"Access" itself is diverse: Typology & terminology

Two recent items - a tweet by the Office of the President of Niger touting greater internet access as a key to the digital development component its "Niger 2.0" program (below), and an announcement by IAB-South Africa (logo on right) of a campaign for free internet access in South Africa - raise anew questions about (1) what we mean by "access" in multilingual societies, especially in the service of development, and (2) how to clearly signify those meanings in ways that facilitate clear discussion, planning, and action.

Le développement du numérique, axe fort du programme Niger 2.0, passe par un plus grand accès à internet. La jeunesse Nigérienne, pilier de la Renaissance Culturelle, est au cœur de ce développement. #RenaissancedUneNation pic.twitter.com/pRMkdkdQYY

— Présidence du Niger (@PresidenceNiger) May 19, 2018

In African Languages in a Digital Age (ALDA) I discussed how "access" in information and communication technology (ICT) may refer to many things, but then adopted a binary distinction between on the one hand "physical access," basically the having a functioning digital device with power and connectivity, and on the other hand "soft access," being the software and applications. In a multilingual society, localization (L10n) is, or at least logically should be, a major concern of soft access.

Nearly a decade later, the tendency still seems to be to treat access as one thing, focused on the technical or physical aspects of access (devices, connectivity), and leaving out L10n and a deeper consideration of how people in multilingual societies access and might interact with the technology. In the wake of the 2015 "Connectivity Declaration" and Facebook's Internet.org initiative I discussed this problem at some length on this blog: "Access gap in the 'Connectivity Declaration'?"

What counts as "access"?

This gap in how we frame access is reflected in Wikipedia (English) articles relating in one way or another to access or to localization:

• Internet access (corresponds roughly with physical access; no mention of software outside of network context or of L10n) & the "right to internet access" (the discussion of which is framed in terms of physical access, and doesn't broach linguistic rights; and the latter article for its part doesn't mention access to the internet or ICTs in general)
• Computer accessibility & web accessibility ("accessibility" generally concerns people with disabilities)
• Language access, linguistic accessibility, & variants (a set of terms not covered in Wikipedia, which have to do with a range of situations including, but definitely not limited to ICT and the internet; this terminology "sub-space" does not seem clear or well-elaborated)
• Internationalization and localization & language localization (include processes leading to software and content in diverse languages, but does not mention access as a goal; in fact, the emphasis is more on reaching people with appropriate messages than it is in facilitating people's access and use of software and content)
• Digital divide (makes specific reference to access, and only marginal mention of languages, but language of software/content is not clearly evoked as a factor in enhancing access to help bridge the divide; no mention of L10n)
• ICT for development (ICT4D; references to access, with language mentioned as a consideration only in some ways that do not relate to access; a single mention of L10n)

It should be pointed out that these  Wikipedia articles do get editorial input from people who have some expertise in the topics covered, so while they may not be definitive, they offer a fair impression of thinking on these subjects.

The impression I get from reviewing these articles is that they show exactly the kind of gap between dominant use of "access" on the one hand, and the issues of access related to language on the other, that I had hoped to help bridge with ALDA and other writing.

The back story on "soft access"

When I first started looking at the dimensions of access to ICT in early 2000 - which was around the time of the Bamako 2000 "Internet: Bridges to Development" conference - I used the term "meaningful access" as distinguished from "physical access." This was intended in part to address the language dimension that was discussed at Bamako 2000 (its Plan of Action included "plurilingualism" among its 20 "essential activities"), but was largely overlooked in most of the early enthusiasm about how the internet was supposed to transform African development.

In later work on the PanAfrican Localisation project and the writing of ALDA, however, I instead used "soft access," a term borrowed from a TeleCommons Development Group report released in June 2000. I had a brief email correspondence with that NGO prior to the release of the report, but it is not clear whether or to what extent my input regarding types of access may have contributed to their thinking. In any event, their take on "soft access" (including as it did, attention to the issue of languages) seemed to capture the essence of what I was getting at. And their emphasis on software in defining soft access seemed productive in the context of localization I was dealing with in writing ALDA:

"software and applications which are designed to enable rural African users to utilize ICTs for their own needs and uses once the physical access has been established."

When it came time to translate ALDA into French, there was the question of how to translate "soft access." The resulting formulation - "accès logiciel" - is fine, but also shades the focus even more explicitly toward software and apps. (The translation adopted for "physical access" in Les langues africaines à l'ère du numérique is "accès matériel.")

