Access For All

The AALIANCE2 Project is pleased to announce the first Stakeholder Workshop of the AALIANCE2 Roadmap “Technologies for AAL solutions: AAL application domains” on February 14, 2012, 9.00–16.30, at The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Viale Rinaldo Piaggio, 34 in 56025 Pontedera (Pisa), Italy. Contact persons are f.cavallo@sssup.it, m.aquilano@sssup.it, christian.wehrmann@vdivde-it.de.

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.

CEN, CENELEC and ETSI are organising a 2nd open workshop on “European Accessibility requirements in public procurement of ICT products and services” to be held in Brussels on 28 October 2011. This is the second of a series of three workshops that give stakeholders an opportunity to learn about the work, to discuss the latest drafts of the standards and reports and to give feedback about the work being done.
Participation is free of charge, but registration is required. Palentype and sign language can be made available upon request. To register please send an email to Ms. Franoise Wanson (fwanson@cencenelec.eu), by the 21st of October, indicating name, company and if special assistance is required.”

The 13th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP’13) will take place at the University of Linz, Austria on July 11-13, with a pre-conference on July 9-10.

ICCHP focuses on eInclusion for people with disabilities and older adults enabling a more independent life, participation and inclusion and improved services and support. By its nature, ICCHP has a wide area of topics and a future oriented mission:
* Full and short to be published in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science
* Special track on Universal Learning Design (ULD), organised by the Support Centre for Students with Special Needs, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic
* Organise your own Special Thematic Session (STS)
* Workshops, tutorials and seminars
* Meetings, presentations, posters and exhibition
* Young Researchers Consortium (YRC)
* ICCHP Summer University 2012: Math, Science and Statistics for Visually Impaired Users
* Project:Possibility – Programming Competition for eAccessibility Solutions
* The Austrian Computer Society’s ICCHP Roland Wagner Award in the range of 3000€

And much more! Please refer to the below Call for Papers (pdf and rtf version) and visit http://www.icchp.org.

Come and get involved and distribute the call widely!

The roadmap is a collaborative text from and for digital Inclusion practitioners across Europe. It aims to gather concrete solutions to common problems; show what eInclusion practitioner are already doing; mobilise support and tools from relevant decision makers and sectors. It is planned that the contributors with the most concrete inputs will be invited to present the most important issues from the Roadmap to Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission responsible for the digital agenda. The Roadmap will be discussed and adopted by the delegates of the Gdansk conference on Innovation for Digital Inclusion, 5-7 October 2011 (you can still register to the conference!).
The draft roadmap is expecting contributions before Wednesday September 28, 2011.
The roadmap draws on stakeholder expertise and is interested also in your contribution. Below you will find the federated collaborative approach to policy consultation.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) established a Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability.
Users of telecommunications and information technology have a varied capability of handling information and the controls of their presentation. The source of this variation lies in cultural and educational backgrounds, as well as on age-related functional limitations, in disabilities, and in other natural causes.
The Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability will facilitate interaction between relevant bodies, and ensure that ICT accessibility is included in the key debates around Internet Governance in order to build a future where all sectors of the global community have equal access to the Information Society. We are convinced that the entire community can benefit from an “accessible ICT world,” as people can be permanently or temporarily disabled due to personal, environmental (e.g., a phone call in a noisy environment) or cultural (e.g., spoken language diversity) conditions. Moreover, we will all grow old and lose abilities that we take for granted now, thus enlarging the part of the population that would benefit from accessible communication. We cannot allow isolation of a part of the population due to lack of appropriate functionality that prevents the use of ICT resources by everybody to the fullest possible degree.
The coalition is open to any organization entity or individual working on the field, including Standard Developing Organizations (SDOs), and i coordinated by Andrea Saks (TDI Telecommunications for the Deaf Inc.)

Official Web site: Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability

Partner CERTH/ITI of VERITAS FP7 project launched an open call for expert.

The VERITAS project is implementing specific methodologies and tools for Virtual User modelling based on sparse data collected via extensive literature research, guidelines analysis and measurement campaigns for collecting data from real users.

An open call for an expert has been launched for supporting the creation of the Virtual User model generator module of VERITAS. Expertise is required in the area of statistics and especially on the synthesis of stochastic models of Virtual Users based on sparse measurements.

The duration of this task is estimated to 10-12 months (starting on the 1st of June 2011) with a corresponding reimbursement of up to 18.000 €.

Interested experts are kindly requested to submit their detailed CV to the following email address: moustak@iti.gr.

The call for experts is open until 6 May 2011.