Access For All

ÆGIS (Open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards) is a research project funded by the European Commission, working in the area of accessibility and independent living. ÆGIS develops an Open Accessibility Framework (OAF) consisting of open source accessible interfaces and accessibility toolkits for developers, alongside accessible applications and open source assistive technologies for users. ÆGIS will produce this framework through user research and prototype development with current and next generation ICT. This should deeply embed accessibility into future ICT for the open desktop, rich Internet applications, and mobile devices. ÆGIS results will be referred to standards organisations where appropriate, and made available under open source licenses to the greatest extent possible. This Newsletter keeps readers updated on the current status and achievements of the project.
The special focus of this second issue is on ÆGIS’s activities for user requirements collection and user involvement in the project developments through the dedicated local User Forums, as well as the 1st pan-European User Forum and Workshop. The articles in this issue present the work, experiences, accomplishments, and lessons learned by the ÆGIS partners. References to similar activities of relevant projects are also provided.
Download the 2nd newsletter.

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.

ACCESSIBLE will exploit the technologies behind the recent expansion of accessibility tools and standardisation methodologies, in order to provide an integrated simulation assessment environment for supporting the production of accessible software applications mobile or not.

This will enable large organisations, SMEs or individuals (developers, designers, etc.) to produce software products of superior accessibility and quality, accompanied with appropriate measures and proposals for best practice. The proposed system will be demonstrated in the four pilots of ACCESSIBLE for the assessment of: a) Mobile applications (including JavaFX Scripts), b) Web applications, c) Web services (mainly focusing on infomobility services), and d) description languages (e.g. UML, SDL, etc.).

The first newsletter is now available.

The ÆGIS project just released its first newsletter.