Return to "meaningful access"? Or, "real access"?

In the years since, I have occasionally wondered if I should have stayed with "meaningful access," for a harder insistence on the linguistic and cultural dimension of access to technology. And more recently whether in fact that term and soft access might not better be thought of as two distinct but complementary access issues addressed by localization: content and interface.

Meaningful access, however, is a term that can be understood - and indeed is used - in ways that don't deal with language or even content. For example, meaningful access might simply refer to the quality of physical access (which would not be meaningful to have if, say, safety or noise were problems). One recent article on helping African women and girls to get online discusses "meaningful access to the internet" in broad terms that also encompass what I've been calling physical access (although it did not mention language):

"having a good, affordable connection and then being able to use it in a way that makes sense for you."

So, perhaps meaningful access might be a useful umbrella term, covering all aspects of "access" that might be left out if the sole focus is very narrowly on hardware and connections. But that doesn't get us too far in a context where language too easily is left on the margins of the discourse.

In this broader use, meaningful access reminds of the "real access" heading used in the early 2000s by Bridges.org (an early ICT4D NGO based in Cape Town, South Africa & Washington, DC, US; logo on left) in recognition that access "goes beyond just physical access and makes it possible for people to use technology effectively to improve their lives".

However, Bridges broke this broad category down into 12 "determining factors in whether or not people have Real Access to ICT" sketches out the environment in which organizations like IAB in South Africa or the government of Niger might try to increase "access" to the internet and ICTs more broadly (even if such organizations are not thinking about it that way). Language is explicitly mentioned only under #5 "relevant content," but a range of linguistic factors are relevant under several others (see my comments below on nos. 2, 4, 6, & 7; I've highlighted their & my uses of language or languages):

1. Physical access. Is technology available and physically accessible?
2. Appropriate technology. What is the appropriate technology according to local conditions, and how people need and want to put technology to use? [Comment: Software / apps localized in locally/regionally-important languages and, where needed, appropriate fonts & input systems can also be considered appropriate tech in this context.]
3. Affordability. Is technology access affordable for people to use? 
4. Capacity. Do people understand how to use technology and its potential uses? [Comment: User skills including knowledge of languages and basic literacy are relevant here.]
5. Relevant content. Is there locally relevant content, especially in terms of language? 
6. Integration. Does the technology further burden people's lives or does it integrate into daily routines? [Comment: Is tech less burdensome & more easily integrated to the extent it "speaks" the language(s) of daily use in the community?]
7. Socio-cultural factors. Are people limited in their use of technology based on gender, race, or other socio-cultural factors? [Comment: Linguistic factors, including lack of appropriate language of interface options would presumably fall under this item.]
8. Trust. Do people have confidence in and understand the implications of the technology they use, for instance in terms of privacy, security, or cybercrime? 
9. Legal and regulatory framework. How do laws and regulations affect technology use and what changes are needed to create an environment that fosters its use? 
10. Local economic environment. Is there a local economy that can and will sustain technology use?
11. Macro-economic environment. Is national economic policy conducive to widespread technology use, for example, in terms of transparency, deregulation, investment, and labour issues? 
12. Political will. Is there political will in government to do what is needed to enable the integration of technology throughout society? 

In fact, language and L10n in the access equation can also be affected by economic and policy considerations (nos. 10-12). Language is indeed a factor, and used of languages are conditioned by, almost anything that involves communication and knowledge. (This could lead into a discussion of "localization ecology," but I'll save that for another time.)

It is very useful when discussing access to technology (internet or ICTs in general) to spread out the subject, as it were, and to see how it might be disaggregated into specific concerns for specific attention, such as what Bridges did. I'm not currently aware of other similar efforts.

What about "linguistic access"? Or the "last inch"?

So why not just identify "linguistic access" as a key component in a broader "meaningful" or "real" access that goes beyond the usual focus on physical access? That thought occurred, but in the original dichotomy between physical and meaningful access, the latter was intended to go a bit beyond just language, much as L10n also is also concerned with more than just translation.

In a redo of Bridge's approach, one might call out linguistic access as a need addressed by localized software / apps and interface. And also localized content, perhaps still under "relevant content," meaning content created in, and/or translated into relevant languages.

