JORDELLE AKINOLA: Good evening, everyone. My name is
Jordelle Akinola, and I'm the Staff
Disability Advisor within the Equality
and Diversity Unit at the
University of Oxford. And it's my honour
to welcome you to the 11th annual
Disability Lecture. It's wonderful to see
so many of you here in person and to have
so many people online and it's wonderful
to be here at the Blavatnik School of
Government. Thank you for hosting us, and
it's great to be here. It's
wonderful to know that we have
registrations from as far as Canada and
New Zealand. We hope you have a wonderful
experience tonight and it really is a
great opportunity to hear about what great
advancements are happening within
the sector of disability, and engage in
some awareness-raising and some heart-felt
discussions. Before we get started, there
are some housekeeping notes on
accessibility and participation for
today's session to make you aware of.
Firstly, for our online attendees, we
have spotlighted the British Sign
Language interpreters for the video feed,
so they should remain clearly visible on
your screen throughout the session
without you needing to do any
adjustments. So hopefully everybody can
see them online, but please let us
know if there are any technical glitches
and we can get our moderators to help.
And we also have live captioning
available. You can turn these on by
clicking CC, and 'live transcript', or 'show
captions' button, typically found in
your Zoom control bar. Once captions are
active, if you need to adjust the
appearance, such as the text size or the
colour, just click the small upward arrow
next to the CC button, and look out for
'subtitle settings' or 'caption settings'.
If there are any problems, again, please
do let us know online and one of our
moderators will be able to help. For
those joining us here in the room, you
will see the BSL interpreters are
displayed on the screen, and we also have
an induction loop system for audio
assistance for those who may require it.
We are not expecting any fire drills, so
if you do hear any alarms, the fire exits
are highlighted to the left and to the
right, but we will be available to help
anybody who has any assistance needs.
Toilets are located outside again.
Please just signal to myself or any of
my colleagues, and we will provide
assistance and direction. Please
note that today's session is being
recorded, and we have been asked to
provide these, so the podcast details will
be circulated after the session.
I now have the privilege of handing over
to our Vice Chancellor, Professor Irene
Tracey. Thank you.
PROF. IRENE TRACEY: Well thank you so much, and a very
good evening, everybody. to this, as
mentioned, the 2025 Disability Lecture,
'Building an environment for all'. And I'd
just mention, this is the 11th one in
the series at the University, and the
third to feature British Sign Language
interpretation. And I will try and speak
slowly in order to help this wonderful
woman on my right, because I speak very
quickly normally. The event is
organised by the Disability Advisory
Group and the Equality and Diversity
Unit, and I'm very grateful to all the
work they do in this hugely important
area for the University, so thank you to
them; and thank you also for the gracious
hosting by the Blavatnik School of
Government for the second consecutive year,
the really wonderful environment to do
this in. I probably don't need to
tell you, but it's important for us to
be reminded of just where things are at,
in this space of our work, to make sure we
build an environment for all. 24% of
the UK population are disabled.
So, as a microcosm of society, here in the
University, we expect that the percentage
of disabled colleagues, students and
visitors here, will likely be similar.
This means at any given time,
disabled people will be working and
studying in our buildings or indeed
visiting them to learn more about their
world. If our spaces are going to be
inclusive and accessible, disabled
colleagues will be better able to focus
on their research, teaching, their tasks,
their learning, rather than on the impact
of a disability. As you know, the
Equality Act of 2010 states that we have
a duty to anticipate the needs of disabled
people and to be inclusive in all areas
of our work, to remove or minimise
disadvantages, and meet the needs of those
with protected characteristics. A visible
strand of this work is the
accessibility of our buildings. Now as
you know, our estate is very large:
over 260 buildings,
67 of them listed. And it
includes some of the most iconic spaces
in the city. Unsurprisingly, the
idea of accessibility has been evolving,
since the early 1400s: Bodleian
Library, through to the 1800s: the Natural
History Museum, and in the 1900s,
with the Dyson Perrins Laboratory. Estates
Services work to ensure our legal
compliance with accessibility
regulations both in refurbishment of
historical buildings and in new projects
such as the Life and Mind Building and
the Schwarzman Centre just behind here.
Alongside the features of the building
itself, operations and procedures
must support independent access and use
for all occupants, including visitors.
The challenges are not Insignificant: I
know that well, having been Head of a
13th- century college when I was Warden of
Merton. But we remain committed to the
University's Equality Policy of
non-discrimination and the advancement of
equality. The University does not
consider compliance with regulations as
sufficient. Oxford's Accessibilty Design
Philosophy Document goes beyond
Government regulations, aiming for an
inclusive environment where all can
independently access and use facilities.
The key word here is 'independently'.
Maximising independent access for
disabled people is at the heart of
inclusive design. Now, how
independent access can be made to work in
the complex environment of Oxford is the
theme of this year's speaker, Professor
Sam Howison, a dear colleague
and, I hope I may say, friend to Sam.
Sam's research interests are in
mathematical modelling and applications
of differential equations in a wide
variety of topics. Recent projects
include models of heat transfer in
electrochemical furnaces, melting of
Arctic sea ice and the microstructure
of the bitcoin markets. More recently,
he has served
magnificently and as a good citizen
as Head of the Oxford Mathematical,
Physical and Life Sciences Division,
a very active Member of Council, and a
great mentor to many in this institution
and at his College of Christ Church. He is
also active in several national
organisations, including the new Academy
of Mathematical Sciences. But perhaps
less well-known is his role in the Oxford
Mathematics YouTube channel, in the
Mathematical Toy Stories and other
videos which demonstrates his deep
interest in using mathematics to help
everyone understand the world around
them. Sam is currently enjoying
a return to teaching at Christ Church and
at the Mathematical Institute. However,
it is notable that he was Head of the
Mathematical Institute during the
construction of its current beautiful
home, the new Andrew Wiles Building,
here in the very Radcliffe
Observatory Quarter where we're
having tonight's lecture. This and
his own lived experience at Oxford gives
him particular insights into what makes a
building accessible and user-friendly.
