Welcome to Under 30 the podcast series by the youth partnership that brings the research results, explores trends in young people's lives and themes relevant for youth policy and practice. In previous episodes of our podcast we have explored different topics covered in the latest Youth Knowledge Book on Young People, Social Inclusion and Digitalization.
In this episode, we would like to focus on another topic you can find in the knowledge book, digitalization and social inclusion of youth with disabilities. This topic is explored in two articles, which you can find in chapter three and chapter four of the book.
Today, we are having two authors of these chapters, Roman Banari, who wrote an article in which he presents the challenges for youth with disabilities related to accessible technology and provides an insight into how they can benefit from ICT in order to be included in participatory processes, education, and the labor market. And Judit Gombás, who is a co-author of the article on digitalization for the empowerment of individuals with visual impairments or blindness.
My name is Dariusz Grzemny together with Lana Pasic, from the EU-Council of Europe youth partnership, we would like to invite you to join us in this episode.
Today, we are speaking with Roman Banari and Judit Gombás about two of their chapters in a Youth Knowledge Book and Social Inclusion, Digitalization, and Young People. The topic of today's podcast is digitalization and ICT as a support for young people with disabilities. So we will start with Roman who will tell us about his chapter in the book. This is chapter three on digitalization and ICT as a guarantee for the social inclusion of young people with disabilities.
Okay, thanks lana. As a start, I would like to say why I chose this topic in order to make some bridges, connection between youth with disability and first of all, also I tend to create connection in the chapter between the young people, civil society and the governmental structure in order to ensure what strategies and actions are connected to young people with disability , in order to ensure that young people with disabilities are not left behind.
So ensuring that the EU standards and national requirements related to social inclusion of young people are respected. So giving some, uh, insights on how to ensure that the young people with disability have to be included in youth actions related to youth participation in decision-making process and how governmental structure could ensure what the youth disability, with different forms of disability hearing or visual, could effectively participate in participation processes.
Also, I tend to make some connection with youth, social inclusion standards related to smart cities, how these could help, uh, in social inclusion and participation of young people in the development of our society. As young people at the present do not play so crucial role in a society as they are excluded or discriminated due to a lack of information accessible for them, or a lack of infrastructure.
So due to digitalization and other forms of accessibility of information or infrastructure, we will ensure that young people are engaged actively in these forms of participation.
Thank you Roman. And, in your chapter, you cover different groups of young people and different types of disabilities and the tools. And also you identify some of the tools which are designed for youth with disabilities. On the other hand, Judit has taken a very particular approach for her chapter, with her colleagues Mária Magdolna Flamich and Mária Rita Hoffmann, and they explored particularly digitalization for the empowerment of individuals with visual impairment and blindness.
So Judit what is it that you explore in your chapter and how does technology help young people, but also not only young people with visual impairments
Yeah. To share a personal background with you, it's important to say that I am blind. Maria, my colleague, she's also blind and Maria Rita Hoffmann, she's a low vision person. And actually, you know, we experienced in all our life this change. Let me tell you examples, then it's easier to understand. Eh, when I started my education, I only had a possibility to use Braille to do all the reading and writing in, um, my school years. And I was around 18 when I got my first laptop.
Already, you can imagine what a huge change it was. I could, for example, simply write my tests on the computer and give them on a pen drive to my teachers. So, you know, it meant a lot before that we didn't have, let's say a language, which we could both use. So I couldn't read or write, um, you know, normal print. My teachers couldn't read or write Braille, so that was tough.
So everything like nowadays, what we experience is that it's much, much, much easier to communicate, thanks to digitalization. And another very important thing is that it's just uncomparable what an amount of information blind and low vision people can get a hold of thanks to the internet. Thanks to the possibility of scanning materials. So like before that we only had, in the good old days, you know, audio tapes with audio books or Braille books, but it was just way much less information.
So actually the reason why we chose this topic and we wanted to give what we wanted to put together a very practical chapter to show our audience in what ways digitalization can help blind and low vision people, how we are able to use computers or smart devices. And so the technology that enables us to be more proficient in our studies, in work, in free time activities, and so on.
Judit, you quote in the end of your article the director of the IBM national support center for persons with disabilities who said that for most people, technology makes things easier and for people with disabilities, technology makes things possible. So if you can say a few words what's made possible for people with disabilities thanks to technology, thanks to ICT.
Or in practical terms, how ICT, how technology, how digitalization is actually supporting the daily routine or daily tasks, basically your life, the life of people will disabilities.
