Erkki Liikanen, EU Commissioner for Enterprise and In formation Society
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I would like to thank the Royal National Institute of the Deaf, for organising this conference.
It provides me with the opportunity to present what the Commission is doing to improve accessibility in the field of the Information Society. During the European year of people with disabilities, we gave a clear indication of the need to maintain efforts to improve accessibility. Those indications last year are generating a wide range of new actions.
The Commission published a Communication "Equal opportunities for people with disabilities: A European Action plan" at the end of last year. It states set out our commitments, including on how we should address accessibility related to new technologies. Our agenda addresses research, standardisation, policy and legislative activities. It touches areas like design for all, web accessibility, and electronic communication services.
I know that people with disabilities fear the risk of exclusion resulting from new technologies and services which they fear are too difficult for them to use. If we do not make such services broadly accessible this could translate into exclusion.
That is why, access to goods and services by every-one is an essential condition for a society based on equal participation. This goal is well established within the European Union's eEurope action plan, which is roadmap for the information society, which we established in 2000 and renewed last year.
The risks are real, but the power of the new technology is that it offers us striking new ways of strengthening inclusion.
Let us consider the opportunities.
The use of state of the art systems can lead to the development of new assistive technologies. It will facilitate the development of mainstream products and services that are more and more accessible. New developments are also making it possible for those assistive technologies to interface in a seamless manner with a wide range of other devices.
Miniaturisation can considerably reduce the size and weight of assistive devices. Web distributed services can make it easy to have access specific services any time, anywhere, improving accessibility for people with reduced mobility.
Ambient intelligence can support the personalisation of devices, and with the automatic configuration (after identification) of individual preferences, terminals could configure their interface to match individual abilities. Whether you would like to use speech, a tactile screen or enlarged fonts, the system will do it for you.
There are many examples, some of them result from the EU Research programmes. European efforts in Research and technological development are contributing to the state of the art. The Sixth Research Framework programme has a specific area focused on eInclusion within the Information Society part of the programme. Its goal is to promote eInclusion as a core building block of the Information Society. It aims to use technical solutions to ensure our vision of a society based on equal access and participation for all in Europe.
But how can we ensure that new barriers are not created in these developments? How can we ensure that this community would not need to fear lack of access? For example, will the new Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) technology and the future fourth generation of mobile systems deliver improved access for people with disabilities? And will new Digital TV platforms use the flexibility of digital technology to increase access?
Ensuring that the possibilities offered by these technologies exploited in an inclusive manner will not happen by itself organically. Public authorities may need to play an active role, ensuring that supportive measures are taken and the necessary infrastructure is put in place. We must also build awareness about the needs of people with disabilities in the wider community. One effective way to do this is increasing the participation of people with disabilities in Research activities. The slogan of the European year "Nothing about people with disabilities without people with disabilities" applies of course also to research.
Quite often the barriers for accessibility do not come from the pure technological features but are embedded in choices made on the developments and on the way the technologies are interconnected. This applies to both mainstream and to assistive technologies.
Either assistive technologies are incompatible among themselves. Or assistive technologies are incompatible with mainstream products (please consider the difficulties to connect a Braille terminal with a public information kiosk). Sometimes they are incompatible across national borders (let's take for example the impossibility for a deaf person to make a call using the same text telephone from one EU country to another).
Solving these problems is not a matter of a complicated technical development but more a matter of choosing and agreeing an appropriate technical solution and using it. All these incompatibilities have contributed to the large fragmentation of the market, making the availability and affordability of products sometimes more of a barrier for accessibility than just their technological features.
Here standardisation can contribute to achieve European or even global solutions.
Standards can accelerate the growth of the market for "assistive technologies", by harmonising technical requirements for them and accelerating the convergence of new technology "platforms". Technological consensus in turn permits mass production, economies of scale and hence price reductions for the consumer.
How can public authorities use standardisation? The EU is making use of standards in support of its legislation or non-legislative political initiatives. Following the "New Approach", legislative harmonisation is limited to the essential requirements of public interest. The technical expression of these requirements is found in harmonised European standards. This leaves sufficient room to identify specific accessibility requirements. Therefore, standardisation has the potential to define state of the art technologies that ensure accessibility to the information society.
An example is the Internal Market's product safety legislation, regulating the protection of health and safety. This also covers the 'safety' of computers, which need to be designed in a way allowing easy perception and handling of control functions, including users with impaired vision or hearing.
In these New approach Directives, standardisation plays a major role as harmonized standards offer conformity to the essential requirements of the directives.
I met last year in October with industry and user representatives to discuss the situation in Europe, and I encourage them to continue the dialogue to improve accessibility. I continue to give all my support in this process. We also look into the legislative options.
In general, existing European legislation in the area of electronic communications mentions the issue of accessibility for persons with disabilities in several Directives. The full potential of this legislation to improve the current situation has not yet been realised. As new ICT technologies arrive and new legislation is developed, there is a considerable risk of creating additional barriers if accessibility by persons with disabilities is not considered. This is why ensuring access to new mobile communications and to new digital television services is a major challenge ahead of us.
