UIG Conference 2022: Digitalization needs inclusion
This year’s UIG conference will take place on September 22, 2022 under the motto “Inclusion affects us all!”. For one day, the online event will focus on the question of why digital inclusion is so important for the economy and society.
Everyone is talking about the metaverse and the countless possibilities that the digital 3D world offers both people and companies. Using the latest virtual reality technologies, we will be immersed in a new dimension in which the boundaries between physical reality and virtual space become blurred. But how accessible are current VR systems, which usually consist of 3D glasses, headphones and a microphone, really? And what needs to happen to give everyone equal access to this new virtual reality?
Professor Kathrin Gerling from KU Leuven, for example, will be addressing these questions at this year’s UIG conference, which will focus on the topic of digital inclusion. Meanwhile, Adrian Wegener from Eye Build IT GmbH will show in his presentation that accessibility is not a matter of course for many existing digital products and services these days – and this is not intentional, but primarily a lack of awareness of inclusion.
“Inclusion is more than just accessibility”
“Digital inclusion is a very broad term and an important part of it is certainly accessibility, in the sense of the usability of digital services by people with disabilities,” explains Prof. Dr. Alexander Mädche, Chairman of UIG e.V., a member of the SME Digital Network, and Professor of Business Informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). “However, inclusion is more than just accessibility. When developing certain systems, you always have to ask yourself who is participating in the development. Is it only men or only women? What is the cultural background? And this is exactly what we are concerned with when we talk about usability and user experience: Society as a whole must be represented – and not just certain subgroups. That is also inclusion.”
And this is exactly what the presentations and discussions at the UIG Conference 2022 are intended to make clear. While the specific implementation of usability and user experience is being discussed everywhere, here, for example, topics such as “Between wishful thinking and reality – integrating digital accessibility into company processes!” (Annett and Stefan Fernetani, mindscreen) and “How can accessibility and usability be interlinked?” (Prof. Dr. Simon Nestler, Nestler UUX Consulting). If you like, you take a step back by asking yourself who you are actually developing a specific digital product for.
The importance of digital inclusion, especially when artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are used, has been demonstrated time and again in recent years. Depending on who trains the models and with what material, they reproduce human errors and prejudices. For example, Twitter made headlines in 2020 when its AI-based cropping mechanism for thumbnails always focused on white people. Meanwhile, there are gender bias effects in machine translation tools: While “the doctor” is always translated as “der Arzt”, Google Translate always returns “die Krankenschwester” for “the nurse” – even though “Ärztin” and “Krankenpfleger” would also be conceivable in German.
People are at the heart of digitalization
“Of course, you can see digitalization in very technological terms. There are new technologies that can be used to do great things almost every day. However, with our human-centered approach, we first try to understand what people’s problems and needs are in the first place. To do this, we actively involve them in the development of digital solutions,” explains Mädche, who heads the science working group at karlsruhe.digital as a member of the steering committee. “After all, the best technology is useless if it is not usable.”
This is where the SME 4.0 Usability Competence Centre, which has been advising small and medium-sized enterprises on the opportunities and challenges of digitalization for years, comes in with the UIG conference. This is because SMEs in particular usually have very direct contact with their customers and often also with the users of their products or services. And in practice, it often turns out that an overly engineering-oriented approach that focuses more on the features than the user experience does not necessarily lead to success. Less is often more.
When the issue of inclusion is added to this, it often becomes difficult for companies. “It starts with the fact that we tend not to even think about things that don’t affect us,” explains Mädche. “And once the necessary mindset is in place, we usually still have to find the right balance between costs and benefits. Creating accessibility is sometimes incredibly time-consuming – and sometimes it is only possible to a limited extent with existing systems.”
Nevertheless, AI-supported technologies in particular – if they are trained correctly – offer incredible potential for inclusive, human-centric digitalization. For example, an AI solution for automated transcription of the live stream will be used at the UIG conference on September 22 to enable all participants to enjoy an accessible online event.
Tickets and the full program can be found here. As we are a media partner of the event, readers of the karlsruhe.digital blog receive a 25% discount on their ticket with the code ka-digital-25.