AALIANCE2 Project is a Coordination Action funded in the FP7-ICT-2011.7, which focuses on the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions based on advanced ICT technologies for ageing and wellbeing of elderly people in Europe. One of its main objectives is to build consensus upon research priorities in the AAL roadmap and Strategic Research Agenda for the upcoming decades.

This first workshop will focus on the functional areas associable to the AAL application domains (AAL4Person, AAL in the Community) and the relative activities/application scenarios. The objectives are to refine, classify, organize and improve the contents of the first AALIANCE Roadmap, published in March 2010.

Suitable persons for the AALIANCE2 Workshop are experts in the AAL domain, which have experience in some of the following tasks: designing, developing, producing, experimenting, and assessing AAL technologies or studying and defining the main aspects of AAL field. Experts should be AAL technology developers and researchers, ICT service providers and technology suppliers, policy‐makers, standardization organizations, health and care service organizations, caregivers, etc.

We would like to invite you (or some of your staff) to participate in this Workshop as Experts in the field of the AAL or responsible in Projects related to AAL and Ageing Well. The participation in the Workshop is limited to a small number of experts, therefore we ask you to confirm your participation as soon as possible, since the experts will be accepted based on the “who first confirms, first participates in”.
We gently ask you to extend this invitation also to all partners of the AAL project in which you are involved in.

If you accept to participate in the Workshop, you will receive guidelines to participate in the event and contents of the previous AALIANCE Roadmap.

The video features an interview with the OASIS project coordinator Silvio Bonfiglio (FIMI), as well as scenes from piloting and user forums in Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Romania.

OASIS is a Large Scale Integrating Project — partially funded by the European Commission (FP7-ICT 215754) – with the aim to develop an open and innovative reference architecture, based upon ontologies and semantic services, that will allow plug and play and cost-effective interconnection of existing and newly developed services in all domains required for the independent and autonomous living of older people and their enhanced Quality of Life.

For more information: www.oasis-project.eu

A related video can be found at http://youtu.be/gOme8Qa-s9U which presents the OASIS project concept.

• A document describing the framework of things needed for 3rd generation accessibility, as validated by the prototypes and user/developer feedback in AEGIS
• A collection of largely open source prototypes and code Deliverables implementing various aspects of the OAF, proven in AEGIS and contributed back to the open source projects of which they are part

This Deliverable (D1.2.1) contains the initial AEGIS Open Accessibility Framework (OAF) description. It is based upon:

• The accessibility API and framework support from the existing Open Desktop (GNOME Accessibility framework) and the Java platform (the Java Accessibility API, keyboard operability guidelines, and theme support);
• The AEGIS generic accessibility framework requirements (AEGIS ID1.2.1).

In addition, this Deliverable is informed by the early feedback from AEGIS consortium developments – highlighting anticipated areas that the OAF will necessarily need to cover. This includes:

• ARIA implementations on various UI elements,
• Initial work on JavaFX accessibility,
• Alternate input systems for users with physical impairments (both for the open desktop as well as “thought experiments” for mobile),
• Development of the RIM Blackberry mobile accessibility API and its use by the Oratio screen reader.

Finally, this Deliverable is informed by developments in the field of accessibility external to AEGIS development work. This includes:

• ISO 13066 work to standardize AT-IT interoperability generally, and specifically to codify the set of information that must be provided via accessibility APIs;
• The U.S. Access Board release of their “Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” for the refresh of the Section 508 and Section 255 accessibility regulations/guidelines;
• The Apple iPhone 3GS/4 (and iPad) which include a built-in screen reader and screen magnifier, both of which rely on a new set of multi-touch gestures for use;
• The Android v1.6 and later operating system which includes the ‘Talk Back’ screen reading functionalit.

This initial OAF description will be updated throughout the remainder of the AEGIS project with the practical information we gain from implementing it in the desktop, web, and mobile space.

For more information, visit the OAEG OAF section. It outlines the Six Steps to Making an Accessible World: The Open Accessibility Framework.

AEGIS is an Integrated Project (IP) within the ICT programme of FP7.

