The purpose of this meeting was to provide information on the upcoming call for proposals of the Competitiveness Innovation Programme in the area of self-service terminals and assistive technologies and gather ideas from participants in this connection.
All presentations can be downloaded here.
Involving people with disabilities from the beginning of a project helps you better understand accessibility issues and implement more effective accessibility solutions. It also broadens your perspective in a way that can lead you to discover new ways of thinking about your product that will make it work better for more people in more situations.
This applies when designing and developing:
- Websites and web applications
- Browsers, media players, and assistive technologies
- Authoring tools such as content management systems (CMS), blog software, and WYSIWYG editors
- Accessibility standards and policies
- Web technologies and technical specifications, such as HTML
in this respect, the W3C WAI Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) published documents to help:
The documents provide guidance on including real users, covering:
- How involving users early helps
- Finding a range of users
- Working with users
- Analyzing accessibility issues
- Drawing conclusions and reporting
- Note for usability professionals
- Combining user involvement with standards
Source: WAI Interest Group
ISO plans a Workshop to formulate an ISO strategy/policy concerning standardization in various areas of “accessibility”, which will take place 3-4 November 2010 (according to present planning). So far the following foci have been identified:
The latter also comprises eInclusion, eAccessibility, AAI, AAC etc.
Within the framework of ICCHP 2010 “12th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs”, July 14-16, 2010, Vienna University of Technology, Austria, there will be a STS (Special Thematic Session) devoted to standardization: “Users need standards need users”. It is planned to organize a special meeting in preparation of the ISO Workshop mentioned above.
More information about ICCHP 2010.
In the EU27, 65% of households 1 had access to the internet during the first quarter of 2009, compared with 60% during the first quarter of 2008, and 56% had a broadband internet connection in 2009, compared with 49% in 2008.
These data 2 published by Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, represent only a small part of the results of a survey on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) usage in households and by individuals in the EU27 Member States, the candidate countries, Norway, Iceland and Serbia . As well as internet use and broadband connections, the survey also covers other indicators such as e-shopping, e-government and advanced communication and content related services.
Household internet access ranges from 30% in Bulgaria to 90% in the Netherlands.
In 2009, the proportion of households with internet access was three quarters or more in the Netherlands (90%), Luxembourg (87%), Sweden (86%), Denmark (83%), Germany (79%), Finland (78%) and the United Kingdom (77%). The lowest shares were registered in Bulgaria (30%), Greece and Romania (both 38%).
The proportion of households with a broadband connection in 2009 was highest in Sweden (80%), the Netherlands (77%) and Denmark (76%).
Almost 40% of individuals shop online.
Nearly three quarters of those aged 16-24 in the EU27 used the internet on average daily or almost daily in the first quarter of 2009, compared with nearly half of all individuals aged 16-74. The highest shares for those aged 16-24 were found in the Netherlands (90%), Denmark and Estonia (both 88%), Finland and Sweden (both 87%), and the lowest in Romania (41%), Greece (57%) and Ireland (58%).
In 2009, 37% of individuals aged 16-74 in the EU27 had bought or ordered goods or services over the internet in the last 12 months. This share varied considerably between Member States, ranging from 2% in Romania , 5% in Bulgaria and 8% in Lithuania to 66% in the United Kingdom , 64% in Denmark and 63% in the Netherlands and Sweden . In the EU27 , 40% of men had ordered goods or services over the internet, compared with 34% of women. The share for men was higher than for women in almost all Member States.
Download the full press release and the Internet usage in 2009 – Households and Individuals – Issue number 46/2009 survey.
This report (Study report: Web accessibility in European countries: level of compliance with latest international accessibility specifications, notably WCAG 2.0, and approaches or plans to implement those specifications) presents the results of a study to provide data and analysis to support the European Commission in the identification of EU-level measures that can help to progress the achievement of greater levels of web accessibility across the Member States. The aim was to provide evidence and analysis to help understand and compare the approaches followed by the European countries, with a view to identifying issues and challenges, good practices and future priorities in the web accessibility field.
A core focus of the report is on the issue of transitioning to WCAG 2.0 guidelines against the current background where Member States have, in the main, being targeting their efforts towards the earlier WCAG 1.0 guidelines.
Download the report and its annexes
A relevant project in this area is ACCESSIBLE which will soon provide access to free accessibility assessment and simulation tools, applicable for websites, webservices and mobile services.
Below demo of Google Goggles shows how this Android supported applications allows users to take photos of things and get pertinent search results back. With Google Goggles, a user snaps a photo, images are sent to Google servers, vision algorithms analyze the image and look for detectable objects which create signatures for those objects. Those signatures are matched with an index of a billion images, ranked, and sent to a user’s mobile device in a fraction of a second. The company hopes to someday be able to visually identify any image. Goggles is available now in Android Market.
Potential applications for people with disabilities are:
