non-trivial problem.
What is Accessibility?
A considerable debate has opened up on the meaning of the term ‘accessibility’. It
is not easy to define as it has acquired a range of meanings in common usage with
particular interpretations in specific contexts. However, effective and widespread
use of formal standards requires that a common meaning must be adopted. Use
of the term ‘accessible’ is even more problematic. Gregg Vanderheiden, at the Trace
Center, was pointing out in 2001 that this term should not be used without some
qualification. An offering may be ‘more accessible’, ‘less accessible’ or even
accessible to a very specific group of people, but never just ‘accessible’. We might
think of a facility as ‘accessible to English-speaking people’, ‘accessible to people
with low incomes’ or ‘accessible to people with a disability’ but, in each case, we
are silently acknowledging that it will not be accessible to all of them. Then what
is an ‘accessible’ telephone? Can there ever be such a thing? There could be a
telephone which meets all of the criteria in a published set, which is a useful
categorization but its usefulness is only as good as the criteria themselves. Any
attempt to extrapolate beyond the intended context leads to difficulties, with the
risk of finding that there are people who cannot use the so-called ‘accessible’
facility. The authors of criteria sets are generally aware of the limits of their work
but others may use the description ‘accessible’ as a convenient shortform, with the
danger that a particular set of criteria comes to be seen as the practical definition
of what is ‘accessible’.
The starting point for ‘accessibility’ is ‘usability’. Usability is taken to mean the
ability of a defined group of people to make use of the product or service. A book
is usable by people who can pick it up, turn the pages, view the content and
comprehend it. It is not usable by people who, because of disabilities, cannot
handle it or see it. If it contains text written in (say) German, it will not be usable
by people who do not understand that language. The book can be made usable for
many of these people in various ways, although it may not then be the same book,
or even a printed book at all. For all the people who are excluded from
comprehension of the book for whatever reason, it is not accessible to them and
will remain so unless steps are taken to improve its usability in their particular
circumstances. ‘Accessibility’ therefore can be regarded as a measure of the extent
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to which groups of people other than the originally intended users can be offered
the experience of using the item in question.
Two points emerge from this simple example. Firstly, with traditional technologies
the intended users are defined by custom and usage. Printed books have always
been aimed at users who can access and appreciate them, so the task of improving
their accessibility has fallen largely to agencies outside the mainstream book trade.
With new technologies there is an expectation that accessibility issues of all kinds
will be addressed at or even before product launch, which is a culture shift that is
not apparent to all. The message for developers of standards is that this is now a
mainstream issue and not something to be addressed in niche markets. Secondly,
it is not a once for all issue. Improved accessibility is a continually advancing
objective requiring constant examination of the types of people who are not given
access. The consequence is that a wider skills base is now called for in standards
Committees.
Inclusive Design - Design for All
The points raised in the previous section can be addressed by the process of
Inclusive Design, also known as Design for All. While it does not mean that all
intending users can be given immediate access, it does signify an iterative process
to improve accessibility by widening the target user population each time the
design of a product or service is re-visited. This process ought to be as fundamental
to the design function as the inclusion of quality parameters, that is, an integral
component and not a feature to be added at the last moment. As with quality,
there are general standards for the Inclusive Design process, which can and should
be cross-referenced in the standards for specific items.
Standards complementing Directives
This section has so far been concerned with the standards that amplify the New
Approach in EU Directives, that is to say, those standards which are accepted as
describing how the essential requirements of a Directive might be met without
claiming to be the only route to achieving conformity. These standards are still
voluntary, in that other methods of showing conformity with a Directive may be
utilised, although these may be less straight-forward or less convenient.
It is unusual for exact compliance with a standard to be demanded by legislation,
but there are other ways of giving a standard legal force. One such way is through
a legally binding contract and contracts in the public procurement arena offer a
most important example.