Sam, thank you for everything you have
done for this collegiate University, and
thank you so much for your contributions
to teaching and research, but thank you
especially for coming to speak and share
your thoughts with us tonight. Please a
give round of applause and welcome him.
PROF. SAM HOWISON: Thank you, Irene.
Well.
Irene, thank you so much for that
introduction, which has sort of
said everything I was going to say, so...
maybe we could all go to the pub,
perhaps. No.
It is a great honour to give this lecture.
It's a subject which I have
personal connections with, as people
will know. But it's also a subject
that I feel very strongly about
for many, many reasons, all of which
I think Irene has just outlined so very
eloquently that I won't repeat them.
So I want
first perhaps, well, first I want to
just thank the organisers also for
inviting me, because Catherine and her
team have done a tremendous job in
organising, bringing this lecture
together and in
getting the whole thing going.
So let me go first
to my first slide. I
want to mention some people at the
beginning of this, because I want to pay
some tributes. I want to
pay a tribute to two people
who have exemplified in
many ways things that have been very
important for me personally and
generally. The first is Professor Ian
Shipsey, who you will see on the left
here. Ian,
was the Head of the Physics Department
when I was head of MPLS, so I worked with
him quite closely. He
was a passionate and dedicated physicist,
a very larger-than-life character,
who... very sadly died
suddenly last November. But I mention him
in particular here because in
mid-life, he lost all his hearing,
suddenly, through illness. And that is
a very traumatic thing indeed to happen
to somebody, at that or any stage in their
life, as that may be in mid-career with a young
child and so on. He
was not daunted. He went in due course
and got himself cochlear implants (and
we'll come to those in a moment) and went
on to have a career as a highly
successful physicist, an FRS and so on.
He is someone that we miss a lot.
On the right on this slide is another
Ian, another Professor Ian. This is Ian
Galway Taylor. Known as Professor
Taylor in my family, he was
on the Faculty in
Manchester in the Department of Audiology,
where I was born in that great city
a very long time ago, and he
was, I think, a real pioneer
in the education of
Deaf children, in particular.
And I was born with
congenital deafness, verging on profound
deafness. So, that was
- I think if I had been born anywhere other
than Manchester in the UK, at that time, I
might have sunk without trace. Even in
London. But it was an immense
stroke of good fortune that I was
I was able to have access to their early
research. And one of the things that he
particularly insisted on was that
children should be fitted with hearing
aids from as early as feasible.
I believe the object in the middle here
is my first-ever hearing aid.
Online tells me that it dates back to
1960, which is consistent - you
see I'm quite old. It's a
lovely retro object, in
chrome. It was
cutting-edge technology at the time,
with transistors, which were relatively
new at that date. There's a
wire which went and plugged into your
ear. Not unlike the devices you see today
actually. My reaction at the time was
to go and bury it in the garden.
And, you know, a world
of noises and sounds, when you are
not used to them, is probably
quite a difficult thing for a two-year-old
to get hold of. But anyway, thank you to
Philips Eindhoven for making that.
And above all, I want to dedicate
this lecture to my parents, because
without their love and support
at that very early stage in my life and
indeed throughout it, of course, but at
that very early stage,
things would have been very different. I
hope they would be proud to see me here
today, because I certainly am proud to be
speaking. Right, that is enough of the
touchy-feely stuff, let's get on and do
some science.
Because I am sort of
existential mathematical
scientist, applied mathematical
scientist. And it's
everywhere. As Irene mentioned, I
have been making these little videos. My
latest one is about how to sum the
geometric theories using your compost heap.
And you can go and see it on the Maths
Instagram or YouTube or TikTok or
wherever. It went up yesterday.
This is a diagram of the human ear, the
inside of the human ear. And
here is the same diagram
but with the colours inverted, because I
find it much easier to work with inverted
colours. I was hoping - I'm sorry about
this - I was hoping that there would not
be these lights in the front, which
might make it a little difficult to see
that diagram. Why don't I come over here
where I will not be in the way of that
screen. And
now, our ears are miraculous pieces
of biology, of
evolution, and of
function. So just to take you through
this very quickly: This is basic biology.
We all have ears. On the
right is the outer ear, the bit
that you always see. And that has its own
function in helping to guide sound waves
into the channel that leads inside your
head, the one that you are not supposed to
put your fingers into, or anything
smaller than your elbow.
The sound then reaches the eardrum or
the tympanum, which is a
membrane in the middle of the ear,
and the sound waves make that vibrate.
Behind that, going further into the ear
still, so go further to the left on the
picture, you have three minute little bones
which form a really ingenious
linkage that takes the vibration
of the eardrum and focuses it down to a
much smaller vibration at the
beginning of what's called the cochlea.
And the cochlea is that little spiral
structure, which you might just be able to
see on the left-hand side of the
picture, two-thirds of the way up. A
spiral which contains
all the sort of business end of it.
That is where the nerve cells are, that
detect the sound that is coming
in and has been amplified by, or
focussed by the three little bones.
And finally above that is the
set of three semicircular canals which
help with our sense of balance and motion,
and work with our eyes to help us know
where we are.
So this is an exquisitely
sensitive mechanism. It
can detect frequencies that run
from,
the rumble of the
earthquake, up to the squeak of a bat,
over the range of 10,000 Hertz or so,
10,000 cycles a second. It
can
detect pressure waves in the atmosphere,
the sound that's going from me to you.
It's making the molecules in the atmosphere
vibrate by a few nanometres.
Now a nanometre, what's a nanometre? It's
a short distance, right? If you take a
paperclip and imagine
taking the shaft of the paperclip, that's
about a millimetre thick, divide that by
1 million, that's a nanometre.
And the vibrations, the sound vibrations in
the air are a few nanometres. So it
really is detecting something that is
almost vanishingly small.
So, that is the
inside of the ear.