This conference will take place on July 11-13, 2012; with the Pre-Conference July 09-10, 2012. Place to be is the University of Linz, Altenbergerstraße 69, 4040 Linz, Austria.

The Web is rapidly evolving and converging with other media and technologies. Today the Web is on mobile devices, televisions, self-service terminals, and computer desktops. It is continuing to be increasingly ubiquitous and indistinguishable from other interfaces and an ambient part of our daily lives, particularly with the advancement of “the cloud.

Given the highly flexible and adaptable nature of the Web, its growth provides a critical potential of increased inclusion and equality for people with disabilities. However, it also raises new challenges for technology, software, and content developers in making their products and services accessible. In particular, the specific accessibility challenges and optimal ways for providing accessibility support are not well understood in all contexts, making it difficult to effectively design and develop accessible mainstream technologies.

This Special Thematic Session (STS) invites contribution and discussion on experiences with the day-to-day challenges that developers, evaluators, managers, policy makers, and other practitioners observe in implementing web accessibility in advanced technologies.

More specifically, this STS invites contributions analyzing good practices, use-cases, end-user requirements, promising accessibility features and solutions, and challenges in applying web accessibility in specific contexts such as (but not limited to):

• HTML5 and rich internet applications;
• Websites and applications for mobiles;
• Digital/IP TV and audio-visual media.

This STS also welcomes research, surveys, and discussion of future trends and directions including (but not limited to) web telephony and real-time communication, self-service terminals (e.g. information kiosks, ticketing machines, ATM, etc.), online games, social networks, virtual and augmented environments, 3D Web, multi-touch, and the use of cloud technology for personalized accessible interfaces.

Acknowledgements: This Special Thematic Session (STS) is jointly organized by the EC-funded WAI-ACT, AEGIS, and ACCESSIBLE projects.

Chairs:

• Shadi Abou-Zahra, W3C/WAI
• Karel Van Isacker, EPR/MCA
• Konstantinos Votis, CERTH/ITI

More information at http://www.icchp.org/node/363.

AccessODF

AccessODF is an extension that can be used in OpenOffice.org Writer and in LibreOffice Writer. It enables authors to find and repair accessibility issues in their documents, i.e. issues that make their documents difficult or even impossible to read for people with disabilities. This includes issues such as:

• insufficient colour contrast between text and background,
• missing text alternatives for images and other objects (such text alternatives are necessary for blind users and other users of text-to-speech software),
• missing language identification for the document and for language changes inside the document (language information is needed for conversion into Braille and synthetic speech),
• the use of proper Heading styles instead of big bold text to identify headings (this enables document navigation based on headings),
• the use of proper tables instead of visually mimicking tables by using tabs or spaces,
• the compatibility of images with DAISY, the de-facto standard for digital talking books.

The AccessODF extension displays its list of errors and warnings in a panel next to the main authoring area. For each accessibility issue, AccessODF provides a description and repair suggestions. Authors can repair the issues and recheck the document by pressing the Check button. For some issues, authors can simply press the Repair button to fix the issue automatically. For some other issues, pressing the Repair button guides authors to the appropriate dialog where they can fix the issues themselves. For all remaining issues, they can follow the instructions provided in the repair suggestions. If AccessODF lists an issue that is not an accessibility issue, authors can press the Ignore button.
Making Writer documents more accessible is not only important for users of Writer, but also for users of formats that Writer can export, for example PDF, XHTML, and – through extensions – DAISY and Braille. Accessibility evaluation and repair for Writer documents is a feature frequently requested by users of odt2daisy and odt2braille.

odt2daisy

odt2daisy is an extension that converts Writer documents into digital talking books in the DAISY format. It supports several versions of DAISY: not only the current version – DAISY 3.0 – but also the version DAISY 2.02 for compatibility with older DAISY players. odt2daisy supports Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) and multilingual documents. It uses the text-to-speech engines installed in the user’s operating system for speech synthesis.
odt2daisy was first released in November 2009. The new release includes many small improvements such as:

• better support for tables and table captions,
• better support for long text alternatives (“long descriptions”) for images,
• better support for multilingual documents and non-Western languages,
• preventing the use of incorrect bitrates for text-to-speech conversion,
• better handling of title pages.