A completely different way to refer to linguistic access is the "last inch" metaphor introduced by Dwayne Bailey and the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc; logo on right) a decade ago. The idea here is explicitly the language of software and interfaces (and content). However the term always seemed to be used only in the sense of "last inch limitations" and "last inch barriers," thus falling into the same trap of discussing lack of a common language first in negative terms that I've discussed elsewhere.* After all, the whole point of L10n is to bridge that "last inch" and thus facilitate linguistic access. Maybe "last-inch opportunities" or "bridging that last inch" to full access?

Wait - access for what?

Maybe part of the reason that the concepts and terms seem hard to settle on is that there is a deeper question that needs to be answered first: Access for what? Bridges discussed people using tech effectively "to improve their lives." One.org's "Internet for all" site, home of the Connectivity Declaration), says "Internet Access is Essential for achieving humanity's potential." These are broad well-intentioned goals - everything will be better with access to ICTs, or more specifically the internet. But what exactly is the vision of what people will do with access that will yield such vaguely wonderful outcomes?

Most examples of use of the internet on site Internet for All (which by the way makes no mention of L10n for access or of languages at all outside of a few translated versions of the Connectivity Declaration) relate to consumption of information and e-commerce. No problem as far as those go - they are important. But is access for all really about increasing markets?

In other words, in what vision of access to technology would linguistic diversity not be important? Is it one where people participating in a market for info and goods are really only those speaking a small range of dominant or "elite" languages? Is our current discussion of "access to the internet" really prioritizing certain uses and certain linguistic and cultural priorities?

I pose such questions as a proponent of greater access to ICTs (powered in part by better provisions for use in more languages). One of the dimensions I see as fundamental is the creation of content which while globally accessible, might be local or regional in relevance. Such non-mainstream perspectives may be as important for global learning as they would be for cultural/linguistic survival and development.

Even if the terminology about types of access might be hard to pin down, and even contested, it is essential to begin with acknowledgement that "access" to the internet and ICTs in general is not one thing and needs to be considered from several angles including languages, whether in Niger, in South Africa, or anywhere else.

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* For example the discussions at the end of "Breaking the 'dialect barrier'" or on my other blog, "Reimagining 'language barrier'."

Access gap in the "Connectivity Declaration"?

History sometimes moves in spirals - after years have passed and many things change, you suddenly find yourself back in a same place, but maybe on another level. I had that sense of déjà vu in Bamako in 1999, discovering that projects were still hacking mutually incompatible fonts to be able to display characters used in Malian languages on computers, much like what Prof. David Dwyer and I had to do in 1989 in order to print the first draft of the Fulfulde lexicon. The intervening decade had of course seen some remarkable advances in information technology including the unfolding of the world wide web, but there was no perceptible change in terms of ability to use African (and many other) languages on computers.

I'm getting a similar sense of already-been-there today, reading about Facebook's Internet.org plan to beam the internet to remote parts of Africa and related news about the benefits of universal access to the internet including the "Connectivity Declaration."

"Access" means more than one thing

The current focus on universal internet access has me thinking back to that same period in Bamako mentioned above, when there was a great deal of enthusiasm on international development-focused email lists about how information technology and the WWW were going to transform, among other things, rural development in Africa. But while working in Mali it was clear that even if by some miracle one could get the technology to farmers, it still wouldn't speak their languages, nor even be able to properly display text in those languages, due to the font issue. (This observation was one of several leading to the Bisharat initiative, which is another story.)

From this point of view it was clear that "access" had more than one aspect, even though most discussions treated it as one issue. It was one thing to have a computer, and another to power and connect it, and another to pay for all that, and then ... with physical access secured, for a farmer or extension agent in, say, rural Mali, to actually make full (or any) use of it. The latter can be called "soft access," a term first used in contrast to "physical access" by an organization called TeleCommons (quoted here), which covers localization of content and interfaces in languages of the anticipated users. (Dwayne Bailey's reference to "last inch limitations" is another way of thinking about lack of soft access.)

Fast forward to the present, where the Connectivity Declaration mentions "access" five times and "accessible" once, but again as one undifferentiated problem to be solved and good to be achieved. And although one might interpret the intent more broadly, the focus does seem to again be technical. The Declaration certainly does not hint at the soft access issues inherent in diverse peoples taking advantage of "the tools and knowledge of the internet."