Now, there
I've shown you the two pictures side-by-side
and sort of repeated what I've just
said. But I think the key point about
this mechanism is
that-- oops, sorry. The key point about
this mechanism is that it's
the word I'm looking for. Its output, if
you like, varies incredibly widely
between people. So
It's quite a familiar sensation, I guess,
that if your ears are full of water, then
you don't hear so well. Or if you're all
blocked up from a cold or something,
then you don't hear so well.
There are other
ways in which the ear can vary so that
you, again, you simply don't hear so well
due to the outer and the middle ear. And
then, of course, there is what can happen
inside the cochlea,where the nerve cells
are. And
again, that can affect your ability
to hear different frequencies in good
ways as well as bad, because there are
people who have absolutely fantastic,
fantastically sensitive hearing and there
are people who don't. And the range is
enormous. I should say,
incidentally, that the cochlea is a
practical solution to a very interesting
mathematical problem. The sound comes
into your ear and makes the
little, it's called the oval window at
the end of it, makes it vibrate. And then
the sound travels on up the cochlea.
There's a set of nerves that sit along on
a membrane that's sort of wrapped around
like that. The short frequency,
short wavelength, the high frequencies
are all sensed at the beginning and the
low frequencies are sensed at the far end
of the cochlea. And this is because of a
very clever kind of resonance between
the membrane and the fluid, that each
frequency finds its own little echo
chamber, and it goes along and then sort
of grinds to a halt and stimulates the
nerve cell at exactly the right place so
that you can distinguish between these
frequencies. It's a really a very
ingenious mechanism for sorting out
frequencies. So that's our ears. And as
I say, their performance does vary
extremely widely.
Equally astonishing is what our
eyes can do. Here
is a cross-section through
an eye, a human eye. And we
are all familiar, I think, probably with
the sort of general way it works. Going
from left to right, you have the cornea,
which is the translucent bit at the
front. giving,
covering up a little gap which is full of
a fairly runny liquid called the
aqueous humor. Humor is a very
ancient word for liquid or for
substance. Then you have lens, which
is the focusing object
controlled by sets of muscles and with an
aperture like a camera, which is the
iris and making the gap in the middle is
your pupil. The light goes through the
lens to the back of the eye, where it's
focused on the retina, which is a
membrane, the line of
light-sensitive cells on a membrane that
sit on the back of the eye, and then
it goes down the optic nerve into the...
into the brain. So
again, there's a wide
variety of things that can happen with
this that
can happen very slightly and will happen
to pretty much everybody in this room
over their lifetime, because
eyesight certainly does change, as does
hearing, but eyesight certainly does
change. For example, the
cornea at the front of the eye may
not be a translucentas it could
be. The lens can become opaque as
you grow older and the condition
known as cataracts where it becomes sort
of milky and doesn't let the light
through and then you have terrible
problems with glare. That light coming
from over here gets refracted by the
particles in the lens and ends up
somewhere where it shouldn't be.
The lens becomes stiff as it gets older,
so it won't move, won't adapt
to focus the
light from different places, as it should
do. You can get floated and things in
your various, in the two layers of
fluid. And the retina has
many things that can happen in the
retina, that's before you even get to
the optic nerve. So once again, there
is a very wide variety of
performance, if you like, or outcomes
from the eye.
Now, this is the disability
lecture, and
both the eye and the ear
are sort of
key focuses of
certain kinds of things we label as
disability. But the real point I want to
make here is that these
disabilities are really just part of
a much wider variation. And I'm going to
come back to this throughout the lecture,
that there's such a wide variation both
between people and in individuals as they
go through life, or if they get a cold
and can't hear, or if they get an eye
infection and they can't see so well, or
whatever it might be. There's
a much greater variety than there's
this lot of people over here who aren't
disabled and there's this lot over here
who are. So
my approach to this whole question
is very much dictated by that thought
that we are talking about pretty much
everybody. There will be the odd person
with perfect eyesight and perfect hearing
and all the rest of it, but we are
talking about pretty much everybody in
what I'm going to talk about for the rest
of this lecture. Before we do that,
though, I do want to take one digestion
because I am a mathematician, and I did
want to work on the mathematical theory
of colour. Now, the
mathematical theory of colour is very
interesting. It goes back to the 19th
century, Maxwell, the great Maxwell was
involved, and Helmholtz,
And it works something like this.
We all know light that comes from
a light source, the sun, these lights,
wherever, consists of
photons of light which come into the eye
and they come into the eye in enormous
numbers. They come in at the rate of,
I said on the previous slide, I think it
was 10 trillion photons a second
in ordinary daylight coming to your eye.
even though the eye can respond to as few
as half a dozen at once. It's,
again, a mechanism of quite extraordinary
sensitivity. But
you have this notion that we all learn at
school that light has wavelength and the
wavelength tells you the color of the
light. But our eyes and our brain
between them take that
complicated set of information that
The amount of light at this frequency is
that, and the amount of light at this
frequency is that, and so on. And it
synthesizes all of that and it turned it
into three numbers, just three numbers.
The picture on the left here is what's
known as the CIE chromaticity
diagram. CIE is something in
French, I think, to do with
couleur, I'll bet you, for the
C, but I don't know the I and the E. And
what this is is a representation of all
the colors that we can see. Round
the curved bit, the curved
boundary of that shape, you have the pure
colors, the monochromatic light, light of
a single frequency going from red at the
bottom left-hand corner to blue at the
bottom right-hand corner through
what Richard de Viore gave battle in
vain, red, orange, yellow, green, blue,
indigo, violet.
So those are the monochromatic lights and
then you have a straight line across the
bottom which is red joining up to
purple to violet. Everything else is a
combination of those
covers and it's what we callin
mathematics. A convex combination, which
means that the shape on the screen is
convex in the sense that if you draw a
little line in it, you stay inside the
colored region. You never go outside it.
It's not shaped like a
figure of eight or anything like that.
