ordinator, See me, hear me Tel: 0207 561 3412 liz.ball@sense.org.uk http://www.sense.org.uk/campaignnews/campaigns/seemehearme/ http://www.sense.org.uk/ DENISE LEIGH http://www.deniseleigh.com/index.htm GENERAL CONTACTS RNIB 105 Judd Street London WC1H 9NE Helpline: 0845 766 9999 ( UK callers only - Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm ) Tel: 0207 388 1266 (switchboard/overseas callers) Web: www.rnib.org.uk The RNIB provides information, support and advice for anyone with a serious sight problem. They not only provide Braille, Talking Books and computer training, but imaginative and practical solutions to everyday challenges. The RNIB campaigns to change society's attitudes, actions and assumptions, so that people with sight problems can enjoy the same rights, freedoms and responsibilities as fully sighted people. They also fund pioneering research into preventing and treating eye disease and promote eye health by running public health awareness campaigns. HENSHAWS SOCIETY FOR BLIND PEOPLE (HSBP) John Derby House 88-92 Talbot Road Old Trafford Manchester M16 0GS Tel: 0161 872 1234 Email: info@hsbp.co.uk Web: www.henshaws.org.uk Henshaws provides a wide range of services for people who have sight difficulties. They aim to enable visually impaired people of all ages to maximise their independence and enjoy a high quality of life. They have centres in: Harrogate, Knaresborough, Liverpool, Llandudno, Manchester , Newcastle upon Tyne, Salford, Southport and Trafford. THE GUIDE DOGS FOR THE BLIND ASSOCIATION (GDBA) Burghfield Common Reading RG7 3YG Tel: 0118 983 5555 Email: guidedogs@guidedogs.org.uk Web: www.guidedogs.org.uk The GDBA's mission is to provide guide dogs, mobility and other rehabilitation services that meet the needs of blind and partially sighted people. ACTION FOR BLIND PEOPLE 14-16 Verney Road London SE16 3DZ Tel: 0800 915 4666 (info & advice) Tel: 020 7635 4800 (central office) Web: www.afbp.org Registered charity with national cover that provides practical support in the areas of housing, holidays, information, employment and training, cash grants and welfare rights for blind and partially-sighted people. Leaflets and booklets are available. NATIONAL LEAGUE OF THE BLIND AND DISABLED Central Office Swinton House 324 Grays Inn Road London WC1X 8DD Tel: 020 7837 6103 Textphone: 020 7837 6103 National League of the Blind and Disabled is a registered trade union and is involved in all issues regarding the employment of blind and disabled people in the UK . NATIONAL LIBRARY FOR THE BLIND (NLB) Far Cromwell Road Bredbury Stockport SK6 2SG Tel: 0161 355 2000 Textphone: 0161 355 2043 Email: enquiries@nlbuk.org Web: www.nlb-online.org The NLB is a registered charity which helps visually impaired people throughout the country continue to enjoy the same access to the world of reading as people who are fully sighted. DISABILITY RIGHTS COMMISSION (DRC) Freepost MID 02164 Stratford-upon-Avon CV37 9BR Tel: 08457 622 633 Textphone: 08457 622 644 Web: www.drc-gb.org The DRC aims to act as a central source of advice on the rights of disabled people, while helping disabled people secure their rights and eliminate discrimination. It can advise on the operation of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). DISABLED LIVING FOUNDATION 380-384 Harrow Road London W9 2HU Tel: 0845 130 9177 Web: www.dlf.org.uk The Disabled Living Foundation provide information and advice on disability equipment. The BBC is not responsible for external websites General contacts Back to top TranscriptIN TOUCHTX: 13.06.06 2040-2100 PRESENTER: GARY O'DONOGHUE PRODUCER: CHERYL GABRIEL O'Donoghue Good evening. Tonight we look at the changes Tesco has made to its accessible website and find out whether one blind shopper feels it's easier to use. We'll also hear from the deafblind charity Sense, and a new campaign aimed at transport providers. And a bit of an aural treat. Music - Denise Leigh The delightful voice of Denise Leigh, who won the Operatunity programme three years ago, we'll be finding out from her how she's dealing with the fact that record companies no longer see her as having the right image. Now I've never really liked wandering around the shops, mainly because, as a blind person you can't really browse properly. And certainly my partner gets more than a little irritated every time I pick something up off the shelves and say - What's this then? So when about 18 months ago I discovered internet shopping it came as a complete revelation. I could browse to my heart's content and by ordering my groceries online I could avoid starvation into the bargain - had to be a winner. But the browsing only works if the shopping website is suitably accessible and easy to use. One company that's put a good deal of time and effort into accessibility and usability is Tesco. Initially Tesco decided to set up a separate accessible site to their main site but some visually impaired people were annoyed by the fact that not all the special offers and the like were available on the access site. So Tesco combined the two and launched a new site in March. Someone who used the old one and who's tried the new one is Tom Walker and he's on the line