17 January 2010
Dr Dave Merchant

For many of you, even an oblique mention of computers brings to mind the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992 as amended (DSER), and deep lack of love thereof.

We see hundreds of questions about eye testing, workstation assessments and the possible legal implications of not having an inspection label on your antibacterially impregnated wrist supporting mousemat, mostly because the entire text of the DSER takes up marginally less space on a page than the question. But some of them, we can answer:

It is true that if you’re self-employed, DSER doesn’t apply unless you’re using a workstation provided by an employer (if you are a subcontracted IT technician or an office temp, for example) in which case you are a “display screen operator”. Not a “user”. An “operator”. Big difference.
It’s true that there’s no workable definition of what a DSE user actually has to do to become a DSE user.

The last point is the kicker for most people. DSER Part 1 says a “user” or “operator” is someone who “habitually uses display screen equipment as a significant part of his normal work” but the Regs have no interest in telling you what the words habitually and significant mean. So while many employers have hatched impressive-looking tables of hours-per-session, they mean nothing.

The HSE’s Approved Code of Practice (L26, free to download here) says it is “impossible to lay down hard-and-fast rules…based on set hours’ usage”, but everyone still does, because there’s no other way to apply the definition. We can’t blame the UK for this (not entirely) as DSER is the result of a Directive from the EU, the Display Screen Equipment Directive 1990.

It’s a woolly law, and one sign of that is that the HSE database holds a grand total of zero DSER breaches, despite most people not having the faintest clue if they’re even trying to implement it properly.

Clearly they don’t care if you follow it or not, but millions of pounds are spent in the pursuit of compliance, and the combination of poor wording and absence of caselaw means you’re unlikely to ever get there. Has your chief executive been trained in the correct use of his mobile phone when sitting beside his swimming pool? No? You’re just not trying.

The other telltale sign of rot in the rafters is the amendment in 2002, which resulted from cases in the European Court where the Directive was ruled as being (how do I say this politely?) not very good. The amendments applied a very small sticking plaster to a large wound, but left many more untreated.

Legacy system

Part of the problem with DSER is in the date at the end of the Directive. Back in 1990, you were marginally impressed if your “mobile” phone came without a mains lead and a car and the idea someone would be running their entire office on something in their pocket was as absurd as the suggestion that one day all the banks might go bust.

It would be another three years before the first handset-to-handset text message was sent, and so the Directive clumsily tried to encompass current and all future technology by defining a display device as “any alphanumeric or graphic display screen, regardless of the display process involved”, on the assumption that nobody would be daft enough to make something 5cm wide that did anything interesting. After all, a computer was a big beige brick with a TV and floppy disks.

The assumptions in the Regulations were that a “display screen” could only ever be used at “a workstation”, that only employees would use workstations, that every workstation must be assessed by a competent person, as workstations are complicated things and that nobody would ever carry a computer onto public transport. Think of what the vibration would do to the valves.

DSER can therefore ask sensible things of employers whose workers stay tapping at their desks: they must assess all the workstations: check the lighting, height of the chair and offer to dispatch users off for an eye test.

Regulation 4(b) completely exempts any and all “display screen equipment on board a means of transport”. Nobody has the faintest clue what that means anymore. It used to mean that the cockpit instruments on a plane were exempt, or the radar screens on a ship, which are good things. If I take my laptop on a ferry, is it exempt? What about a PDA on a mountain bike? The HSE’s code of practice conveniently sidesteps any explanation of this point, but the omission is a good thing too, as I’ll explain later.

Always with us

These days, we carry computers about all over the place: laptops, notebook PCs, mini notebooks, palmtops, smartphones and PDAs, plus we have things that use display screens for graphics or create a screen in mid air – satnav devices, TVs and video projectors. Many of us do indeed use these things for “prolonged” periods, and for “work purposes”. You certainly do more on your mobile devices than the people writing DSER ever thought you’d get that big beige brick to manage. As Bill Gates said in 1981, “640K should be enough for anybody”.

There’s no concept of “a workstation” for a smartphone or a palmtop, and so you can’t risk assess it in the way DSER intended, nor apply any of the guidance that HSE issued at the time. Is the lighting adequate? Is there unacceptable glare on the screen? Is there a suitable level of ambient humidity? It depends where you are standing in the car park.

The solution, according to the ACoP and the HSE’s easy guide to DSE, HSG90 (free again here), is to ignore the parts of DSER that don’t fit. The Regulations are written to allow that slightly, but don’t tell you what to put in their place, nor which precise combination of things is appropriate to ignore. Fine, I’m standing up, so I don’t need a lumbar support on my chair. But should I actually be sitting down?