Wow. I should mention lots of things. I couldn't be chatting with you now without a screen reader and an accessible webpage. So, you know, it's really important that I not only have a screen reader, but also this page is accessible. I can read the buttons well, I can use it well, or I can do my shopping. I can read all the full list of ingredients of the products, if I'm interested, you know, earlier I just went to the shop, try to find a shop assistant, told the person what I need.
But I had to be much more focused. It had to be a very quick process, you know, because the shop assistants are super busy. So now I can use a lot of time to read through all the things that I'm interested in, if the web page of course is accessible, or I can simply listen to a audio book, on my smartphone when I'm sitting on the train or the public transport. So lots of things are possible. And there's one thing I would love to stress. Is that, we do need to Braille.
I'm really for using Braille and there are fantastic ways of comparing, let me say old technology and new technology, so there are devices called the refreshable Braille display that you can connect to your computer. So you can simply read in Braille what can be seen on the screen. And this is very important because, you know, blind students, low vision students also need to learn, correct spelling.
Also need to learn what a text looks like, for example, and these things are way easier with a Braille display. So when you listen to an audio text, you just can't learn spelling. So, you know, I think what is very important today or these days is to see that, uh, that we should, um, find a good balance between digitalization and all the new technology and how to combine it well and efficiently with all technology.
But really I could tell you a super long list of the things that it helps with. For example with my phone, I can check what bank notes I have in my wallet. Hungarian forints are all the same size, so there's no other way for me to recognize them. Or I can check colors with my smartphone. So really lots and lots of things.
That's very interesting because usually when we read or hear about people or young people with disabilities, when it comes to their contact with digital technologies, there's a lot of focus on what challenges they are facing. And probably there's a lot of challenges. And actually when we turn upside down what you just actually said, this would be the challenges. That the page is not accessible, that you can not follow, that you cannot read and so on.
So I think that these are a lot of challenges. There's a lot of standards that could be applied when it comes to making technology accessible. How we actually know about them. If we are a youth organization, if we are a group of young people and we want to involve young people, how can we know about these standards?
So Roman, what we actually should start with as let's say youth organization, when we really want to involve young people with disabilities in our activities, or give them the space for participation and involve young people, hearing the voice of young people with disabilities.
Okay, thanks Darek. In fact, we can start from our everyday world, where can see without these standards, without knowing about this. So we can see accessibility of our offices, of our spaces where do we tend to organise some activities. Even our websites could be a observed if we are accessible or not accessible for those with disability.
So I'm having some filters for accessibility for people with disabilities, but then when it's coming to more concrete standards, you can use ISO standards which regulate all steps or how we can use one or other tools for people with disabilities. Or some other general principles of accessibility are developed by UN where we have a possibility to use seven principles of accessibility related to youth with disability.
But more effectively, I suppose, Judit will support my idea , we have to involve people with disability in developing these concrete apps or different tools for people with disability because we are developers, but without knowing exactly how people with disability feel this, how they use this in their daily life, without this, we will not prepare any tools which are individualised for each person.
If I may add something. Yeah, I absolutely, I fully agree with Roman that we need to ask persons with disabilities. And you may say as an NGO c'mon, but I don't know any blind developers who could give me advice. I would say no worries about that because I'm pretty sure in each country there's uh, at least one big organization, but I'm pretty sure in most countries, there are many big organizations of people with disabilities.
In Hungary I would say to the Federation for the blind and visually impaired, if we just stay with people with visual impairments, but all other bigger disability groups have these organizations supporting them and they can give you practical advice on who to turn to. So I don't think that, you know, all the NGOs should start trying to learn all these standards. On the other hand, it would be really cool to have web developers who are into the standards and who are aware of the standards.
Unfortunately, my experience is that we, we just don't have many of them. So I believe it does help a lot if you, as an NGO, for example, try to find a bigger disability organization who you can turn to. And another thing is, all these support pages are really important.
So for example, if you want to use, I don't know, zoom in your activities or any other platform, video conferencing platform before you decide you can either ask a person with a disability or, or you can check their support sites to see to what extent those are disability friendly pages.
If I may add, for example, after this chapter, we asked national youth council to decide to change our webpage in order to make it accessible, according to what I presented in this chapter. So, we found money for this change and the, we made these accessibility standards for people with disabilities, different kinds of the accessibility standards.