now. How is it for you Tom? Walker Difficult Gary I think. Having worked on the development of a couple of websites myself, one of which won an accessibility award I was naturally very interested to hear that Tesco had merged the two sites. But when I saw their main website I was absolutely horrified, I thought blimey they can't possibly have issued this as an accessible mainstream website. And after about a week and a half of messing about and browsing around I eventually found that there was a low graphics version. To be honest I did encounter a number of problems. O'Donoghue Well you rather kindly recorded yourself trying to buy some bread rolls. Tesco site voice Heading, label through bakery and cakes. Walker So I'm in the bakery and cakes section. Now what most users of screen reading software, such as Jaws, would do is tab through the items. But there's a problem. Tesco site voice Tab in store bakery - [indistinct words] Walker That doesn't tell me enough to make a decision as to whether I actually want to buy the item but what you can do - and I didn't realise this - is use the up arrow key. Tesco site voice [indistinct words] six pack round crusty rolls. Walker Six pack round crusty rolls. On the old Tesco site when you press a tab key you'd have got that information straightaway and that is the first problem with this particular part of the website. The next problem is when you select the quantity. Let's try and do that. Tesco site voice Tab. Items colon edit. Walker I'm now in the items and this is where I can select the quantity but in order to that I need to go in and out of what Jaws calls forms mode, so we'll do that. Tesco site voice Enter. Forms mode on. Walker And then I select the quantity. And let's say, for arguments sake, I want five. So I hit the five key. Now what most people would do at this point is tab to the next item but what happens is ... nothing. Tesco site voice Five tab. Walker It stops reading the next item, it should be reading it at that point but it doesn't do it. Tesco site voice Tab. Tab. Tab. Walker So I could tab as often as I like but it won't pick anything up. So the only way to get round that problem is for me to come out of forms mode. Tesco site voice [Indistinct words]. Forms mode off. Tab. Cakes [Indistinct words] Walker And then it will do it. But that is an awful lot of fiddling around. O'Donoghue Tom, how much do you think this is the site and how much is it about the specialist software? Walker I would say this site technically is probably accessible, it probably does meet most of the triple A compliance requirement. What they've not done and what they've forgotten to do is do basic usability testing. That wasn't the only problem I found. I also found, for instance, if you inadvertently hit the return key it takes you to a place you don't want to be, so then if you use alt left arrow to go back you get timed out. Speaking to other visually impaired people over the weekend there were also issues when you go to check out. What strikes me Gary here, more than anything else, is it just hasn't been properly user tested. O'Donoghue With me in the studio is Julie Howell, who's from the RNIB and helped Tesco with their site, as is Nick Lansley, who's the IT manager for Tesco. Julie, what advice were you giving Tesco on this redesign? Howell I must start by saying Tom I'm horrified by the experience that you're having there, just atrocious and you sound incredibly patient. O'Donoghue And hungry. Howell And hungry and a week and a half of messing about is not what you should have to go through when you're just trying to get your food and other supplies from Tesco. I can tell you a little bit about the way that RNIB works with Tesco. The changes that you're experiencing are absolutely not changes that are as a consequence of RNIB's advice to Tesco, we'd like to make that completely clear to start with. What we have done with Tesco, we audited the site that they already had, we suggested some changes to them and we then expected the company to come back to us with their revised design that indeed we would do some usability testing on. It sounds like Tesco have rushed ahead far too quickly and have inflicted upon existing customers a site that some people, like yourself, are finding very, very difficult to use. It's not your job Tom to be messing about on the site, Tesco employ people to do that. O'Donoghue Okay Nick Lansley, it sounds like you haven't tested it very much. Lansley I too am a little bit distressed by the experience you've been having. Certainly Tom trying to do a week and a half to do your ordering is certainly not what we wanted to do with the new Tesco access service. We have been building and testing it for the last year and we've been working with a few hundred Beta Test customers over the last few months to try and make sure that we cover all accessibility and important usability standpoints. The service actually launched in March and we actually ran the old access and the new access sites side by side for three months, letting people know on the old access site that there was a three month countdown started and please could you give us feedback if you had any