Many of these changes resulted from co-operation with a Flemish Braille and DAISY conversion centre.
odt2daisy is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and Linux and can be downloaded from http://odt2daisy.sourceforge.net/.

odt2braille

odt2braille is an extension that converts Writer documents into Braille or prints them on a Braille embosser. odt2braille was first released in August 2010. The new release includes numerous improvements, such as:

• support for a larger number of Braille embossers,
• support for a larger number of languages,
• expanded Braille formatting settings for professional users: volume management, tables, footnotes, pictures, etcetera,
• user interface localisation in other languages, e.g. Czech and Polish.

SourceForge selected odt2braille as “SourceForge Project of the Month” in April 2011: http://sourceforge.net/blog/april-project-of-the-month-odt2braille/. odt2braille can be downloaded from http://odt2braille.sourceforge.net/. At the time of writing, odt2braille is only available on Microsoft Windows. It will later become available as a Debian package prepared by the Debian Accessibility Project (http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-accessibility/). Mac users can try out a limited beta version (which does not have the print functionality, and has only been tested on Mac OS Leopard).

Open-Source Software

AccessODF, odt2braille, odt2daisy and most other software developed in the AEGIS project are or will be available as “open-source software”. This means that users will not only be able to download the finished product but also the programming code or “source code”. They can also modify and improve the source code, provided that they make their changes available to the developers or the community that maintains the software. This process enables a community of users to make improvements to the software and enables these improvements to be quickly available to other users.

About OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice

Several partners in the AEGIS project are making contributions to OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, including Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), DART and FPD (both from Sweden). The OpenOffice.org Community (http://www.openoffice.org/) is an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, translate, support, and promote the leading open source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. UNO, OpenOffice.org’s language-independent Application Programming Interface (API) is also available for developers, systems integrators, etcetera to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in their own applications.
OpenOffice.org uses the OpenDocument Format OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as supporting legacy file formats such as Microsoft Office, and is available on major computing platforms in over 100 languages. OpenOffice.org software was provided under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) until June 2011 and may be used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial. OpenOffice.org development is expected to continue at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under the Apache License.
LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org/) is a free and open-source office suite based on the OpenOffice.org source code. It is a community-driven project of The Document Foundation. The Document Foundation was formed in September 2010 and has released several new versions of LibreOffice since that time. New code in LibreOffice is developed under a double license: the GNU Lesser General Public License Version 3 or any later version (LGPLv3+) and the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

The project addresses the need for expanded European and international cooperation on the development of accessibility solutions for people with disabilities; for consensus-based, authoritative technical guidance to accelerate implementation of advanced technologies; for internationally harmonised evaluation methodologies; and for a coordinated research agenda on eAccessibility.

WAI-ACT addresses these challenges through development of a framework for open, expanded cooperation among European and international stakeholders, technical guidance on advanced web technologies; an evaluation methodology for web accessibility; and a research agenda for eAccessibility. Technical guidance will include a repository of information on accessibility support in web technologies, application notes on authoring accessible web page components, and code samples for web applications. WAI-ACT will result in: Expanded cooperation on the development of accessibility solutions; Authoritative accessibility guidance on advanced web technologies; Harmonized methodologies for evaluating accessibility of websites; and Common visions for a coordinated eAccessibility research agenda

WAI-ACT is co-funded by the European Commission as a Specific Support Action under the IST 7th Framework Programme. It is lead by and builds upon the strengths of the existing World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) cooperation mechanisms to facilitate strategic European and international participation throughout the project. Other project partners are Stiching Bartimeus Accessibility (SBA), Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (Fraunhofer), and Johannes Keppler University (JKU). WAI-ACT will also seek active exchange with relevant networks in Europe such as eAccess+, and coordinate standardisation activities such as EC Mandate M/376.

WAI-ACT Project started as of 1 September 2011.
European Commission Project, 7th Framework Programme, IST 287725

Source: Project website

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

September 7, 2011

OASIS (www.oasis-project.eu), a research project partially funded by the European Commission under FP7, promises to revolutionize the interoperability, quality, breadth and usability of services addressed to older persons through ontologies and semantic web services.

