Christophe Strobbe

The accessibility of digital technologies in the European Union (EU) varies from country to country, due, in part, to differences in accessibility-related legislation. In October 2016, the European Parliament accepted a directive on the accessibility of websites and mobile applications provided by public sector bodies (Directive (EU) 2016/2102). New public sector websites in the EU will need to conform by 23 September 2019, all public sector websites will need to conform by 23 September 2020, and all public sector mobile apps will need to conform by 23 June 2021. The directive references standard EN 301 549, which has been updated to reflect the requirements in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. This new legal situation will create a greater demand for accessibility-related training and training resources for public sector bodies. The EU-funded project MOOCAP (MOOC Accessibility Partnership, https://moocap.gpii.eu/, September 2014 - August 2017) created 11 free online courses about various aspects of digital accessibility. Four of these courses ran as MOOCs (massive open online courses) on platforms such as FutureLearn and edX. The resources from these courses are freely available as Open Educational Resources (OERs) under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0). This licence allows anyone to share, adapt and redistribute the content of the OERs, provided that they correctly attribute the MOOCAP partner (or partners) who created the resources. This presentation will briefly present the MOOCAP project, the courses it created (especially those that are still available) and the Open Educational Resources it made available.

The Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) is an open-source infrastructure developed by Cloud4all and several other R&D projects that aims to support automatically adaptive user interfaces and thus enable "Design for One".

Design for All strives to create user interfaces "for human diversity, social inclusion and equality" (EIDD Stockholm Declaration, 2004). In spite of its name, the goal of Design for All is not to create a single solution for everybody ("one size fits all"). However, most software comes with settings and options that need to be tweaked by the user, and most users never change a program's settings. Many users are unaware of the available settings, they are afraid of breaking something, etc. What is needed is software that adapts to the user's needs and preferences, so users don't need to worry about where to find the settings. Ideally, the user's needs and preferences should also be "translatable" to other systems, e.g. from a desktop PC to mobile devices, websites and ticket vending machines. The Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) is an open-source infrastructure developed by Cloud4all and several other R&D projects that aims to support automatically adaptive user interfaces and thus enable "Design for One". However, even this approach assumes that interfaces have accessibility features (though not necessarily enabled by default), so it does not make Design for All redundant.

This talk is intended as an introduction to a more technical talk about GPII in the same devroom.

Design is not simply skin deep, it interacts with deeper layers in software programs. And it is not just for people who point and click to use applications. It also affects people who cannot distinguish certain colours, who cannot use a mouse, who are confused by complex user interfaces, etc. What can designers and developers in open source projects do to make their software more accessible? What do they need to know about people with disabilities? What tools are available to help them? What are example projects that have worked to improve accessibility?