By henny on 2007-04-15 15:06:48
Over the last few months I've been closely watching the progress of the December 2006 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This marks an exciting shift in the accessibility arena as it is the first time that accessibility is mentioned in an international human rights initiative. While the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) publishes technical guidelines on how to make websites accessible there has been no global movement to date that outlines the framework of what must be done. One of the first things to come out of the Convention is the Global Initiative for inclusive Information Communications and Technology (G3ICT). I was able to attend the first G3ict Forum held at the UN in New York at the end of March which brought together people from Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America including representatives from commerce, government and the public sector as well as people with disabilities. The aim of the forum was to encourage the implementation of inclusive information and communications technology (ICT) not just for the web but also for software, hardware, physical access, everything that provides a means for a person to get to information. This is great news because while many of us have been chipping away for years at making the web sites we work on accessible, there has always been a sense of working in pocket communities either with colleagues, other designers and developers via forums and blogs, or partner organisations. The proliferation of knowledge that this has generated has been invaluable in both promoting and creating accessible websites but while we have all linked back to WAI and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a shared reference point, there hasn't been a great deal out there that has truly promoted a framework for accessibility from the top down, straddling countries, regions, governments, commercial and public sectors as well as linking web, software, hardware and physical access. That's not to say that there haven't been significant and influential groups promoting web accessibility. At the heart is WAI, a working Group of the Wold Wide Web Consortium (W3C), who develop technical standards for the web (such as HTML, XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets CSS) with WAI focusing on web accessibility guidelines. Individual Governments have also issued guidelines (based on WCAG) and passed laws enforcing accessibility. The drawback here of course is that these are confined by borders, culture and economics and represent a different interpretation and application from country to country. Many people also feel that the lack of any successful court cases beyond that of the Sydney Olympic website in 2000 has also held us back. Disability groups such as RNIB (UK), Vision Australia, Braillenet (France), Fundosa (Spain), Bartemeus (Netherlands) and many more have promoted accessibility from the perspective of people with disabilities leading in campaigning for accessibility since the early days as well as policy and consultative work within countries and regions. The commercial sector has also been involved in accessibility, including hardware and software vendors such as Adobe, Microsoft, Freedom Scientific (creator of the Jaws screen reader), IBM and many more. More recently purely Internet based businesses have stepped up to the table such as Yahoo!, Mozilla and Google which has done much to boost the street credibility of accessibility in the design community which is often seen by people who are new to it as a bit dull and a bit of a chore. But of course most important of all are people with disabilities themselves who contribute on both a personal and professional level by working with and in industry, business, advocacy groups and government to ensure that we all understand the user perspective and don't get too wrapped up in technical accessibility at the cost of real world issues. While these groups, including WAI, whose participants are from companies and other organizations from around the world, have been networked into each other and have contributed to getting us to where we are today there has been no true "internationalisation" of accessibility in the form of a shared global initiative and agreed framework of how guidelines should be applied. This has resulted in what is now commonly seen as a form of fragmentation across borders, regions, industries and governments of how accessibility is interpreted and implemented. You could argue that in the grand scheme of things this fragmentation and localisation needed to happen in order for the real issues of applying accessibility to real world websites to be understood. But we have been at a point for some time now where there is a need to standardise and harmonise not only technical guidelines but also the framework within which they are applied. This has given rise to a number of international initiatives focused on the standardisation and harmonisation of accessibility and it is these initiatives, I believe, that are the ones to watch:
UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
Published in December 2006 and signed March 2007 the Convention looks at accessibility in all areas specifically citing accessibility to information including information delivered via websites (Article 9):
"States Parties shall also take appropriate measures to...promote access for persons with disabilities to new information and communications technologies and systems, including the Internet"
Indeed the concept of accessibility to information is a guiding principle of the Convention (Article 21):
"States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that persons with disabilities can exercise the right to freedom of expression and opinion, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas on an equal basis with others and through all forms of communication of their choice.."
The Convention also emphasises that it is not sufficient to just recognise the rights of people with disabilities, but it is also necessary to ensure that people can feasibly access and enjoy what is bestowed by these rights. In short this does not just mean the right to access information but also the means to do so. To that end pretty much all areas of business and government have an obligation to ensure access. Software vendors must provide accessible software, organisations must provide accessible websites, buildings must provide accessible entrances...however an individual accesses information be it from the library down the road or from your desk top, channels must be accessible. For more information visit the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Assistive Technology News has published some useful insight to the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities.
G3ICT
The G3ict was set up off the back of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and brings together people with disabilities, disability organisations, business and government to work together to drive accessibility and ICT . G3ict is made up of four Working Groups (WG's) 1. Best ICT Accessibility Case Study Sharing 2. Core inclusive ICT Opportunities 3. Standardization and Harmonization 4. Legislation, Regulation and Enforcement of Best Practice At the forum meeting in March representatives from organisations all over the world presented issues surrounding access and ICT. While people spoke from their own perspective, be it personal, professional or both, the message was unified and clear. As Mike Paciello of the Paciello group summed it up: to succeed there needs to be a "collaboration model" with people with disabilities, governments, business, disability advocates and standards all working together with common agreed goals. Chiara Giovannini from ANEC added that while collaboration was essential to success it is not the only necessary ingredient; there is a clear need for funding in research and development as well as more expertise in the field. Barry K. Fingerhut gave a different perspective by flagging his organisation, Synconium, who provide venture capitalist funding for companies with products and services that serve people with disabilities and ICT. Probably the most interesting speaker of the day however was Todd Arnold. Paralysed from the neck down and with restricted speech Todd joined the meeting via MSN Messenger and his webcam to talk about how the Web has not only given him the means to stay in touch with friends and family but also to work from home for Coraworks, a company which provides work opportunities for people with disabilities. This drove home the point that there is a vast pool of talent and expertise that can be brought into business if people with disabilities have access. For more information visit G3ict
WAI-AGE (Web Accessibility Initiative: Ageing Education and Harmonisation)
We talk a lot about disability and web accessibility with the issue of aging left on the sidelines. Yet it is inevitable for us all and with an ever-increasing aging population it is becoming an issue that is creeping up government's agendas. It is also an area that, while addressed by web accessibility guidelines, it is not always done so obviously. WAI-AGE is a European Commission funded project that aims to better understand the needs of the ageing community in the context of existing Web accessibility guidelines; to work with the ageing community to obtain more direct contribution into W3C/WAI work; to revise existing and develop new educational materials to better reflect the needs of the ageing community; and to pursue standards coordination to promote adoption and implementation of a common set of guidelines. For more information visit WAI-AGE
Web Standards Project (WaSP) International Liaison Group (ILG)
While the UN Convention sits at the top we have the Web Standards Project working from the grassroots level. WaSP is a coalition group fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all. One of the more recent groups to be formed is the WaSP International Liaison Group (ILG), an international collective of web professionals promoting the global use of standards to ensure an equitable Web. This ties in well with what they are doing within WaSP to promote standards in web accessibility, DOM scripting, Education and more as well as what is happening on an international level. For more information visit WaSP
Ever the optimist and always with an eye on what's going on internationally, I think these are exciting times. All of the above initiatives represent just how much more weight web accessibility has gained over the last 10 years. The emphasis on accessibility across all ICT is also encouraging as increasingly there are web projects out there that cross both web and software accessibility. It'll be interesting to see how the accessibility arena will develop with these international threads working together. My hope is that this collaboration model will lead to more open sharing and pooling of knowledge across business, government and regions as well as shared research and development with all groups bringing individual expertise to the table.