It's a nice convex shape. And it has
three dimensions. The third one is the
dimension that goes. as it were, into the
screen. And that measures the brightness,
the amplitude. But the
key is in this picture. On the
right is how a television
screen works, or an LCD screen. You have
three different phosphorus, red, blue,
and green, or liquid crystals or
LEDs these days. And what they do is
they shine at their different
powers. And they meld together,
if you look at them from far enough away,
if you look at them really close up with
a magnifying glass or the
magnifier on your phone or something, you
can see the individual pixels all red,
blue, and green. But when you look at
them from far enough away, they mix
together to make colours just like the
left-hand side. And you see
what you can see on a television. or a
phone or something, it's only the inside
of that triangle because you can only get
positive amounts of red, blue and green.
So you have a much
smaller set of colours. And so getting
outside and getting into the daylight
really is a very good thing to do.
Now, let's get down to
business.
My theme is essentially just a
variation on what Irene said in her
introduction. And my theme is
just one extension to what she said. It
is that if we really work
to design our
buildings and everything to do with them,
to design them in a properly accessible
and inclusive way from the
bottom up and from the very beginning,
thenfar more people will benefit
than those who are
in whatever category we might say is
disabled. Because as I say, in my view,
the spectrum, these ranges are
incredibly blurred. And
it's not a pointless exercise. It's
necessary for legal reasons, if nothing
else. And it's a tremendous spur to
action. for us to have
this notion of disability in quotes.
But I'm arguing that by
working to make things better that way,
we will make work things better for
everybody. And that is such a powerful
motivation that it should really be
running through everything that we think
and do. So that is
the general philosophy of this.
And the other thing
that I think is absolutely critical
is to say that
we have to do this from the bottom-up and
from as early as possible onwards. And
certainly in my experience, and I'm going
to give you some examples in a minute,
but in my experience, doing
things late in the day or thinking about
things late in the day is simply, it's
hopeless, it never works, you never get
enough. you can never get them done
because there's always so many reasons
not to. So that is the
that is the general theme.
And then
there's another thing to say, which is,
especially for someone like me talking
about this, because I am, you know, I've
done a lot of things in the university
and I've been I've got a lot of
experience. I was fortunate enough to be
head of the mathdepartment when we were
building the Andrew Wiles building but
nonetheless I'm I'm no expert
and the temptation is
very very strong for uh
anybody in that sort of position to
adopt uh this is a
what what do you call an aphorism for
every uh complex problem I
can't quite read that from there.
Well, we can sort of write for every
complex problem. There is a solution that
is clear, simple and wrong.
'Wrong!' 'Clear, simple and wrong' is a
motto that should be sort of engraved in
all planning departments because
this is so true. I don't like aphorisms
actually, because I think they stifle
thought. This is a kind of anti-aphorism
because it says aphorisms are clear,
simple and wrong, doesn't it?
Oh, I can feel a word cloud coming on.
Most unlike me, those of you who know me,
I promise I won't make you write your
thoughts on post-it notes and come up and
put them on a board. This is a word
cloud. It's got a lot
of words in it. Not all of them probably
very easy to read, but the one in the
middle is certainly
absolutely key: 'Complexity'.
There is no escaping complexity. There is
no escaping complexity in everything
we do, to do with design and
making it accessible and inclusive. There
are other words in there, 'wellbeing' I
think is a really important one, one we
don't talk about wellbeing in our design
enough. 'Cost'
is clearly, you know, is
crucial. 'Compromise',
care,responsibility,
and several other words as well. But
'complexity' is
the one.
So let's go back a year. A year from now,
I was asked to come
and give the vote of thanks for this
lecture, an invitation I accepted very
gladly. and I
didn't realise it was the audition, at first.
Anyway, I walked over from
the Maths Building and I came towards the
Blavatnik. And
so what you are looking at there is the view
from outside Somerville's new
buildings towards OUP. And I
saw those two silver
anti-parking bollards in the
pavement and I thought - oh, good, I 've
spotted them and I'm not going to run
into them, I will go right through the
middle of the gap, and then I'll be safe.
Well, right in the
middle of the gap was that bollard there.
'Bollards!', I said.
Well I didn't quite say that.
It is, by the way, still there. I checked
on my way over today. So I said,
yes, 'Bollards,' 'bollards, bollards!'.
That was kind of, you know, it got me
going a little bit. So,
let's take a journey to
work, opening up a
world of obstacles.
So here are some pictures of the sorts of
things that one will
encounter on a typical journey to work.
We have sandwich boards,
designed to push you off
into the traffic. We have,
what else have I got here?We've got
signage. We've got people putting, you
know, the things that tell you about the
floor is wet and slippery. And then they
go and put them at the top of a set of
stairs so that what do you do?You
slip over or do you trip over?It's
anyway, things like that. And
And what is the other one? What does it say?
I cannot remember my own
slides now! Oh, yes,
yes. Well, that kind of speaks for
itself, doesn't it? And then, you
know, once you get going on this, oh,
yes, yes. What have we got now? We've got
bicycles. Yes, bicycles.
And wheelie bins. I mean, wheelie bins
all over the pavement. And other
people, especially the great long
crocodiles of tourists who don't see you
coming. And I mean, you
can get yourself quite worked up about
this and start writing letters to the
paper in green ink. So
you've got, you've got yourself to work.
You're sort of happy. Well, no, you
haven't quite got yourself to work. This
is quite an interesting slide, this one.
This is two pillars.
The one on the left is a little station
down in Somerset called Crewkerne,
and in the picture you see
the station platform, and you see the
thing, the awning to keep the rain off
you while you're waiting for your train,
and waiting and waiting. And then you see
that's held up by a set of pillars, just
iron girders painted white. And
they have painted black stripes across
them at eye level through various heights
for people. That is a game-changer for a
lot of people. It's
enables you to see something that you
might well not have clocked when you're
getting out of a train, you know, you've
been out of the train and you come out into
dazzling sunlight or something like that,
and you might well not clock that there
is a pillar there. That is
something that is ugly to
do in retrospect but
could we not think about - I mean, just
imagine putting white stripes round the
pillars of the Clarendon Building, let's say.