The solution I’m proposing for mobile display screen devices is to argue yourself out of DSER entirely. Doing so is perfectly safe; there is no clinical evidence of any long-term health effects from using a portable display screen, and we’re not expecting you to be staring at a phone without a break for eight hours at a time.

Mobile users look away from their screens far more frequently, and so their eyes have adequate chance to relax focus and blink. Tiny, blurry screens may annoy you, and cause stress; they may even give you a slight headache. But so will trying to cope with 50 pages of paper forms because someone decided your PDA wasn’t compliant.

Avoidance tactics

So how do we exempt ourselves from DSER? We just interpret the phrases exactly as they’re written:

• Any device on board a means of transport is exempt, courtesy of Regulation 4(b), so a laptop on a train or a satnav app on your phone is not a workstation, nor is the person using it a user.
• Any “portable system not in prolonged use” is exempt, courtesy of Regulation 4(d). “Prolonged” is meaningless, so we’ll say it means a “very long time”, fractionally longer than any of our employees are actually using one, which in reality is probably only a few minutes at a time.
• A user is someone who uses the equipment for a “significant part of his normal work”, so we will define “significant” as “pretty much all of it”, and average over a year, because we are allowed to.

I’m not proposing you then do nothing. But without the DSER clogging up the process, we can do what is sensible and practicable when dealing with a small, portable, but very useful little gadget.

The right stuff

Firstly, provide devices that are the most appropriate for the software they’re running. If it’s a phone, choose a high-definition screen, consider the battery lifetime and if it can survive being dropped, or being caught in the rain.

If you decide a phone is what your users need, then use a phone. If not, don’t. Consider whether screen protectors are a good thing (to save the repair costs) or a bad thing (as they increase glare in bright sunlight). Is a Bluetooth flexible keyboard worth it if employees only need to send occasional texts?

Naturally a laptop or netbook is easier to use for typing a report than a phone, but if your main task is scanning a barcode and collecting a signature, a PDA or smartphone is the only option. Reading lots of text on a small screen can be difficult, but if the software is designed properly it can be easier than on a printout, and graphic tasks such as taking photos can be ignored entirely, as what’s on the display screen gets barely a second glance.

Ensure the software is appropriate for the device; that text sizes are suitable, things can be zoomed, input workflows and menus are easy to follow, colours and contrast work indoors and outdoors. Look at how things like satnav devices do it, as they’ve been designed as extremely low-effort interfaces.

Forget about eye tests for people who only use mobile devices. If someone needs special DSE user spectacles, they aren’t going to be putting them on in the car to read their sat.nav. Forget too about training them to use their “workstation”. Sure, you can help them learn how the software works, but concentrate on training them on the things that matter.

Design the data systems your devices link to so that the same data can be accessed elsewhere, so someone in the office can get at those emails without using the phone at all. Not just a bigger screen, but less exposure to RF energy. We mentioned that last year.

Don’t be averse to using mobile devices where they increase efficiency and make the user’s life easier, but don’t use them just because it seems cool, nor get paranoid about screen size. We all know size doesn’t matter, and for 90% of the apps used on mobile devices that’s perfectly true.

If the device can link to a docking station so the user can work with a full-sized keyboard and screen, then great – but don’t panic if it can’t. They can always move the data to something that can, and a docking station isn’t much use if you’re in a railway station. Forget about all the stuff in L26 about manual handling. An iPhone or a BlackBerry is not heavy.

Above all, treat employees and self-employed subcontractors, temps, trainees and visitors the same. Avoiding the eye test means it’s perfectly practicable to include these missing groups, and pick your hardware and software accordingly. The requirement to offer eye tests is the only reason the Directive was written to exclude other workers in the first place, and why should the screen on a self-service checkout be any worse than the one the staff use in the next aisle?

All the advice above leaves out the single most significant risk mobile DSE users face: being mugged. Nothing in DSER will help you defeat a teenager in a hoodie. Dealing with theft is down to personal situational awareness, lone worker policies, and checking your van insurance covers stuff worth more than £30.

However don’t bother with the “give them a cheap phone” plan; not only does it make roll-out of new technologies more difficult and use of existing applications more fiddly and stressful, but the kid in the hoodie only looks at what he’s nicked after he stops running. His phone’s better than yours anyway; he’s a kid.

References

References
The guidance notes are free as PDFs from hsebooks.com – search for the document numbers:

• L26: Work with display screen equipment: DSER Guidance on Regulations
• HSG90: Easy guide to the law on VDUs
• the basic leaflet from HSE’s website (INDG36) is useless for mobile devices.
• the Regulations themselves are split into two by the amendment, so we’ve combined them together for you here — if they change again, we’ll keep the link updated.
• the Directive is available here.

 

Categories:
Display Screen Equipment (DSE), Features

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