Access For All

HCI International 2013 (http://www.hcii2013.org) organises a parallel session entitled ‘eInclusion – Policies, Programs, Best Practices … and Lessons Failure Has Taught’. HCII 2013 will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, on 21-26 July 2013.

HCI International 2013 incorporates 12 Conferences / thematic areas, expecting to attract over 2,000 participants from all over the world. The program will feature pre-conference tutorials, an opening session with a keynote address, more than 250 parallel sessions, poster presentations, and an exhibition where attendees will be able to examine state-of-the-art HCI technology and interact with representatives of manufacturers, vendors, publishers, and potential employers. HCI International 2013 promises to be an unforgettable cluster of high quality international scientific events, and an ideal occasion to come to contact with the rapidly evolving ICT market worldwide.

The session ‘eInclusion – Policies, Programs, Best Practices … and Lessons Failure Has Taught’ will be one of the parallel sessions of the ‘Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction’ Conference / Thematic Area. Accepted papers will appear in the Conference Proceedings along with the other regular submissions that will be accepted for oral presentation, following a peer-review process.
The HCI International 2013 Conference Proceedings will be published by Springer in a multi-volume set. Papers will appear in volumes of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. Extended Poster abstracts will be published in the Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) series.
All volumes will be available on-line through the SpringerLink Digital Library, readily accessible by all subscribing libraries around the world, and will be indexed by a number of services including EI and ISI CPCI-S.

Farfalla is a web application for enhancing accessibility of any website. It is meant to be easy to configure and to use. It wants to provide users with a lightweight and flexible solution, which can be always available in the cloud, for free.

You can try it right now via the Farfalla website: you only have to click on the bar on the upper-right part of the page to select a profile. Every profile allows accessing different kinds of resources, from text magnification to an onscreen keyboard.

They will add more tools in the future, so if you can’t find anything useful, you could try contacting them and explaining your needs.

Farfalla is based on free technologies such as jQuery, jQuery-UI, PHP and MySQL. Farfalla is Free Software. Its source code is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL). The main developer is Andrea Mangiatordi.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/farfallaproject

Raising the Floor (RtF) – International are holding an online meeting to discuss the Needs & Numbers program, RtF’s work on quantifying disability and accessibility. This is a follow-up to their panel discussion at CSUN, with Mark Richert of the American Foundation for the Blind and Jim Tobias of Inclusive Technologies.

When: April 18, 1 PM Eastern (GMT-4)

Where: Online; information about participating will be sent to registrants.

Registration and information page.

Raising the Floor (RtF) is an international coalition of individuals and organizations working to ensure that the Internet, and everything available through it, is accessible to people experiencing accessibility barriers due to disability, literacy, or age. Of particular concern are people who are underserved or unserved due to the type or combination of disabilities they have, the part of the world they live in, or the limited resources (financial or program) available to them. A central activity of Raising the Floor – International is coordination of an emerging consortium to build a Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII). For more information see http://raisingthefloor.org.

The purpose of the survey is to gain insight into the depth and breadth of work currently being undertaken by professionals involved in the creation and promotion of Accessible ICT, in order to better understand the challenges faced, where improvements are required and how best to facilitate and support these improvements.
The survey was launched March 30 2012, and will be open until April 30 2012. Access survey.
eACCESS+ is an EU-funded project that intends to establish, co-ordinate and systematically grow a platform for co-operating, discussing and improving the implementation of eAccessibility throughout Europe.

ATLEC logo

Alongside various European initiatives that address training the trainers and professionals who work with people with disabilities, ATLEC, (Assistive Technology Learning Through A Unified Curriculum) a 2 year project partially funded by the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning program, aims to fill the current gap concerning the ICT AT training of people with disabilities.
ATLEC will support their learning in order to develop specific skills, particularly tailored to their individual and employability needs, while also creating the job profile of ICT AT trainer, relevant for VET (Vocational Education and Training) Centres.

“The ATLEC project gives us an opportunity to work with colleagues across Europe in establishing and developing assistive technology for young people and for adults with physical and learning disabilities.
In the world of Disability we only move forward by working together. We are all European citizens and it’s very important we share our expertise across the European Community. The more we share together, the better.3
(David Stewart OBE, Headteacher at Oak Field School & Sports College, Nottingham, UK)

The kick-off meeting of the ATLEC project took place on 16-17/01/2012 in Nottingham, UK. It brought together experts in the field from four different countries. The ATLEC partnership consists of: Oak Field School and Sports College (U.K.) –contractor-, PhoenixKM BVBA (BE) –coordinator-, Disability NOW (GR), AIAS Bologna onlus (IT), Greenhat Interactive Ltd (U.K.), and the University of Athens (GR).

The innovation of this project lies with the individual tailoring of the ATLEC curriculum and training materials to the learners’ needs, combined with the implementation of mobile learning applications to support the learning, as well as applying mentoring as an additional supportive aspect of the ATLEC training services. The learner and his/her needs and potential are central in the project, as well as the relationship between the learner and the trainer who is expected to equally benefit from the learning process.

Supporting the end-users’ learning in effective usage of ICT-based AT means enables them to gain new skills, including self-directed learning and also allows them to gain self confidence, improve their adaptability skills and their attitude towards risk taking which is necessary to address the challenges of the employment environment that in many cases is still full of physical, technological and attitudinal barriers.
A mentoring scheme will be set up and run in workplaces in Belgium and Greece, directly linking the knowledge and skills acquired with the practice, while also facing the reality in the working environment.

The applied pedagogical methodologies will use blended learning (face-to-face, online and mobile), and will provide accessible WCAG2.0 compliant learning/training objects/material, which are thus exchangeable with other learning initiatives. All ATLEC learning opportunities objects, learning materials and mobile applications will also be offered through the platform of the ViPi project (KA3-ICT, 511792-LLP-1-2010-1-GR-KA3-KA3NW, www.vipi-project.eu) that aims to launch in 2012, and which is also coordinated by PhoenixKM BVBA.

Finally, the ATLEC consortium is focusing on promoting free access to the resources developed. The mobile application will be freely available via the Android market, while all created material will follow a creative commons license. This approach will ensure that the research, methodology and outcomes of the project will be freely available to everyone.

The 2nd ATLEC project partnership meeting will take place in Belgium (Ypres) and is scheduled for 25-26/6/2012, in combination with a local workshop.

Follow ATLEC project via Twitter: www.twitter.com/ATLEC_project
or via Facebook: www.facebook.com/ATLECproject

Using social media is for everyone, also for people with disabilities. However, many accessibility issues arise, which were strikingly discussed in the presentation “Social Media Accessibility: Where Are We Today?A modest attempt at awaking the giants” by Denis Boudreau at CSUN 2012.

Media Access Australia now released a nice list of guidelines how a person with disabilities can use YouTube (guidelines) , Twitter (guidelines) and Facebook (guidelines).