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Standards in Public Procurement
A new Public Procurement Directive, which Member States were required to
implement by 31st January 2006, replaces a set of earlier Directives and
amendments dating back to 1992/93. These themselves replaced previous
Directives. The importance of Community legislation in this area arises because
public sector contracting could otherwise lead to serious breaches of the open
principles of the Single Market. Public bodies would often frame contractual
procedures in ways that were familiar only to the regular bidders for the contracts,
and this made it very difficult for an outsider to get an invitation to tender. The
variety of national approaches and technical specifications acted as a deterrent to
bidders from other nations and such processes were fundamentally incompatible
with the Single Market rules of transparency and fairness. The Community has
devoted considerable effort to legislating for open procedures in public purchasing,
with strict rules for advertising and awarding contracts. These rules also eliminate
the use of technical specifications that would favour particular groups of bidders.
The series of Public Procurement Directives has pushed purchasing bodies towards
reliance upon European technical standards and specifications, or the national
standards which transpose them, and Member States which persisted in using non-
harmonized national standards have been fined heavily. It is possible for a public
purchasing body to use non-harmonized specifications, where there are over-riding
reasons for doing so (such as the need for compatibility with installed equipment),
but the procedures for sanctioning this are lengthy and involve additional work.
The simplest course is, as was intended, to use European technical specifications.
However, one effect of this has been to deter Member States from writing
accessibility requirements into their public purchasing specifications, as such
requirements are not commonly found in European technical standards used for
procurement purposes. Public procurement has in consequence provided less of a
lever to promote accessibility in Europe than it has in the USA, for example, where
Government purchasing has had a pronounced positive effect on the availability of
accessible ICT equipment.
The new Directive recognised this problem and it goes some way towards adopting
accessibility principles while still keeping to the fundamental rules of transparency
and fairness. Recital 29 includes the comment “Contracting authorities should,
whenever possible, lay down technical specifications so as to take into account
accessibility criteria for people with disabilities or design for all users”. It adds “The
technical specifications should be clearly indicated, so that all tenderers know
what the requirements established by the contracting authority cover”. In other
words, it is not sufficient to require that the items must be accessible in some form
or other; the manner of achieving this accessibility must be specified in a way that
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allows the tenderer to prove compliance. Recitals are not binding, but the Articles
of a Directive are. Article 23 requires technical specifications to be set out in the
contract documents, and includes the wording “Whenever possible, these technical
specifications should be defined so as to take into account accessibility criteria for
people with disabilities or design for all users”. This is expanded in an Annex,
which deals with the way in which technical specifications define the
characteristics required in the purchased items; among the listed types of
characteristics are “design for all requirements (including accessibility for persons
with a disability) and conformity assessment”.
With this new Directive it will be possible to use accessibility criteria in public
procurement even where accessible features are not immediately essential to the
purchaser’s objective. But in order to do this, there will need to be appropriate
European standards which set out the criteria unambiguously and include tests for
conformity. Developing these will entail dealing with the same issues that have
been described in previous sections. The Commission has published a mandate to
the European Standards bodies in order to urge this work forward, but there are
no doubts as to the magnitude of the task .
Mandate M/376 requests CEN, CENELEC and ETSI to develop European
accessibility requirements for public procurement of products and services in the
ICT domain. The main objectives of the Mandate are:
• to harmonize and facilitate the public procurement of accessible ICT
products and services by identifying a set of functional European accessibility
requirements for public procurement of products and services in the ICT
domain, and
• to provide a mechanism through which the public procurers have access to
an electronic toolkit, enabling them to make use of these harmonized
requirements in procurement process.
It is hoped that some drafts can be available in 2008. There will be involvement by
key stakeholder groups including disability organisations and close cooperation on
an international level with other standards bodies. This should give an opportunity
for comparison with the U.S. Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines, which are to be
reviewed in 2007.
It is especially important with public procurement standards that the tenderer is
able to know, at the time that the bid is submitted, whether the offering meets the
technical conditions of contract. Transparency rules prohibit a public purchaser
from lining up the submitted items and making a subjective choice, or even a
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choice based upon the outcome of a user evaluation. The conformity tests to which
the offerings will be subjected must be described in the tender invitation, and they
must be capable of replication in any test situation or laboratory. This places further
demands upon the Standards writers to produce precise objective criteria that are
capable of independent conformity verification.
Several European public procurement authorities have already been considering
how to address accessibility issues in their tendering and some have successfully
introduced their own sets of accessibility criteria but, in the absence of harmonized
European Standards, these criteria have to be approved case by case through a
process involving consultation with all the EU Member States. It is clear that a set
of appropriate European Standards, that can be simply called up in any invitation
to tender, has to be available before public procurement can become a really
effective lever in promoting more accessible products.
