Access For All

The FUTURAGE Road Map for European Ageing Research was formally launched yesterday (Tuesday 18th October) at a conference in the European Parliament in Brussels.
FUTURAGE is a two-year project funded by the European Commission, under the Seventh Framework Programme, to create the definitive road map for ageing research in Europe for the next 10-15 years.
Drawing on experts and specialists from Europe and beyond, the road map represents the most extensive consultation ever conducted in this field and identifies the main priorities on ageing and health from a multi-disciplinary perspective.
Through a chain of events, academic and non-academic stakeholders engaged in a state-of-the-art assessment of research priorities, emerging fields and methods to build consensus on the research priorities in ageing until 2025.
The FUTURAGE Road Map for European Ageing Research is now available to download here.

Web Accessibility Initiative – Cooperation Framework for Guidance on Advanced Technologies, Evaluation Methodologies, and Research Agenda Setting to Support eAccessibility (WAI-ACT) will address critical areas of advanced accessibility support through activities that build upon the strengths of past web accessibility work, harmonize existing work, and help shape a research agenda in coordination with key stakeholders in Europe and internationally.

The project addresses the need for expanded European and international cooperation on the development of accessibility solutions for people with disabilities; for consensus-based, authoritative technical guidance to accelerate implementation of advanced technologies; for internationally harmonised evaluation methodologies; and for a coordinated research agenda on eAccessibility.

WAI-ACT addresses these challenges through development of a framework for open, expanded cooperation among European and international stakeholders, technical guidance on advanced web technologies; an evaluation methodology for web accessibility; and a research agenda for eAccessibility. Technical guidance will include a repository of information on accessibility support in web technologies, application notes on authoring accessible web page components, and code samples for web applications. WAI-ACT will result in: Expanded cooperation on the development of accessibility solutions; Authoritative accessibility guidance on advanced web technologies; Harmonized methodologies for evaluating accessibility of websites; and Common visions for a coordinated eAccessibility research agenda

WAI-ACT is co-funded by the European Commission as a Specific Support Action under the IST 7th Framework Programme. It is lead by and builds upon the strengths of the existing World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) cooperation mechanisms to facilitate strategic European and international participation throughout the project. Other project partners are Stiching Bartimeus Accessibility (SBA), Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (Fraunhofer), and Johannes Keppler University (JKU). WAI-ACT will also seek active exchange with relevant networks in Europe such as eAccess+, and coordinate standardisation activities such as EC Mandate M/376.

WAI-ACT Project started as of 1 September 2011.
European Commission Project, 7th Framework Programme, IST 287725

Source: Project website

Registration is open for the International Course on Disability & Development to be held at the VU University Amsterdam on Nov. 28- Dec. 23, 2011. Topics covered include: disability models and stereotypes, International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) conceptual framework, rights of people with disabilities, including the CRPD, and disability-relevant research methods, including survey methods.
Click here for further information.

A call for papers for the “Engineering Technology & Applied Science Research” (ETASR) international journal has been launched. ETASR is a wide scope, peer-reviewed open access journal which aims to provide fast publication to scientists, researchers and engineers from both academia and industry, that wish to communicate recent developments, applications and parts of on-going research in their field.
Authors are invited to submit their work using the journal website, following the instructions and the live template provided.
A standard research article published in ETASR consists of six pages but no page limit is set. Colour figures and pictures are accepted providing that they are of good quality.
The ETASR journal is published bimonthly with the first issue of every year published in February. Final decision about each submitted paper will be reached within 4 weeks from submission.
ETASR is oriented towards publishing articles that communicate advances, interesting implementations and parts of on-going research in fields of interest. In addition, it offers a medium to authors for fast publishing individual parts of their work that are used as basis for diverse further research (e.g. a new software, a modification or an original measuring apparatus/technique), specific aspects of their research that are important but not closely linked with the rest of the work (e.g. a study for the economical aspect of a technical implementation) and individual parts of their work that can be later used as citations, allowing authors to comply with page limits set by other journals.
An added aim for ETASR is to offer a medium to authors for publishing and permanent referring papers that have been presented to international conferences that do not publish their proceedings, providing that the author still owns the copyrights of his paper.
Further, unlike most journals, ETASR accepts papers that describe negative findings and research failures, since it feels that publishing negative results is valuable and saves considerable time and effort for other scientists around the world. ETASR is fully committed to Open Access policy and will provide free access to all articles as soon as they are published. Open access provides a worldwide audience, increases the visibility of published work, enhances indexing, retrieval power and eliminates the need for permissions to reproduce and distribute content.

The eChallenges e-2011 Conference takes place in the beautiful city of Florence, Italy on 26-28 October 2011. It will focus on applied ICT research topics addressing major societal and economic challenges. The programme will combine strategic keynote presentations, technical and policy papers, case studies, workshops, an exhibition and social activities. The programme will showcase results from projects funded at national and regional level as well as those funded by European Commission Research Programmes. The goal of e-2011 is to stimulate rapid take-up of Research and Technology Development results by industry and in particular SMEs, and help open up the European Research Area (ERA) to the rest of the world.
The Call for Papers for eChallenges e-2011 is published with a deadline of 28th February 2010 for online submission of paper and workshop submissions.

The aim of the CARDIAC project is to create a platform that can bring together the various stakeholders in the area of accessible and assistive ICT with a view to identifying Research & Development gaps and emerging trends and generating a research agenda roadmap.
The basic concept behind the project is to create a platform that can bring together the various stakeholders in the area of accessible and assistive ICT with a view of identifying R&D gaps and emerging trends and generating a research agenda roadmap. It aims to identify examples of best practice and to disseminate the collective wisdom of all the relevant actors (both partners from within the project and stakeholders from outside the project) through, meetings, conferences and publications.
The major aim of the Coordination Action will be to improve the overall success of Challenge 7 ICT 2009 7.2 ‘Accessible and Assistive ICT’ by drafting a research agenda road-map highlighting research priorities that will favour eAccessibility.