[Irl-dean] Workshop: e-accessibility in Europe, Paris, Jan 31 2005

[Mark Magennis]

Thanks for that Barry. Is anyone from Ireland speaking? I believe this
is an important issue for everyone involved in accessibility. Public
policy and legislation is a real industry driver. For us in Ireland, it
seems that legislation covering the private sector is still a way off,
but at least there are things happening on the public scene and we can
learn a lot from our European colleagues on how to push this issue and
leverage (an annoying word, but so apt!) whatever public policy and
legislation there is.

I recently attended the workshop in Brussels on accessibility in ICT
public procurement. It was very good and very worthwhile. Ireland was
well represented with myself, Donal Rice of the NDA, Gerry Ellis, Carmel
Madden of the Information Society Policy Unit and Colm Flynn of the
Local Government Computer Services Board. We were quite vocal too. Donal
made a presentation on what's been happening in Ireland. Here's a brief
trip report I wrote for NCBI, in case anyone's interested. It outlines
my understanding of what is happening across Europe and even the United
States to some extent.

The two main themes that emerged at the workshop were standards and
harmonisation. We heard about the kinds of accessibility standards that
are being used in different European countries and the United States and
how they can effectively influence public procurement of Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT). We heard about the nature of standards
- what works and work doesn't work in terms of giving procurers and
developers something they can use. We heard about the benefits of
international harmonisation of ICT accessibility standards. And we heard
about the forthcoming EU public procurement directives and their
accessibility provisions. Public procurement policy is such a key area.
It has proved to be one of the most important drivers of activity and
skills in the ICT sector in many countries.

There was basic agreement that standards are indispensable. They can
provide the objective, authoritative, reliable, applicable and testable
basis that is needed for implementing ICT products and services across
the board. Most of the progress that has been made in ICT accessibility
can be put down to the existence of standards, in the form of either
guidelines like the World Wide Web Consortium's or legislation like the
U.S. Section 508. If we want to influence accessibility of public ICT
systems, one of the best things we can do is to create and promote
standards. But they must be the right kind of standards.

The current situation is that there is a lot of fragmentation between
the approaches used in different countries. A lot of countries, like
Ireland, have produced standards or guidelines but these are of
different types. Some countries have adopted a more legislative
approach, some are going more for persuasion. Some have taken existing
standards, some have reworked them and some have created their own from
scratch. The supporting resources provided to help organisations meet
the standards differ widely. There was a lot of very good discussion
about what kind of standards are best and what kind of supporting
resources are required. It was concluded that there is a need to create
standards for specific areas, such as the Web, application software and
public access terminals, but these must fit together. They need to be
based around a common core of functional requirements. The forthcoming
version 2 of the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines may provide
exactly that sort of core and a structure capable of incorporating the
wide range of individual technologies. Whereas the current version 1 are
based very much on technical features or media types, the next version
will be based on functional requirements. These requirements, such as
the need for all outputs to be perceivable, are universal across all ICT
systems. The structure of thee WAI version 2 guidelines enable the
functional requirements to be broken down into specific technical
requirements in individual domains and for supporting resources to be
added. Supporting resources can be based on what has been discovered to
work and not work in different countries so far. For example, in Denmark
they have had some success with providing boiler plate content for
public procurers to add to their requests for tenders. This is something
that we wanted to do for the NDA guidelines but never had the time to.
In the United States, they have had a mixed experience with using
voluntary product accessibility statements where suppliers provide a
breakdown of their products' accessibility features, based on a common
template. These experiences, both good and bad, can be used to inform
the creation of resources that work.

Although up till now there has been a lot of fragmentation with
individual countries doing their own thing, much as we did with the NDA
guidelines, there is a great deal of interest in joining together in a
common European and even international effort. This workshop, the first
of its kind, was both the expression of that common interest and an
impetus to further cooperation. Some Europe-wide things are happening
already. The Euro Web Accessibility Project is attempting to harmonise
evaluation methods across Europe, create a Europe-wide quality mark and
explore a business model for creating regional help desks. A discussion
group has been set up for people to work together on pushing for the
best local implementations and interpretations of the two forthcoming EU
public procurement directives. I've been in that discussion for a while.
There is now a strong dialogue between European organisations like
ourselves and US organisations, chiefly the WAI who control the Web
guidelines and the Access Board who control the 508 legislation.

As far as what we in CFIT have got out of this, there are a couple of
important things we can do. Firstly, working with our own Government on
the implementation of the public procurement directives. These will have
to be stated in Irish law in some form or other. We need to make sure
that this statement is the most beneficial for accessibility. There is
also the issue of cost limits. The directives need only be applied to
purchases of 163000 Euro or more, although as I understand it is normal
for individual countries to set lower limits if they wish. We need to
argue for the lowest possible limits. We need to give our input into the
European and international harmonisation efforts. We have a lot of
expertise and experience to add to the pool, particularly in the realm
of evaluation and testing. This needs to be heard. We also need to bring
best practice from other countries into Ireland. The NDA ICT
accessibility guidelines are shortly to be updated and the NDA
guidelines on public procurement processes are still in development. I
have been invited to peer review them during the next few weeks. I will
work with Donal Rice and others at the NDA on these issues to make sure
that we have the most practical and effective guidelines possible.

Mark

Dr. Mark Magennis
Centre for Inclusive Technology
National Council for the Blind of Ireland
Whitworth Road, Dublin 9, Republic of Ireland

mark.magennis at ncbi.ie   tel: +353 (0)71 914 7464