It's not to be considered. But if
you think about this early enough in your
design, well, we know Departments have logos;
have logos; Colleges have coats of arms
that could easily be put around quite a
lot of these things and make them just...
Just that little bit of forethought. On the
right, a lamppost. The
lamppost is - I've slightly hammed this
picture up by fiddling with
it - but that is sort of what a lamppost
might look like, if you had incipient
cataracts. And lot of people in this
room will get cataracts. The good news
is that the treatment is
excellent and it's
transformative, actually, the treatment
for cataracts. And so, it's not something
to - although it's not how you would spend an
afternoon by choice, it's
not the
sort of end of things that it once was.
But there you see how a tonally
similar lamppost and pavement can just
blend into each other in glary sunlight.
You approach your building. Now
this is the
approach to the Weston Library on Broad
Street, the steps outside the Weston
Library. I'm afraid I'm going to be
critical about this.
I don't have too many kind thoughts
for the design of this.
What we have is a set of steps running up
to the building, very wide steps, the
width of the building,And then there's a
wheelchair ramp which runs diagonally
across the steps. So the
steps, every step is crossed in a
different place by this wheelchair ramp.
This is an absolute nightmare to
walk down or up if you are
not able to see really how well things,
if you're not able to see how, where
you're going terribly well. It really is
a nightmare. And you imagine coming out
of there on a cold November night,
having been to a wonderful talk in the
Weston Library and your head is full of
medieval manuscripts or something. And
then you've got to make your way down
there. No handrails, of course, because
you can't have handrails across the
wheelchair ramp. You can see where they
were coming from. You can see
the idea was good. Obviously, there had
to be wheelchair access, that goes
without saying. But this compromise, this
particular compromise, was all one
and none of the other. So here is another
thing that's going to come into this as a
theme. There is going to be conflict
between the needs of different people.
And we need to recognise that and
balance it off, not just sort of shove it
away. We need to recognise that and work
out our solutions, and if possible work out
solutions that avoid that conflict
altogether.
Here are some more steps. This is the
approach to Christchurch Hall, my
college, Christchurch. This is Harry
Potter territory.
And, well, it's
a very tall flight of
steps. Again, not much in the way of
handrails. If Henry VIII had
listened to his accessibility advisor,
we would not have had to paint those ugly
white stripes in the middle of the steps
to helpeverybody, and I mean
everybody, see where they're going on
those stairs. But I don't
think Henry VIII was very keen on that
sort of thing somehow.
So you arrive at your building, and
maybe it's locked. Maybe it's, you know,
you've gone, had to go in at the weekend
or something, or maybe it's always locked
with security, and you're faced with a
keypad. Now I had a
tantrum back in
January because I went into
the maths building to
return the lapel mic with which I had
walked off after my lecture the previous
day. So I was doing good, right?
And I get to the door, freezing cold,
pouring with rain. You have to put
your PIN into this number. And oh, by the
way, the PIN is not the first six digits
of pi, were you thinking of that?You have
to put your pin into this thing and you
find that it is essentially completely
black and completely invisible.
The old one, the original one, had an
American style
telephone punch keypad, but this one
sort of smooth and the numbers got worn
off. So I wrote a
really polite e-mail to the
to the Maths facilities team,
who wrote back immediately and, very
apologetic and explained - this is
another thing - it was the contractors who
had put this on and we had not somehow
been able to get them to get a
proper keypad. So there's another thing
we have to worry about, our relationship
with our contractors and are our
contractors on board with the way we are
trying to approach things? And are they
going to come to us with the helpful
suggestions that will
take us from the sort of
basic level up to where we need to be?
They did source another
another keypad quite soon. And
there it is on the right. It's, you know,
not great, but the the numbers are
indented so you can feel your way around.
in the dark if you needed to. And you do
need to feel your way around because in
this picture, you see what those keypads
look like to someone of my height,
which is, you know, not uncommon. You're
looking down at them from an angle. You
can either sort of bend down or creep,
groan and, and squint at the
numbers, or you can rely on trying to see
them from an angle. But here's another
thing. They have to be down there because
wheelchair users need to be able to get
to them. That, again, that is without
question. What's the
solution to this?Maybe you have to have
two keypads, or maybe you put your keypad
on an angle so that you can at least see
it at right angle, see it sort of
straight on from above. But
it's these details that really
make the difference between a seamless,
welcoming work environment and one that
you're sort of having to struggle
to get into. I should say that the
very helpful young student who eventually
let me in, totally in breach of all
protocols, said, my
God, that was a nightmare, that key. I
can't do it either. So, you know,
this is a case of benefiting everybody.
Right, so you're in your
building, and what are we
going to do?Well, the first thing we
might be faced with is stairs, if we're
a stairs person, and we might go into a
lift. Oh, by the way, just before we go
upstairs, we might have gone upstairs in
the lift, and the lift is the right hand
one of those two keypads on that picture.
Again, the same thing aboutYou're in a
crowded lift with a whole lot of other
people. You've got to see the thing at an
angle. The key,
The numbers aren't even in any sort of
logical order, like the top floor at the
top and the bottom floor at the bottom.
Lifts are not particularly easy.
However, these stairs, I have been
complaining, right? I've got the green ink
out. Well, I'm going to put it away again
because these stairs are lovely. These
are stairs in the maths building again.
And they have all the attributes of good
stairs. They are wide, so
that two people can pass without having
to manoeuvre. The
fronts of the steps are clearly
delineated. The number of steps in each
flight, 11, is the same throughout the
building. So you can kind of do it on
autopilot. The ergonomics of it are right
in the center of the
step length is good. The handrails are
good. There's a good contrast between the
floor and the walls. This is good design.
If you want to see some good stairs, go
to Maths and ask to be let in to have a
look at these stairs in the
interior of the building.