First results will be presented at the 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011) in Bonn, Germany (October 23 – 27, 2011).

How to support holistically the independent living and mobility of the older citizens across Europe? How to connect services for the elderly in an one-stop-shop fashion and interrelate and integrate those services?

OASIS (Open architecture for Accessible Services Integration and Standardisation), a research project partially funded by the European Commission (FP7-ICT, GA# 215754), has developed an open and innovative reference architecture, based upon ontologies and semantic web services. This architecture enables plug & play and cost effective interoperability, seamless connectivity and sharing of content between existing and newly developed services in all domains required for the independent living of older people and for the enhancement of their Quality of Life.

The project addresses the issue of direct re-usability of information across heterogeneous services and devices through the common understanding and sharing of contextual information.

The OASIS platform allows aggregation of different services which offers the unique benefit of enhancing each of the services through a synergic exchange of information. In consequence, each application can adapt to the specific needs of the user

By fostering interoperability, standardization and organizational / business arrangements based on cooperative and aggregating models, OASIS addresses some of the main weaknesses in this area. These include fragmentation and duplication, poor cooperation among the key players of the value chain and lack of sustainable business models. “By these means, OASIS aims to contribute to the sustainability and efficiency of social and health care systems” says Project Coordinator Silvio Bonfiglio.

OASIS will moreover boost and improve the competitiveness of the markets for innovative products and services, responding to the ageing challenge at both EU and global level, thus creating new opportunities for businesses.

The research work carried out by the OASIS Project in the field of ontologies and semantic web services will be discussed during the half-day OASIS Symposium (October 25, 2011:14:00-18:00), co-located with the 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011) in Bonn, Germany ( October 23 – 27, 2011).

Press is invited to attend the Symposium.

Contact: Dagmar Roeller – Email: DRoeller@polisnetwork.eu

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OASIS Symposium at the ISWC 2011: Hyper-Ontologies and Modularity for Semantic Interoperability

The aim of the OASIS Symposium is to serve as a forum to exchange ideas with regard to the realization of a semantic interoperability of services.

The common vision of the Semantic Web is the achievement of seamless and transparent interoperability of services across diverse providers by making the meaningful content of those services openly accessible. For content to become ‘meaningful’ it must be related to more general information schemes for which some semantics has already been provided. Such information schemes range from tag collections, which impose an indirect semantics by means of induced similarity across tagged entities to formal ontologies, which explicity represent class-subclass relationships, the attributes of such classes as well as additional information that may be known about combinations of such classes and their instances. Whereas the semantic information that is explicitly maintained in ontologies might appear ideal for realizing the Semantic Web vision, substantial problems still render this goal difficult in practice. The symposium will address these problem areas.

More specifically OASIS addresses:

(i) the inherent complexity of constructing the high quality formal specifications necessary for trustworthy reasoning and (ii) the tendency for many formal specifications to emerge with little overlap in their coverage, modeling styles and intended semantics.

The solutions being explored involve: the replacement of large-scale ontologies by small-scale, application-specific ontologies maintained by those who know their data best, the system developers; automatic and semi-automatic support tools for allowing system developers to flexibly relate their data with re-usable ontologies in their domains of application; and the automatic generation of code supporting seamless data transfer across and within applications. The resulting framework relies on the well supported inter-linking of heterogeneous ‘ontological modules’, which we term a hyper-ontology.

The symposium will present results achieved to date and – through the contribution of highly qualified speakers, external to the OASIS Consortium – will raise issues in the formal foundations and guidelines for future hyper-ontology work and discuss opportunities for new standardization initiatives in the area of hyperontology-driven interoperability.

Specific attention will be devoted to interoperability spanning complex services in the areas of Independent Living, Autonomous and Smart Homes and Workplaces and to the provision of cross-domain networked ontologies, a goal which is itself a substantial research challenge.

Relevant topics that will be raised during the OASIS Symposium presented by renowned experts both internal and external to the OASIS Consortium, include:

• Modular Ontology Design
• Reasoning over content from multiple sources
• Query processing over multiple linked datasets
• Creating applications drawing on multiple data sources
• Open Ontology Repositories
• Information and design quality of ontologies
• Semantic Web Services and support tools

The program is completed by a Round Table discussion titled “Interoperability, Applications and Hyper-ontologies: the way forward”.

