Access For All

On 3-4 November 2010, the WSC will organize an international workshop in the premises of the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva, Switzerland, on “Accessibility and the contribution of International Standards”.
Accessibility is the degree to which a product, device, service, environment or facility is usable by as many people as possible, including by persons with disabilities. Its importance is signified by the fact that the number of persons with disabilities, either congenital, acquired or as a result of age is estimated to be around 650 million worldwide.
International standardization can be a powerful tool for strengthening accessibility in all these areas by setting the same standards around the world for accessible products, devices, services, environments and facilities.
The World Standards Cooperation (WSC) brings together the three leading international standards bodies, namely the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
The workshop takes up the topic of the 2010 World Standards Day, celebrated each year on 14 October, which is “Accessibility”.
Workshop structure and expected outcome
The workshop will address three key subject areas:

• accessibility in the field of everyday products
• accessibility and buildings
• eAccessibility and eInclusion (in Information and Communication Technologies)

In a combination of plenary and break-out group meetings these three subject areas will be discussed and the potential of standardization – and in particular international standardization – to contribute to strengthening accessibility aspects in the design of products, services, environments and facilities will be addressed.
Key stakeholder groups participating in the workshop will include disability organizations, governments and regulators, product designers and manufacturers faced with accessibility requirements, consumers and standards developers from around the world. Under discussion will be the current and future needs in the field of accessibility as well as the possible contributions international standardization can make in facilitating the development of accessible solutions around the world.
The expected outcome of the workshop is a better understanding of both the work on accessibility issues in standardization in the various areas and the needs of those most concerned. It is hoped that the groundwork will be laid and a road map drawn up for future standardization initiatives with the involvement of the key stakeholders.

More information at the event website.

Almost one in five of the world’s population lives with some kind of recognized disability. Sooner or later, everyone will develop at least some limitations in vision, hearing, dexterity or learning. To improve usability for those of us with sensory or physical limitations, phones have features for accessibility, which are continually improving and becoming more prevalent as technologies advance. The Global Accessibility Reporting Initiative (GARI) project was developed to provide a central information source to learn about accessibility in mobile devices. On their website you can learn about the various features that a phone may have and link through to manufacturers websites for specific information on particular models.

ACCESSIBLE consortium is proud to announce the realisation of their first Project Workshop on 13 July 2010, in the context of the ICCHP conference in Vienna.
During the ACCESSIBLE workshop the innovative results of the project, related to the accessibility assessment and simulation technologies, will be presented accompanied with the developed tools, which will be interactively tested from the participants.
The participation is fully free of charge.

According to a survey conducted on behalf of the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation by a consulting firm specialising in information technology for people with disabilities, 52 % of the Danish government websites are not fully e-accessible to people with various types of disabilities.
A total of 226 government websites were tested, including pages that are directly covered by the agreement on the mandatory open standards and a variety of other government websites. Individual pages were tested in terms of compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA standard and with the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standards.
The survey shows that almost half of the websites examined (48 %) have little or no serious accessibility problems, whereas the other half of them (52 %) include only some essential functions or are loaded with content that may not be available. Every tenth public website has been proved to be less accessible than it should.
According to the Danish Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, Ms. Charlotte Sahl-Madsen, “The results are not very satisfactory, because we expected a more positive development after the political agreement on open standards in 2008.”
There are still many public websites that are not fully IT accessible to people with various types of disabilities, according to the same survey. Therefore, ministries, regions and municipalities should be more willing to use IT solutions in order to ensure greater accessibility for all.
Furthermore, the Ministry will launch in 2011 a new eLearning tool that will provide instructions and guidance on how documents and websites can become more accessible. “The Ministry will also examine whether there is any workable international experience, we can bring into play”, says Ms. Sahl-Madsen.
Web accessibility includes, e.g. accessible design for screen reader users, access for people who cannot use a mouse and who ultimately use the keyboard alone when they need to use various functions or download content from a website, etc.
During the ministerial conference in Riga in 2006, EU member states decided to set a goal of 100 % accessible public websites by the end of 2010. However, this has been proved difficult for all countries and none of the member state is expected to reach the target before the end of 2010.
Commenting in this regard, Mr. Michael Bach Petersen, the Head of the IT and Telecom Agency, stated, “We are not alone in our challenges to ensure accessibility of public websites. Problems exist in all EU member states. We will intensify our participation in the single European work towards achieving common strategies, tools and methods to ensure that all citizens have equal access to public information and to digital public services.”
The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has already launched a series of initiatives designed to support the authorities’ efforts to develop and maintain accessible websites. These initiatives will be further evaluated and strengthened in order to maximise improvements for the benefit of the large group of citizens with disabilities. The initiatives include an information campaign, development of accessibility eLearning and other tools to support public authorities’ work towards web accessibility.
Source: eGov Monitor

Accessibility is becoming an ubiquitous topic nowadays, with many authorities and experts putting a lot of effort on pushing forward accessibility of software applications. Despite this fact, many ICT applications and systems are not fully accessible yet.

The development of accessible software applications requires a strong effort from developers and software designers. With the additional encumbrance of taking into account different kinds of accessibility requirements, guidelines and best practices, and different user interface implementation technologies, developers are faced with a daunting task. Therefore, the highly specialised skills required for developing accessible software sets aside most of them.

Starting from this lack of accessibility, the ACCESSIBLE EU FP7 project was established to contribute to better accessibility for all citizens, to increase the use of accessibility 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.

Actually the main goal of ACCESSIBLE is to develop appropriate open source assessment and simulation tools in order to fully support and incorporate accessibility constraints for the design and development of accessible new applications.

The ACCESSIBLE Consortium kindly invites you to participate in its first international Workshop that will take place on 13 July 2010 in the context of the 12th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP), in Vienna University of Technology, Austria.

The main objective of this workshop is to promote the innovative results of the ACCESSIBLE project related to the accessibility assessment and simulation technologies, to a wider community of potential users and to offer significant support to interested parties (ICT developers, designers, etc.) in order to encourage and empower them to contribute towards the inclusive ICT vision.
At the end of the Workshop, an award ceremony will be given to the organisation or to the developer of the most accessible software application (Web, mobile), according to the accessibility tests (WCAG 2.0, mobileOK) that are going to take place with ACCESSIBLE assessment tools. The ACCESSIBLE Award evaluation expert committee will be composed of well-known scientists and experts in the accessibility domain.

For more information about the ICCHP conference and the ACCESSIBLE Workshop, please visit the web page of ICCHP or the projects web page.

The FCC (Federal Communications Commission – USA) released “A Giant Leap and a Big Deal: Delivering on the Promise of Equal Access to Broadband for People with Disabilities“. It is the second paper in a series of working papers that are being released in conjunction with the USA’s National Broadband Plan, and it is the first time the Commission has issued a working paper addressing accessibility and technology issues.
References are being made to EU backed initiatives such as the ÆGIS and Reach112 projects.