Yes, there are other stairs in the Maths
building which aren't so good. Am I
allowed to say the word seagulls here?
No, I thought not because,
a few years ago, water started
coming in through part of the glass roof
of the math building and the contractor
said, oh, it was a bird dropped a stone
on it. And we all said, oh, yeah. Well,
maybe it was true. Anyway, there are
places where water comes in and it had to
be caught by buckets and where it dropped
on the stairs, what do you do?You have a
trip hazard or you have
a sign. Anyway. What
do we do when we get to work?We go to a
meeting. We spend our time in
meetings and
meeting rooms. So
why is it that so many of our meeting
rooms are so bad?I
know that we're having to retrofit
in old buildings, but nonetheless, so
many meeting rooms are awful. The one
in this picture, with its glass
walls and the sun shining in,
is clearly a nice sort of architectural
conception, but it would be a horrible
building, a horrible room in which to
have a meeting. For many reasons, it
would become very hot.
If you were sitting on the wrong side,
you would see everybody as silhouettes
against a bright background.
You can imagine that not being a very
comfortable room in which to work at all.
That's a random picture off the internet.
I'll show you one of ours in a moment. So
what can we do?What
are the issues with meeting rooms?Well,
one of the issues is simply
the shape of the room. The room may be
very long and thin. We may be using long,
thin rooms for meetings. And
that means inevitably that the
people at the end of a table, either both
ends or the far end from the chair,
depending how it's arranged,are going to
end up being
far from the action,
very hard to follow without visual cues
and so on. So
that's certainly one thing.
We have meeting rooms where there is a
lot of external noise,
especially traffic,
but alsoin some ways,
maybe it's quite nice to know that people
are alive out there and that you're not
locked away in this hermetically sealed
room. But nonetheless,
when traffic noise is drowning out
speech, or let me put it thisway. When
you are working at the margins
of your hearing,
that extra bit of noise from traffic is
really seriously disruptive.
So external noise
is a problem. Internal noise.
Now, here's another area of
conflict, air conditioning. You need air
conditioning. And especially,
as we know, since COVID, you have to
have, you want, we realise the benefits
and indeed the necessity of having good
air changes in rooms. And that means air
conditioning, but air conditioning can be
very noisy. I don't think it always has
to be very noisy. Let's just pause for a
moment and listen.
It's pretty quiet in this room. I'm sure there
is air coming in from somewhere, but it's
pretty quiet. And it's very quiet
in some of the bigger rooms in the Maths
Building and very noisy in others. Some
of the committee rooms in Wellington
Square, where all the key
decisions are made, are
really very noisy indeed.
So again, this is a conflict
between fresh air and
getting rid of the CO2, which makes us
makes us feel stupid. And on the other
hand, having to sit through the noise of
having our meetings, as it were, on an
aeroplane. Again, you don't
want to end up with a building where you
say, 'Oh, our meeting rooms are
very noisy'. We need to be thinking about
this from the word go. And we need
to be working with our architects to
make this work from the word go.
Because if we say towards the end of a
process, 'Oh,We don't want our
meeting room to be noisy'. They'll say,
'sorry, the M&E is all designed. We can't
change it now.' And we've got such and
such a spec. So,
that is a consideration.
And there is the question of
also of hybrid meetings. Now,
I've said this before. This particular
room is an excellent one for a hybrid
meeting. And there's something
clever about the IT that means that when
somebody speaks from in the audience, it
sort of zooms in on them and you can see
who it is and you can hear them. And the
acoustics are very good too. But
most of our rooms are pretty terrible for
hybrid meetings. And the person
online is kind of isolated. I know
they're isolated anyway, a bit,
but they're kind of isolated from the
main room. So that's another thingfor
us to be thinking
about. And there's something else I was
going to say on this one. Maybe it
doesn't matter. So overall,
I think we can ask ourselves a question.
Do our meeting rooms help us make
good decisions? You know,
it's not a question we ask ourselves, but
we should, because
we should be making our decisions in the
best conditions possible to make
decisions in. And I don't think that
making decisions in rooms where you can't
hear yourself speak is going to be very
good at all.
If you are, by the way, beginning
to zone out at this point, why don't you
spend the rest of the lecture designing
in your head the ideal meeting room for,
it will give you something, you'd be
something to think about.
while I carry on.
This is one of our meeting rooms. This is
the Quillen Room in the Maths Building.
It's actually a nice room in many ways,
but it's not a good meeting room. It's
got all the attributes of a difficult
meeting room. It has a
very large glass wall, which I think the
architects conceived of as a clear wall.
And the mathematicians said no, we don't
want people looking in, we want privacy.
And so you ended up with an opaque
wall, but it's still very bright when the
sun shines through the glass roof and
onto that wall. So anyone sitting on that
side of a table is, you're sort of
peering at them. It's a very long table,
the people at the end. Well, the people
at the end tend to be the ones who
kind of like ostentatiously not quite
paying attention and then
occasionally chip in with a question and
thenleave 5 minutes early.
We all know, we all know about, oh, I
could write you a book about the types of
people in committees.
It's very hot because of all the solar
heating and the air conditioning
struggles and is a bit noisy. The
screens are a long way away and not
easy to see. It's not a good meeting
room. I think it's a compromise between
an architect's design,
a bit of vanity but also a
trying to shoehorn into a
difficult brief. So
an interesting case study.
So you have had your meeting.
Maybe you're not a staff member, maybe
you're a student and you go to a lecture.
This is one of my colleagues, Jan,
giving a lecture, a very interesting
lecture about probability. And this is a
still from the movie,
given in our main lecture theatre,
L1, which is a lovely lecture theatre
with excellent acoustics.
That does not, by the way, excuse
not having hearing assistance
because even in a room, this is not
a large lecture theatre, it's a
medium-sized lecture theatre. Even in a
room a third of this size, you would
still want hearing assistance. Quite a
lot of people would find it very helpful.
And I'll come back to that in a moment.