A focus on internet access as a connectivity issue is inadequate when discussing use by marginalized populations that are diverse in terms of their languages, cultures, and education levels (addressed by soft access), and in terms of other socio-economic factors (that may affect overall access). The Internet.org initiative to its credit does mention "Content isn’t available in the local language" (in response to "Why aren't more people connected") as a "barrier" it wishes to address, but this is only part of the equation - there are also technical language support and interface localization needs that fit under soft access.

Current issues and potential in soft access

So we're back at more or less the same place with regard to "access," but on another level with some changes:

• Unicode has largely resolved the font incompatibility issues mentioned above (I'd like to say completely resolved but there are still hiccups in implementation)
• Localization of software and apps in less-resourced languages is incomplete and sometimes uneven, but it is happening
• Input methods (hard & virtual keyboards/pads, STT) are still problematic for may extended Latin scripts and non-Latin writing systems, but the main issues now are arguably less technical than policy-based (lack of standards)
• Human language technology / natural language processing offers the potential to 
• bridge text ⇄ speech for speakers of less-resourced languages with new forms of soft access as well as content deliver
• bridge languages by machine translation of content
• Content localization and creation, which like software localization is incomplete and sometimes uneven, extends the concept to include soft access to knowledge

So we're much better situated to enable soft access today than we were 10-15 years ago, but there is still not the same focus on these issues as on the simpler (which is not to say easy) challenge of technical connectivity. Soft access means more and can be facilitated by more than was previously the case, but it will not come in the same access "box" as internet access without explicit attention. Part of the reason is that "universal internet access" is implemented on a wide scale (national, regional, continental), while soft access in the case of most less-resourced languages is particular to smaller areas and populations.

Soft access needs attention from people and organizations closer to the need - governments, NGOs, companies, and communities on the national and local levels, as well as regional and continental organizations (such as ACALAN). However I would suggest it also needs advocacy from the same people in positions of influence and power - like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill and Melinda Gates, and the other originators of the Connectivity Declaration - who are promoting universal internet access.

Whose "tools and knowledge"?

A blog post by Dr. Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute in response to a tweet by Jimmy Wales (another one of the originators of the Connectivity Declaration) ...

@kshrivertucker @urbandata it is obvious from all trends the net will be available to nearly everyone in 10 years. No contrary evidence.

— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) September 27, 2015

... raises some issues about the impact of corporate-sponsored internet access that are worth considering in this context (these do not represent all of the analysis in the article). What kind of internet service or choice of content, and under what conditions (ads?) would Facebook's Internet.org, or Google's Free Zone (another free concept) provide? And what might be the impact on local internet markets? Dr. Graham suggests that

In much the same way that food aid as a development strategy harmed local farmers and markets in Africa, “connectivity aid” could similarly destroy the evolution of local content, local innovation and local alternatives.

This is an interesting point, though it bears noting that approaches to food aid have evolved, and in any event, research on its impact has reached diverse conclusions. It is however a legitimate question whether "connectivity aid" would be a simple "Pareto improvement" (some gain, no one else loses) for the societies receiving it.

The impact of free internet on soft access and local(ized) content is another interesting unknown. It may cut either way, with the potential for support for languages down the long tail* if the corporations decide (perhaps in facilitating work of local initiatives?), or for an economic decision on their part to limit focus to languages at the head of the tail (i.e., the ones the most spoken). For some languages at least, this might become somewhat complicated if you take into consideration the technical and content dimensions that must be managed (note those bulleted under "Current issues and potential in soft access," above). For languages that lack standard orthography and/or have high dialectal differences without one dialect being accepted as a standard variety, a free internet operation would probably not be well placed to engage the issues necessary to have - so I imagine there could be a risk of corporate sponsors deciding to limit commitments in this area.

More on "access"

All that said, there's more to the topic of access. The physical/soft distinction is a useful but basic one. In African Languages in a Digital Age I discuss this matter in more depth (although with reference more to computers than mobile devices), including reference to one organization that disaggregated 12 dimensions of "real access."

A factor related to soft access is user skills (which may include basic literacy, computer literacy, experience with other technology), and there is some trade-off between the two, in that greater user skills require less attention to soft access, whereas lower user skills require greater attention to soft access by those providing physical access/internet access.

Soft access is not so much an issue for those of us speaking dominant languages, and who have a lot of computer experience. Another aspect of interaction with devices that normally wouldn't affect access - the quality of user experience - may get more attention in this case.

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* The distribution of languages spoken in a society is always asymptotic. See earlier discussions on the long tail of languages.