problems. And lots of people did and we made three or four changes to the service to improve it. But the situation at the end of May was that we were - actually quite bizarrely as far as I'm concerned - were actually taking four times as many orders through the new access service as we were the old and we certainly hadn't mentioned this to sighted customers, it's only been available as a message on the old access site. O'Donoghue Julie, that's got to be a sign that they're doing something right, if four times as many people are going through it. Howell They're clearly doing something right for some people some of the time, which is the problem isn't it. I mean it sounds like Tom is a very experienced access technology user and good for you Tom but there are a great many people who are blind and partially sighted using the computer - using the internet - who don't know a great deal about the technology and nor should they have to. And if you're spending a week and a half trying to get to grips with the system what on earth is it like for those people? O'Donoghue But isn't the fact though that actually for blind people looking at a web page isn't an intuitive experience and essentially you have to learn sites don't you? Howell Why shouldn't it be an intuitive experience though is my question? O'Donoghue Because you can't see the whole image in one go, for a sighted person it's a different experience, doesn't there have to be a certain amount of learning for blind people when they use a website? Howell There's a certain amount of learning but it shouldn't be an insurmountable task of the type that Tom describes, that's not necessary. O'Donoghue What changes do you think they need to make now? Howell I would like Tesco to stop making changes to the site on a day by day or week by week basis, I would much rather Tesco slowed down, took stock, worked on a redesign and had an agency, such as RNIB, or any other agency that can provide specialist advice in this area to have a look at it as a whole and to feed back changes, rather than what appears to be happening right now, which is Tesco making changes in response to customer feedback without looking at the whole picture. O'Donoghue How far off are they from making an accessible site? Howell I don't know, I'm just hearing with horror the experience that Tom is having. We would love to have an opportunity to say stop, let us see what you're doing now. O'Donoghue Nick, are you taking ongoing advice from people apart from just the people who are logging in? Lansley Oh yes absolutely, and we are working with the RNIB and we're only too well aware of the fact that we are sort of equivalent of moving the furniture around in somebody's house. If we actually want to make the service tenable we have to make sure that it's fixed once it's fully working. We believe that we are mostly there, that there are a little bit of maybe some nuances that we need to clear up. This is not a stopping point, we are moving forward and listening all the time. O'Donoghue Okay Tom, just briefly, does that give you any reassurance? Walker Not really to be honest at this stage. You asked the question about whether a website should be intuitive, what you have to remember is that 75% of visually impaired people are at home, probably aren't trained, most of them, in the use of Jaws or other access technology, which means that the website has to be absolutely as usable as possible and not just accessible. O'Donoghue Tom Walker, thanks very much. Julie Howell and Nick Lansley thank you to you both as well. Denise Leigh, you're obviously a visually impaired woman, do you use these shopping websites at all? Leigh I do actually, I've been doing Tesco for about five and a half years but I've really lost patience with it in the last few months. O'Donoghue Well maybe the changes will have some effect for you as well then. Leigh Yes I hope so, yeah. O'Donoghue Now perhaps one of the most excluding of all disabilities is deafblindness, few service providers ever consider this group of people and by definition it's hard for deafblind people to acquire the information and skills they need to play a full part in society. Well the national deafblind charity Sense wants to do something about that. They've launched a campaign called See me, hear me, part of which is aimed at transport providers and how they can make their services accessible to deafblind people. Joining me now in the studio is Liz Ball, who's going to talk about the campaign. Also with Liz is Fiona, who's going to translate into deafblind manual, so that Liz can understand my questions. Liz, could you tell us what the principle aim of the campaign is? Ball The See me, hear me project aims to get deafblind people to stand up for themselves, to speak out, to take action to bring about changes to overcome all of the frustrations that they face. One of the things that we're doing as part of that project is holding a consultation meeting between deafblind people and transport organisations to give deafblind people the opportunity to tell transport organisations what their experience of using public transport is and what transport organisations ought to be doing to enable