So there is Jan giving a lecture about
stopping times. I listened to a bit of it,
it and I learnt something, so that was
good. Now, when you look at the picture,
you can't really see his face because the
illumination is incorrect.
The illumination of the lecture theatre
is incorrect. You have
a whiteboard, which has to be illuminated
so that you can see what Jan has been
writing. Sometimes you have a screen,
as we do today. Then you
have the speaker. The speaker needs to be
illuminated from the front, so that
the visual cues are there. And,
you know, these visual cues, everybody uses visual
cues. if I put my hand in front of my
face like this, so that you can't see my
lips, you won't be able to hear me quite
as clearly as you will when I take it
away because you are,
however little and however
subconsciously, you are using visual
cues. Those cues are
not really available. In fact, we even
have to bring in lights in Maths, when we
have a big event, a big public event,
when we have an important person coming,
like the Vice Chancellor coming to speak.
We bring in lights to
make sure that the illumination is good.
So that is not good. Here I am afraid
these lights here are not helping with
seeing what's on the screen. I prepared
the lecture on dark
slides because I think that's actually
easier to read and more comfortable on
the eye. But it doesn't work in here,
does it? because of the
contamination from the front row of
lights. It's the one flaw that I've found
in this otherwise excellent lecture
theatre, is that one of
lighting.
This is the same lecture theatre from the
other side. And the story of this
lighting is, roughly speaking, that we
did realise, that we did say
you have got to arrange the lighting so
that, for example, when the screen is
being used, the speaker can stand in a
convenient place and be illuminated
without contaminating the image on the
screen. So, you know, light goes into
straight lines and the pixels on your
screen are, you know, they are there that
big, that is how precisely you can control
light, if you have the right kit.
there's hundreds of years of experience
of lighting theatres. We must be able to
get this right. We did raise it with the
architects and there was
resistance. I think, actually,
because, as you see in this picture, they
have a very elegant design in which the
curves in the ceiling mirror the curves
in the seating, and
the whole room has a kind of integrity,
and to put lights in the front of the
ceiling would have spoilt that. The
difficulties were all about - oh, there is
no power up there. Well there is power
up there. Look, there are lights
and so on and so forth. But
the real truth is, it was too late in the
process. It was not built into the brief
and it was not built into the thinking.
What have we got here? Hearing.
Yes. I've talked about visuals mostly
because, well, somehow the
consequences of running into something
visually are, that you didn't see, are
worse than the consequences of not
hearing something you didn't hear.
But nonetheless, hearing is something
that we need to think about more.
Working in a noisy environment, it just,
well, it's not good for you for a start.
Ear protectors are there for a reason.
Working in a noisy reception because
there is not enough sound-proofing cannot
be good for
anybody. I've talked about the
the impact of air conditioning.
I've talked about
what else have I got here? I've got
should know my end slides better,
shouldn't I? I've talked about
Yes, good acoustics, not excusing
having no hearing
assistance. The building on the
left in this picture is the Earth
Sciences building, another recent Oxford
building,
1980, I guess.
And it has an atrium with
graduate study spaces which open
directly on to that with no gaps.
which are apparently not at all popular
because there's a lot of noise from the
atrium which gets into the heads of the
people who are working there. Some people
love working in a caf. There are always
people in the Maths Caf working but
there are lots of people who need peace
and quiet to deliver their best
work. They need to be able to
concentrate. They need to be able to
mutter to themselves if they do some
complicated calculation. I know I do.
SoThat's another
piece of design that doesn't work when it
is the only form of work space in
the building.
So, you know, that's just a
few thoughts on hearing. And it's the
same thing about thinking, thinking
through from the beginning, what
are we going to, how are we going to do
this and how are we going to optimize the
the experience for everybody, because if
we optimise it for everybody, then we
will certainly be be doing the right
thing by people who are
in the in the 24% that Irene
mentioned who are who are disabled.
So.
Oh, I know what I was going to say,
the last thing on hearing
before I move on.
Hearing assistance is a very
tricky subject, actually, and I know this
from experience. There are various
systems around the place, many of them,
almost all of them, unsatisfactory.
There are infra-red ones which tend
not to work terribly well and can get
blocked by not having line of sight
communication. There's Bluetooth through your
phone, which is fine if your phone talks
to your hearing aid, but you have
latency, which is to say that the sound comes
to you after a processing delay,
and so it's not synced with the action.
There are here induction loops, which is
what I think that we have in this room. The
one in here, I should say, is excellent.
I've said this before, it's a really good
one, it works very very well in various
places in the room, but they are
difficult. My feeling is that if we were
to build them into the design from the
very beginning, they would be a robust
and
widely usable solution. But I think
they always get put in at the last
minute, at the last stages,
not built in as an essential part of the
building.
So let's move on
then. We're more or less done, I
think. Oh, no.
Oh, no. We've got on to IT. I'd forgotten
IT. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, IT!
Well, now... How to lose
friends instantly!
IT is so difficult. IT is difficult.
Especially in Oxford, because the Oxford
IT system is so spread out
and diverse. But even if it was command
and control from the centre, it would
still be very, very difficult. You have a
huge range of users and they all have
strong opinions and they are prepared to
let everybody know about them. You have
a huge range of devices. You have Macs and
you have Linux and you have Windows and
you have other things probably as well.
You have mobile devices. You have
desktops. You have a
background which is constantly changing
as technology evolves. And our poor IT
staff are expected to keep up with this.
So they have a really tough time of it.
And yet, and yet... So
I think you can tell that there is a
couple of personal complaints coming
along here. I
will just make a couple of points here.
One of them is that we are
very prone to buying software which does
not adopt the standard high
contrast themes on Windows.
and or indeed other operating systems,
but mostly on Windows. So if
you are like me, and indeed like many
ordinary people, I'm surprised that the
number of people I talk to, and I say
'ordinary' I mean people not like me...
the number of people who like using
light text on a dark background, it's so
much easier on the eye. And we,
you know, why should backgrounds be white
just because paper is white?So
we have training, training resources like
these in Health and Safety
and Information Security.
which do not have accessible versions.