But here I wanted to point out, uh, yeah, we sometimes know how to deal with this and how to engage our community in order to make some information accessible. But unfortunately in case of civil society, we have a lot of problems, uh, related to accessibility because for a world changing or adaptation of our webpage or even more, offices and so on,we need some resources. Without having support from a diverse donors or government, we will not be able to ensure these in practice.
So, for this we tend to have good collaboration with all actors who are interested in this, in order to ensure tha we are able to make minimal accessibility standards in our activities. But without supports, I am not sure if civil society will be able to conduct and to ensure that we are fully accessible for all.
Just one more thought. Earlier Darek, you referred to perhaps you said side effects or negative things. Now one super big obstacle I would say is, uh, is also a Roman mentioned the price of things. So lots of accessibility devices are super expensive. The refreshable Braille displays that I mentioned before are so, so expensive at least with Hungarian standards, for example, that very, very few people have them in Hungary.
And it's also a problem that often developers charge much higher prices if you ask them to develop an accessible webpage. Which, you know, should be a basic expectation to have your pages accessible. I mean, the page that you develop. So yeah, there's a lot to do, uh, finance wise.
Yeah, this was actually one of my points I wanted to ask you that this is probably one of the points that discourages a lot of smaller organizations that maybe do not have enough resources to standardize, or to keep up with the standards that are available in order to make the websites accessible. But I quite liked what you said at the beginning that maybe it's not important to start with big things. It's maybe important to start with something that you are able to start with.
And one of the things that doesn't cost anything is actually asking people with disabilities, what they would need, what would make their life easier or how it would make it possible for them to be included in what they are doing. I think this is maybe some kind of advice for policymakers, for people who are establishing programs that are supporting, financing youth organizations, to be able to actually support organizations in making things possible for people with disabilities.
So making the websites or any material that they are producing online, accessible for people with disabilities. I think there's a lot good initiatives that are open source that are free as well that you can use. Probably they are not so good, but this is also a good start, maybe for youth organizations.
I think as technology is a fast changing and developing, and there are so many tools and artificial intelligence is also developing and supporting us kind of in using these tools. But the big moment as well is advocacy and kind of demands for things to be accessible. At the youth partnership we have seen through our conversations with young people as well these kind of questions regarding the materials that we produce.
And these podcast, for example, are just one of the ways in which we try to make our publication and now research closer to different groups of young people. And it is also a question of not only accessibility in terms of hearing things now, instead of reading the book, but also presenting materials in different languages, using subtitles for some of our videos.
And I think in the youth sector now it's quite expected to use transcripts, for example, for the videos and for podcasts, instead of just producing the materials only in one form or one format.
Yeah. I think it's very important what you are now saying. And I believe we just cannot stress enough that, you know, when you hear the word accessibility, most people immediately think of wheelchairs and blind people, and we mustn't forget that accessibility is important for everyone. So, I mean, you may be, I don't know, coming from any country of the world that say you are moving to Germany, but your standard of Germany is not high enough yet.
Then for example, a document or a website in easy language is important for you, helps you a lot, supports your daily life. I mean, you know, it's not that easy language is only important for people who we have, I don't know, learning difficulties, for example, or any other, reading difficulty. So like, or I don't know accessibility of infrastructure is important for you if you have a baby in a push chair.
So it's like accessibility means way more than access for people with disabilities to digitalization or to the infrastructure.
We need the once again, resources and those who have knowledge, how to make, for example, easy to read materials for people with disabilities, with mental (disabilities). So, here there is another problem, in case of a civil society representatives who do not have some much money for this. Yeah, we are interested to promote vis accessibility standards, but as usually we don't have the knowledge and the expertise, how to do this.
And in case we do not have money for experts, we will not provide this. And this is a problem of civil society and, my request is to engage more governments or other state institutions who will contribute to the accessibility of the youth sector.
Yeah. I think the resources are important, but I think what's very important is also the change of mind, , or change a little bit of perspective because I think that sometimes if you really want to include people with disabilities in our activities, any activities of any organization or institution, and then we are applying for funds. Very often we don't think that we can actually apply for funds to make things accessible.
And I think that this is like the way of thinking or how you organize our activity. I mean, always to think about possibility of including the request for funds that actually would make things accessible for people with disabilities. And I think that this is the starting point, whether it will be granted or not, it's another issue, but I think thinking and putting it forward is the first step that you actually can do, which I think is simple. Thank you all for your contribution.
And just to remind our listeners, you can find the articles we have been talking about in chapters three and four of the Youth Knowledge Book on Young People, Social Inclusion and Digitalization. Thank you for listening.