deafblind people to use public transport. So that the key aim there is to give deafblind people the opportunity to speak out for themselves when so often they aren't heard, they're not given that opportunity to speak out. O'Donoghue Is it also a question of deafblind people not having the skills, in a sense, to organise those sorts of campaigns to get the access that they want to things like transport services? Ball Absolutely, yes, there's a big problem with deafblind people not knowing how to do it. And part of the project is providing training and information and advice and support to deafblind people so that they can acquire those skills. We help them to work out how they can take up any issue, whatever that issue is, and provide them with skills and the advice and support that they need. And sometimes that involves very practical support, other times it simply means explaining who they need to contact about an issue and how they might go about contacting them. So it's a wide range of things. O'Donoghue And tell us about the meeting you're having in July, just finally, how can people get involved in that? Ball The meeting on July 8th is between deafblind people and representatives of transport organisations, such as the Department for Transport. The morning will be spent with deafblind people deciding which issues to raise, the afternoon the representatives will actually come to hear from deafblind people. And any deafblind person, anyone with any degree of both a vision and a hearing loss, can come along to that. You do need to register in advance. O'Donoghue Okay Liz Ball thanks and thanks to Fiona as well. And you can get details of that meeting and the See me, hear me campaign from the Radio 4 action line, number at the end of the programme. Liz Ball thanks very much. Now three years ago Denise Leigh proved that the image oriented world of reality television wasn't a closed book for blind people when she came joint first in Channel 4's singing competition Operatunity. As well as getting a part in Verdi's Rigoletto, she landed a recording contract as a result and looked set for a successful career as a singer. But Denise has struggled to get a new recording deal, so has decided to do what so many other artists are doing now and publish her own work in the hope that word of mouth and the internet will get her music to a wider audience. Denise, what has the last three years been like? Leigh It's been a whirlwind, it's been like a dream. The producer that I worked with on the first two albums was the producer who worked with Paul McCartney and the producer who took over from Sir George Martin, so it's been fabulous. And he was the hardest thing for me to leave behind at EMI really because we had a very heartbreaking goodbye. O'Donoghue Why did they let you go do you think? Leigh It was a combination of things. They were losing their classics department, they were keeping on some classical artists but they were losing their classics label. So they needed to sort of pare down their classics list. Pie Jesu sold very, very well but it was very much tied to Jane's - Jane Gilchrist's Vocalise, which sold slightly less well. And I think they just didn't know what to do with us as individuals, to be honest. And I also think I was the wrong side of 30. O'Donoghue Do you think your blindness had anything to do with it? Leigh I couldn't say, I really don't know because it never seemed to be an issue when I was working at EMI, nobody ever said well of course you're more or less marketable because you are blind. But then I suppose you know I'm a big feisty redhead, I don't suppose anybody's likely to are they really, would you? O'Donoghue There's a new CD. Leigh Yes there is, yeah. O'Donoghue And you've had to sort of fund that yourself I guess. Leigh Well myself and my management have funded it. We've been very, very lucky that a lot of the people that have done things towards the CD like the photo shoots and make up for the photo shoots and the hair and we had the studio donated for the photo shoots. The musicians that worked on the album I was fortunate to find through the husband of one of my managers and yes I've been very, very fortunate in this. It's an EP, there are four tracks on there. We decided that we'd take the lead from people like Katie Melua and the Arctic Monkeys and Simply Red, who are going with smaller independent labels and are being given more artistic freedom. And that was what I really felt I needed to grab hold of, I mean how many times do we say - I could do this better myself? I've said it so many times over the last two years and I thought right well it's time to stop saying it and start doing it then. O'Donoghue We'll ask you to do just that in a moment. But that's about it for this week, don't forget if you have any comments or questions there's the Radio 4 action line, that number 0800 044 044. Peter White will be back in the chair this time next week. That just remains for me to say goodbye from producer Cheryl Gabriel and the rest of the team. I'm Gary O'Donoghue and this is Denise Leigh. Music - Denise Leigh - My Funny Valentine Back to top |
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