So I remain a walking health
and safety risk and a walking information
security risk. I'm sorry about that. But
there really is nothing I can do about it
because I cannot actually read those
screens. except by taking about half
an hour per page, and I'm not prepared to
do that. The one at the top is
so-called accessible text which puts
the text which is very small in black
boxes. You
can read it, but again, you have to work
very hard. It's not the effortless thing
that you have to have in a critical
and important training video.
I should say that the inrehearsal
videos that the university has are much
better in this respect. But these ones
come out of CoSy and are absolutely,
absolutely terrible. So
we have weaknesses like this.
I do not get the feeling that
accessibility is yet
bottom-up in our IT. As I said,
I think this is really hard to do. But I
was very encouraged to listen to a
podcast recently with Anne Trefethen and
colleagues, in which they talked about how
accessibility was going to be built into
IT far more than it is at the moment.
And again, this will benefit everybody
far more than just a small number.
So I am approaching the end of my time, I
think. I have approached it, haven't I?
Oh, in that case, I'll wrap up very
quickly because I can wrap up very
quickly. I apologise for that.
Once you get me going... So, some
final thoughts: first of all,
we have to build in accessibility into
our design from the bottom up and from
the very beginning. It's absolutely
essential that we do that. I think we
need ways of documenting
that and making sure
that we are not relying on individuals
to make our projects accessible and
inclusive. So,
we had - and this feeds
into the interface with our architects
and our designers and everybody else.
So I went and read the University's
Accessibility Design Philosophy document.
I did not have high expectations; but it
document. which says a lot of the things
I wanted to see said.
I think we can use that document. I think
we can take it and we can build on It,
and we can make it into
something which is really authoritative
in this sphere and informs all
of our projects, every single one of
them, for the
future. I really think that we've got to
do that and I think we've got to gather
the knowledgefrom our community of
people, across the whole
University. I think we need to recognise
that this is an important job and
we need to, for example, use our
system of responsibility allowances to
pay people for doing it and to give them
the time to do it. In other words we
shouldn't rely on people in the
disability and non-disability community
to give their timeto this sort of thing.
It's a professional thing. It's part of
our professional endeavour and we should
recognise it as such.
I have the idea that we should give all
our architects and designers, and our contractors,
too, what I would call
accessibility tours, which would be a
kind of walking version of what I have been
talking about with my slides. In other
words, you would take them round and
show them some of our buildings, show them
the successes, show them the failures -
very important to show them the failures -
say 'We don't want any of those'. Talk
about the desires. Talk with the people in
the departments concerned. But really
build this into their thinking before
they start putting pen to paper or
stylus to screen or however they, however
they do it these days. So I think that's
a really, that's an important thing to
do. And overall,
overall,
I would like to pose, I would like
to pose a challenge. Have I got to
my challenge yet? I would like to
pose the challenge, which
is - skipping ahead -
I would like to pose a challenge,
which is: Can we make Oxford
a beacon institution in this respect?I
think we are in a good place. We've got a
lot of hard work and thought that's gone
into it. Can we take it to the next
level?Can we make Oxford the place that
everybody else looks at it and says,
'This is how you do it.'
'We need to go and ask them
how they did it.' 'This is fantastic.'
That's what I would really like to see.
And if there's one point in my lecture,
it's that doing that will benefit every single
person in this University. Every single
person. Thank you for listening.
ELIZABETH FROOD: So,
I very much hope this is not an audition.
That frightens me, Sam. So
I'm Elizabeth Frood. I'm an associate
professor of Egyptology here.
And I feel very privileged to be in
this space, to thank Sam
for articulating such a powerful
call to arms for the University,
which placed the individual
body at the centre, and I
love that. I loved starting out with the
detail of the ear and just
moving out to how we navigate spaces.
And I want to thank Teresa and
Catherine for creating this
critical space for discussion, through the
annual Disability Lecture. I know you
have worked really hard to create this. I
thank you. Thank you both so much.
When I first began,
almost ten years - no, almost ten years ago
now, to have to
navigate the world
and everything,
literally every thing, literally things in the world, I
anew - I had to renegotiate my
relationship to the world - I
read a book. and maybe
it should be a new textbook for
architects , by the artist and
designer Sara Hendren, about
adaptive design and technology
from an artist and a designer's
perspective. And she
- it's an incredibly inspiring
book - and it helped me
rethink how my relationships with the
world could work, even though I'm not an
artist or a designer. But she
begins this book right at the
start with a quotation from a philosopher
Albert Camus:
'But one day the why
arises and everything
begins in that weariness,
tinged with amazement'.
The 'why' there for me, for me personally,
encompasses the 'what if':
what if things,
spaces, the world, could be
otherwise? And I think Sam
has shown us, beautifully, this evening, the
possibility that resides
in that 'why' and the
'what if'. There are many of
us in the room who will be familiar with
the weariness, the labour
that goes into navigating this world.
But I want to just touch a little bit,
because I thought Sam also brought this
into his lecture, the amazement,
in a positive way, in a delightful way,
because we are throwing down a gauntlet
to the architect, to the
designers, to the digital
world that I have to navigate to do my
job every day, the people
that create software, for
imaginative, creative,
holistic design that can
be really beautiful. And that the
aesthetic of that is so important.
All of you that half way through the
lecture started to design your meeting
room, I hope you were
creating spaces that are
visibly, visibly - visibility is
really important - audibly,
and sensorially useful.
Because it is possible. Sara
Hendren talks about case studies where
it's really possible. And yes, it has to
start from the ground up, and it has to be
a collaborative community and we are so
privileged in Oxford to have the
potential for that. So, Sam, thank you
so much for highlighting all of this for
us. I am so grateful and I'm really
grateful to have been here to hear that
and to be able to respond in this small
way. So I would just like to, on behalf
of the entire room and everyone online,
offer another round of thank-yous
and applause for Sam.