You can sign up for the OASIS Symposium when registering for the ISWC.

For further information about the OASIS Symposium, please contact info@oasis-project.eu or :

John Bateman – Chair of the Symposium Organizing Committee

E-mail: bateman@uni-bremen.de

Silvio Bonfiglio – OASIS Project Coordinator

Email: Silvio.Bonfiglio@philips.com

Evangelos Bekiaris – OASIS Project Technical Manager

E-mail: abek@certh.gr

For further information about the OASIS Project, please visit the web site www.oasis-project.eu

More information
APSIS4All (Accessible Personalised Services in PDTs for All)

To register, click here.

• Disability Impairment Approximation Simulator (DIAS)
• Web accessibility assessment Tool (WaaT)
• Web Service accessibility assessment Tool (WebSaaT)
• Mobile Web accessibility assessment Tool (MobileWaaT)
• Description Language accessibility assessment Tool (DlaaT)

The triggering idea behind ACCESSIBLE is to contribute for better accessibility for all citizens, to increase the use of standards, and to develop an assessment simulation environment (including a suite of accessibility analysing tools as well as developer-aid tools) to assess efficiently, easily and rapidly the accessibility and viability of software applications for all user groups.

An accessible PDF version can be downloaded here.

You can also download it as accessible PDF.

The workshop on 28 November will focus on the realisations of the AEGIS (Open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards) project and provide attendees the opportunity to try out all outcomes of the project. The demonstrated products offer barrier-free access to desktop, mobile and web applications, are open source based and will be freely available.

The conference on 29-30 November will gather a wide array of experts and users in the area of Assistive Technology to discuss scientific and policy developments in accessible technology; showcase relevant projects and initiatives in the area of assistive technology.

Access to both events will be free, but places will be limited.

Download the call for papers also as pdf.

We kindly invite you and your colleagues to submit papers in the following categories:

• Scientific papers
• Technical papers

Conference topics (non-exhaustive list):

• Accessible desktop applications (AT, developer tools and accessible applications)
• Accessible mobile applications (AT, developer tools and accessible applications)
• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (AT, developer tools and accessible applications)
• Accessibility and Standardisation (e.g. ISO, eInclusion, Policies, Legislation)
• Accessibility and Usability (e.g. Design for All)
• Accessibility research (e.g. Assistive technology usage by end-users and their satisfaction, innovative AT training via accessible e-learning)

Important dates:

• Abstract submission deadline: 30th April 2011
• Notification of acceptance abstract submission: 31st of May 2011
• Paper submission deadline: 30th June 2011
• Notification of acceptance and outcome of review process: 15th September 2011
• Final camera ready papers: 31 October 2011
• Registration by 31st October 2011

Abstracts submission:

Abstracts submitted in the context of one of the above topics should not exceed 500 words. The title, authors and their contact and affiliation details (authors’ email address, telephone and fax number and affiliation name and address) as well as keywords (up to five) should be included.

Under the title of your abstract, please quote the relevant conference topic. We would strongly recommend you to propose more than one conference topics, if applicable, quoting them in priority order.

Authors who are unable to provide an electronic version or have other circumstances that prevent such submission must contact us (info@aegis-project.eu) prior to submission to discuss alternative options.

Abstracts should be submitted to info@aegis-project.eu by 30th April 2011.

Submission declaration:

Submission of a manuscript implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the copyright-holder.

Any manuscript not complying with the above requirements will not be accepted.

Publications:

Abstracts and camera-ready papers as well as exhibition applications will be reviewed by the ÆGIS Scientific Committee. The final versions of the accepted camera-ready papers will be published and will be made available during the conference. The authors of each accepted submission are required to give a presentation at the conference and must register by 31 October 2011.

In addition, the authors of the accepted technical papers will be invited to publish their software (where relevant) in the Open Source Community.

Looking forward to meet you and welcome you to our Community!

Guidelines for Final Paper:

Download Guidelines for Final Papers (.doc).