Verification and Certification
Wherever conformity to a Standard is required or claimed, there is necessarily a
procedure for verifying that conformity. The supplier may carry out his own
assessment, using the test procedure laid down in the Standard, or an independent
body may perform the testing. In EU legislation, only the most critical or potentially
dangerous products have to be tested by an independent approved test house. For
most items, a self-certification by the manufacturer or supplier is considered
adequate, and this form of certification will usually form a part of the Declaration
of Conformity that is obligatory in the Single Market Directives (leading to the
application of the CE mark). Self-certification is not an easy option. The supplier
will be guilty of making a false trade description if the claimed compliance is found
to be unwarranted, and the penalties can be severe, especially if compliance is a
legal requirement, for example as part of a Directive or a condition of contract.
With independent testing, it is the test house which is liable if the report is in error.
For this reason, many suppliers will use an independent test house rather than their
own test facility in order to achieve greater confidence in the outcome.
Mostly, however, conformity with accessibility criteria is not a legal obligation in
the EU, and sanctions are only likely to apply if a false claim is made by a supplier
in the course of trade. A supplier may make a very non-specific claim as to the
accessibility of his offerings, without referring to any particular Standard, or no
claim at all, so that disappointed users would have no redress – and no
information as to which products on the market might suit their particular needs.
In these circumstances, users have to rely upon post-market testing by evaluation
organisations, that is to say surveys and test reports aimed at giving independent
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information to consumers. The procedures here are very different from formal
conformity assessment. The evaluators are free to use whatever evaluation
protocols they consider appropriate, and will often recruit panels of users to carry
out actual or simulated ‘real life’ assessments of the products. The evaluation body
may even award its own certification mark to products that perform well, but this
is for the information of potential users and has no legal status. For as long as
formal accessibility standards are embryonic, however, there will be a possibility
that post-market evaluation of this kind is more effective than reliance upon the
standards. In other words, the standards themselves need to be tested.
Quality Standards
There is an extensive and well-established set of European and International
Standards dealing with quality. Quality, like accessibility, is not a fixed quantity; a
product or a service may be intended to have a particular quality level. The object
of quality assessment (or quality assurance) is to ensure consistent quality at the
desired level. Quality approvals are given to suppliers by registration bodies, who
periodically audit the in-house procedures operated by those suppliers to ensure
that they are both robust and fully observed. This process could be applied to a
supplier’s approach to accessibility issues, for example by writing an accessibility
assessment section into the Design Manual and the Production Manual. The same
results could be obtained from a quite separate registration system, but this may
be superfluous if an Accessibility Guide could be drafted for inclusion in the already
familiar structure.
5.1.3 Conclusion
The thrust of European Regulation in the ICT sector has been primarily to support
the principles of the Single Market and to recognise the contribution of this sector
to the European economy. Consumer protection elements have concentrated upon
privacy and confidentiality matters, with some acknowledgement of public service
issues such as universal service in telecommunications. However, the latter has
tended to centre upon legacy notions of fixed line telephony practice and little
heed has been paid to newer technologies which have been rolled out unevenly
across the EU Member States. Liberalization of the former state monopoly
networks has created a division between networks and terminal provision, such
that the market for terminal equipment is now driven almost entirely by market
forces. The regulatory regimes are chiefly concerned with the avoidance of anti-
competitive practices and, while the commercial freedoms have encouraged a
vigorous development of new and attractive services, those consumers who are not
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well served by the forces of a highly competitive and innovative market have little
protection. Chief amongst these disadvantaged consumers are those disabled and
elderly people who have little economic power and consequently find that their
needs go unheeded. The future trends in regulation are now being determined but
it seems that the ultimate direction is likely to be one of less regulation to suit a
global market-place, rather than one of more regulatory control over the EU’s
internal market.
If this is to be the scenario, it poses the question of how best to protect the
interests of disadvantaged users without hampering innovation and investment.
