Report from Special session
Citizens with Special Needs
European Ministerial Conference on Knowledge and Information Society
Lisbon, 10-11 April 2000
Rapporteurs:
Gunnar Fagerberg and Margita Lundman, Swedish Handicap Institute
In the special session on Citizens with Special Needs, around 40 experts representing governments, industry, research, service providers and NGOs participated. With backgrounds and interests in different sectors of the Information Society, participants had sometimes different priorities. However, on the main directions and the most important actions necessary, there was a strong consensus. This report will focus upon these directions and actions.
The aim of eEurope is to bring the Information Society to the European Union and to make sure that all European Union citizens can benefit from this initiative. Therefore, eEurope stands for integration, participation and inclusion for all, including citizens with disabilities and older people. This is a human rights issue. And therefore, special measures need to be taken promptly to ensure the participation of these groups.
Users of ICT products and services represent a diversity of people.
10 – 15 % of the population of Europe have disabilities. The number of individuals with disabilities will increase as the proportion of older persons in the population grows.
Some groups are large, such as persons with hearing impairments and mobility impairments, who represent approximately 10 % of the population; others, e.g. persons who are deaf-blind, are smaller in number but represent complicated communications problems – where ICT can be immensely useful.
Include in all actions
Every effort should be made to create an inclusive information society. They should be made as far as possible in their natural context. In addition to the important special action on eParticipation, social inclusion issues for disabled and older people should therefore be addressed in all the actions of eEurope.
Universal standards of service
Universal standards of service are the key objective. This means that services and products provided to citizens in general should be accessible for people with disabilities. This new term should not be confused with the concept of “universal service” used in the telecommunications field.
The basic requirements of everyone can be expressed as five A´s: Awareness, accessibility, availability, affordability and appropriateness.
Typical services, which are meaningful and wanted by the users are e.g. government information, health information, banking and financial services, broadcasting and retail services, i.e. the kind of services which citizens in general are interested in.
Principles behind the ambition are democracy and human rights but also market opportunities and the realisation that we can develop cost-effective solutions using ICT-based goods and services.
It should be noted that making products and services usable by persons with disabilities in many cases makes them easier to use for persons without disabilities.
Two directions
It was clearly pointed out that actions are needed in two directions: design for all and assistive technology. Design for all is the process of making services, systems and products usable for as many individuals as possible. Methods and guidelines, as well as good practices and benchmarks need to be developed, established and implemented. Assistive technology is products and services intended for use by persons with disabilities in order to compensate for their difficulties, for training of their functions, etc. The Information Society holds a great potential for creating new assistive technology products to the benefit of these groups.
Enforcement
The target is equality and full participation. Available instruments, such as legislation, are needed to put force behind the efforts to reach that target. A review should be made on how to use the most efficient instruments in order to ensure accessibility for persons with disabilities.
Legislative action is needed in the area of copyrights, with the aim of ensuring accessibility for people with reading difficulties. The danger that blind persons run of being excluded from access to information, should the current European Union draft directive on copyright be adopted, has been clearly described by the Board of the European Blind. There is a need to include in the directive mandatory and effective exceptions to such exclusive rights proposed, which might leave blind persons and others with reading impairments at risk of being excluded from necessary information.
Public procurement
Accessibility should be considered in public procurement. One of the targets of the eEurope initiative concerns this. Based on the results of the ACCENT project, several recommendations can be made, such as:
· explicitly identify ICT accessibility as an appropriate goal of public procurement policy
· define accessibility as primarily a technical issue that adds value to ICT, to be addressed as such in procurements
· ensure that accessibility is given priority attention in the context of WTO or other bilateral agreements (the Transatlantic Agenda provides an important opportunity in this regard).
Standardisation
Standardisation is necessary in order to define requirements. An independent project team, working for CEN under a mandate from the European Commission, has developed an important base for including requirements of persons with disabilities in ICT standardisation.
One example of important international standardisation concerns the so called Total Conversation, using voice, text, speech and video for telecommunication in a standardised way for people who cannot speak, or are hearing impaired or deaf. This shows that there is a solution even to a complex problem.
Access to Internet
Activities regarding accessibility to the Internet are under way. There is the Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C) on the international level, supported by the European Commission, as well as several national initiatives. In order to achieve harmonized, universal standards there is a need to bring these efforts together.
Education
Another area of priority is education (for professionals and users in using ICT Tools). Some measures could be taken at the European level, e.g. quality assurance and development of curriculum components, while other steps should be taken at the national level. The possibilities of creating an EU programme with the aim to provide people with disabilities and older people with appropriate knowledge about ICT should be explored. Another area of importance is the area of employment, where ICT could bring invaluable tools.
Research and Development
Recent results from the evaluation of the European Union TIDE programme show that the programme has been successful. In research and development, not only highly innovative projects but also practical, new applications of existing ICT technologies are needed. Research programmes must address the multi-disciplinary nature of the field. There is a need for means to close the gap between prototypes and viable products for the users. Social goals must go hand in hand with commercial goals. There should be strong user influence to define the needs. The contribution of industry, including major companies as well as SMEs, is important for developments in the field.
Task force
Finally, in reference to the universal standards of service, as well as other of the actions proposed, we recommend that a Task Force be mandated to specify and monitor the development. This could be an already existing body or a new initiative. The body could work in collaboration with national centres of excellence.
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