It is also very important that ongoing work on data protection copyright and electronic signature takes into account the needs of people with disabilities. Or in another area very close to this audience: to make TV programmes accessible for deaf persons, it is necessary to modify formats and enrich TV programmes with additional information like subtitling and signing.
An essential harmonisation of television broadcasting regulation is realised at European level by the "Television without frontiers" Directive. Although accessibility issues are not a part of the Directive, the Commission services have established a dialog with users organisations on the matter. But, let me concentrate now for a few minutes on the new regulatory framework for electronic communications in Europe. It entered into force last July. It ensures that the opening of the markets does not occur at the expense of end-users, but brings benefits to them. Competition and market forces are the most effective means to satisfy user needs, but national regulatory authorities (NRAs) should have the necessary powers to act to protect users when it is needed.
This applies to users with disabilities. It applies whether these rights stem from the provisions relating to universal service obligations placed on designated undertakings, or from other specific provisions (e.g. number portability) which allow end-users to derive maximum benefit in terms of choice, price and quality.
A specific working group of Member States representatives was established to undertake a programme of work during the European Year of People with Disabilities, on Inclusive Communications (INCOM). The working group focused on the user perspective, identifying the constraints and problems users with disabilities face in accessing and using electronic communications as well as identifying potential problems and opportunities relating to new and future technologies and applications. Its report identified areas to focus on: access to emergency services, access to telephone services for deaf/hard of hearing/speech impaired/deaf-blind persons, access to public pay telephones and to mobile telephones, access to broadcasting, digital television and related services.
My services are already studying the suggestions of the report and we will take action where appropriate. I would like to mention some of the very recent activities emerging from this work.
Many of you have raised an issue of digital television. The need for European standards for transmission of signing for deaf people and audio description for blind persons is being discussed with the European Standardisation organisations. Maybe this will be included in the future standardisation programme following the CENELEC "TV for all" work. It is expected that the existence of these standards will foster the development and availability of accessibility services, what will encourage manufacturers to invest in the mass production of new receiving equipment.
Finally I would like to say a few words about the initiatives for inclusion that we undertake in the framework of eEurope 2005 Action plan. The Commission recommended adopting the WAI guidelines in order to make public web sites accessible. This proposal has been taken up with great commitment from Member States. Some of them have even started to develop legislation to make this mandatory in their countries, for example Germany, UK and recently Italy. This will not only contribute to achieving access rights for people with disabilities, but will also, as already proven in the USA, foster new economic developments.
There are new SMEs already being created offering services for the development of accessible on line services. This is creating not only more accessible services but also employment and business.
This positive reaction happened not only at Member States level but also at EU level. All European institutions have embraced this initiative and today we see the WAI logo in the main EUROPA pages and other European sites.
But not all public web pages are accessible in Europe. It is important to monitor and publicise the progress achieved. The Commission will publish, in the first quarter of this year, a report with findings on the situation in Europe including progress to date. Accessibility of public web sites remains a key element of e-Government, e-Health and e-Learning. Accessible web sites are essential if we want to bring these services to all citizens including those citizens with disabilities.
I would also like to mention the progress achieved under other of the eEurope targets: the establishment and networking of the National Centres of Excellence in Design and the creation of recommendations for a European Curriculum for designers and engineers. The Network of Centres of Excellence in Design for All 'EDEAN', was launched in July 2002 and comprises over 100 members from all Member States. Raising awareness amongst design and engineering students and providing them with design for all knowledge and tools that will permit them to build a more accessible Information Society is an investment in the future.
New activities have also been initiated under eEurope 2005 framework, to mainstream accessibility in "general policies". One important area is public procurement. In the US the situation is clear after the introduction of section 508. In the EU we will explore and support the use of accessibility requirements in public procurement as highlighted in the recent revision of the Public Procurement Directive. We will do this by using a toolkit with examples of harmonised models of accessibility criteria. It could include test cases, for example, for purchasing accessible electronic educational material, public Internet access points, web site construction, authoring tools and other services.
This would facilitate public authorities the inclusion of accessibility requirements in their tenders. We have just launched a co-ordinated action under the Sixth Framework Programme for research in the area for policy support that, among other inclusion related issues, will investigate these matters and support this process.
The European Commission is committed to take into account the needs of persons with disabilities when developing policies for the Information Society. This Workshop is an excellent forum for co-operation and for the exchange of information in these areas. In particular it provides an opportunity to channel your comments and contributions for our future work.
I encourage you to provide us with your conclusions and with your recommendations so that we are able to build together an Inclusive European Information society.
I wish you a fruitful Workshop.
Speech held at the occasion of the European Conference on "Access to the Information Society" in the Residence Palace, Brussels, on 25 February 2004.