Horizontal anti-discrimination legislation would be one approach but it would
appear that the expanding EU Community is not yet ready for this. An extended
and up-dated concept of universal service would be another; the EU has plans to
look at this in 2007. Writing specific requirements into existing Directives, as they
come due for review and revision, would also be possible but the scope is limited
because of the diversity of needs and the necessity of keeping the basic types of
legislation technologically-neutral and future-proofed.
A quite different approach – which is not mutually exclusive – is to make use of
other forms of leverage which could influence the attitude of commerce and
industry towards disadvantaged consumers. Awareness of needs and business
opportunities is one such. The population size is considerable and although there
is a great range of needs – not to be met in a single action – there is potential for
a growth in market share with relatively small changes in design concepts. The
Inclusive Design/Design for All approach is based upon this notion, with a gradual
– not a sudden – expansion of the target user base until, with repetition, a much
larger segment of the general population is catered for.
The effective use of standards is crucial to such approaches. Even where standards
are voluntary, it is usually in the best interests of manufacturers and suppliers to
comply with them rather than seek to support their product claims by other means.
In public procurement contracts, standards take on a legal significance that can
influence a supplier’s attitude towards serving his other customers. The inclusion of
Inclusive Design/Design for All principles in a whole range of standards should
become as commonplace as reference to quality standards. The scope is enormous
and so is the task, for there is need of many more standards that take account of
accessibility needs of people with a disability in the ICT sector. However, there are
many bodies worldwide that are giving serious attention to this task and, with co-
operation, a raft of European Standards that could support and complement
regulation will eventually appear. Not least, standards are an important force in
industry and trade, which is why these sectors are actively involved in preparing
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them. Causing the Standards Organisations to take a pro-active role in looking at
accessibility issues for people with a disability will automatically engage the
industry bodies.
There is good reason to believe that this process has not only begun but is
gathering momentum.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to acknowledge the help and support from the following
persons who contributed in the development of this chapter: Gunela Astbrink,
Hajime Yamada, Gregg Vanderheiden, Jim Tobias, Erkki Kemppainen, Robert Hecht
and Jan Engelen.
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5.2 eAccessibility: European developments and targets
Ima Placencia
5.2.1 Introduction
We live in an information society. Information and Communication Technologies
(ICT) permeate almost every aspect of our lives. They can be powerful tools for
bringing people together, adding new value to life and creating new wealth,
health, welfare, making for a richer and more rewarding professional and social
life.
However, in Europe (and elsewhere) millions of people cannot fully reap these
benefits and a significant percentage are effectively cut off from them: today,
people with disabilities are estimated to make up close to 15% of the European
population or 90 million people. Many of them encounter barriers when trying to
use ICT products and services. In fact it is difficult to imagine how people with
disabilities would be able to enjoy their fundamental rights when accessibility to
ICT is not a reality.
The prevalence of both disabilities and other minor functional limitations is
strongly related to age. It is estimated that 45% of those persons above 75 years
of age are impaired in one way or another in their daily life. The ongoing
demographic shift in Europe, as a result among others of a greater life expectancy,
will cause a noticeable increase in these numbers over the coming years -- 18% of
the European population was aged over 60 in 1990, while for 2030 that
percentage is expected to rise to 30%.
Accessible (ICT) can improve the quality of life of people with disabilities
significantly.
The European Commission has the ambitious objective of achieving an Information
Society for All. This means overcoming the barriers that technology creates for
people with disabilities, elderly people and many other users. The Commission
wants to ensure an inclusive digital society that provides opportunities for all and
minimises the risk of social exclusion.
To achieve the goal of developing such an Information Society for all it is necessary
to pay attention to groups at risk of exclusion because of accessibility problems,
namely to people with disabilities and in certain cases older persons, who form a
large group that represents about 20% of the population in Europe.
* Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official European Commission’s view on the subject
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5.2.2 The eAccessibility Communication
The Community relevance of this subject is well reflected in the initiative launched
in 2005 that is called “i2010 – A European Information Society for growth and
employment”. The i2010 initiative presents a new strategic framework and broad
policy orientations to promote an open and competitive digital economy,
emphasising (ICT) as a driver of inclusion and quality of life. One of the 3 pillars of
the i2010 initiative is intended to develop “An Information Society that is inclusive
provides high quality public services and promotes quality of life”.
In order to raise the visibility and provide policy guidance on these issues the
Commis