EBU Commission on Technical Devices and Services

The final report on the work done during the working period 1999-2003













1. Membership of the Commission

Chair: Bernhard Stoeger, Austria
Vice-Chair: Vladislav Stepanov, Russia
Board representative: Enrique Pérez, Spain
Members:
Daniel Jacquet, France Peter Brass, Germany Kostas Theodoropoulos, Greece Salvatore Romano, Italy Branislav Mamojka, Slovak Republic Bernabé Martinez, Spain Michael Townsend, United Kingdom Most of the time, all the members were present, and, if not, they apologized correctly. The exception is Kostas Theodoropoulos from Greece, who did not attend one single meeting, and who, despite serious efforts on behalf of the chairman, could never be contacted.





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2. Plan of Action

The work plan of our commission for the current work period was approved by the Board. I quote here only the headlines of the work plan items – the whole document has come to the hand of the Board.

1. Literature in alternative formats
2. Access to the Internet
3. Graphical user interfaces and their representation particularly on refreshable Braille displays
4. Distance Learning
5. Domestic appliances, household
6. Cellular phones
7. Smart Cards
8. Audio description
9. Braille Technology
10. Educational software
11. Technical needs of developing countries
12. Design for all





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3. Commission Meetings

Until writing of this report, the commission had five meetings in the current period; one last meeting is planned for September :

1 December 9th and 10th 2000, University of Linz, Austria
2 May 26th and 27th 2001, Grand Hotel Hermitage, Rome, Italy
3 March 9th and 10th 2002, Imperial Hotel, London, United Kingdom
4 September 27th and 28th 2002, CIDAT/ONCE, Madrid, Spain 5 April 5th and 6th 2003, Ravenna Hotel, Berlin, Germany 6 September 13th and 14th 2003, Ustav vzdelavania a sluzieb s.r.o., Bratislava, Slovak Republic




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4. Work Carried Out

The work plan was so extensive that not each of its items could be thoroughly covered. In addition, one if its items, namely item 12, “Design for All”, was reclaimed by the Board. Moreover, item 11, “Technical Needs of Developing Countries”, could not be studied : Since the relevant commission was not very active during the current period, the needs of the group in question could not be evaluated.

In what follows, our work relating to several work plan items of major importance to our commission shall be described.





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4.1. Access to the Internet (WP item 2)

We treated this item under the following main aspects:
- To extract important information from the WAI guidelines,
- to evaluate the web sites of the EBU member organizations,
- to evaluate government web sites in the countries of commission members.

4.1.1. WAI Guidelines

The guidelines set forth by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) are currently the basis for practically every investigation of web accessibility. We found, however, that they are by far too technical and too detailed to be of immediate value to practical people with the intention to make their sites accessible. We therefore searched for alternative texts which rest upon the standard WAI guidelines but which are shorter and easier to read. We found two publications which we consider appropriate for this purpose, and, with some minor modifications, we recommend them to the EBU Board as practically usable reference documents for web accessibility. The first one was compiled by the German Association of the Blind (Deutscher Blindenverband e.v.). It is entitled “How to Design Accessible Web Pages for Blind and Visually Impaired Internet Users”. It is very short, can be used as a checklist, and covers all the essential aspects. The second publication was contributed by Czech Blind United. It is entitled “Documentation on Accessible Web Design Guidelines for Severely Visually Impaired Users”. It is quite extensive, but very thoroughly written, not too technical, and complete. We do hope that these two publications are helpful tools in practice.

Apart from our efforts to make the WAI documents usable, we constantly observed the activities of WAI during our work period. We get the impression that recently the importance of WAI decreases in favour of that of Section 508 of the U.S. rehabilitation act. [1]


4.1.2. Web Sites of the EBU Member Organizations

The commission believes that, if EBU wants to promote web accessibility, then the web sites of its member organizations should be perfect examples for accessibility and usability. In order to help reach this aim, we evaluated the web sites of the member organizations of EBU from which the commission members come. In fact, every commission member wrote a brief report about his organization's homepages. All these reports were summarized into a single one.

The results are encouraging : Virtually every site inspected was found to be well accessible and usable; deficiencies were only detected as far as visual attractiveness of some of the pages is concerned.


4.1.3. Government Web Sites

It was observed that in most European countries there are already laws obliging government and other public information to be accessible. In several countries, there exist organizations who observe the process of establishing governmental web accessibility. The countries where this is not yet the case will probably follow soon.


4.1.4. Commercial Web Sites

As pointed out above, we got the impression that the task of establishing web accessibility for government and other official sites is almost accomplished. The situation concerning the vast and ever increasing number of commercial web sites is completely different: Here, awareness for accessibility and usability of information by people with special needs is by far lower. It could be one of the tasks of a future EBU Technical Commission or even of a special EBU working group to develop ideas on how to improve that situation.


4.1.5. Dealing with Search Engines

Since the web holds more and more information important for everyday life, it becomes more and more necessary for everyone to develop good strategies to quickly find relevant information. We felt that this has even more importance for blind people, because they face greater difficulties in navigation through vast amounts of information. We therefore wrote a short publication, entitled “a Closer Look at Search Engines”, for publication in the EBU Newsletter. The article is meant to assist everyone who wants to work with a search engine more effectively.

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4.2. Graphical User Interfaces (WP item 3)

The commission observed the development in access to Windows operating systems. We got the impression that, especially through the commitment of Microsoft to accessibility caused by Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act, Windows accessibility is maturely developed and shall remain so in the future. The MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility) technology is not only employed by Microsoft itself in their most important software programs, but also other key software vendors such as Macromedia and Adobe integrate it into their products, such that, e.g., PDF documents and Flash web pages became accessible.

On the contrast, accessibility and usability of the graphical aspects of the Linux operating system is by far less developed, and its future deployment is in peril. Although we now have the Gnopernicus software [5], a screen reader granting Braille, speech, and large print access to Gnome2, one of the flavours of graphical Linux, it is uncertain whether this will be applicable to a wealth of mainstream software comparable to the Windows situation. Moreover, Gnome2 [6] is not the most widely used among the various flavours of graphical Linux – for instance, KDE [7] is much more common.


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4.3. Domestic appliances (WP item 5)

There is a publication from ONCE entitled “Electronic Household Appliances”, where the subject is studied in depth. The publication states, in short, that there do exist possibilities to manufacture household appliances in a way accessible to our target group, but extensive lobbying is required to raise the producers’ awareness. The EBU Board established a special working group for the topic, which is chaired by a member of our commission, Mr. Bernabé Martinez.


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4.4. Cellular Phones (WP item 6)

Remarkably and fortunately, considerable advances in establishing accessibility and usability of these devices for our target group have been contributed by organizations and companies coming from member countries of this commission. In particular, contributions from Germany, Italy, and Spain have to be mentioned here. Much time of our meetings was dedicated to reporting, testing and commenting on those especially important and promising developments.

4.4.1. The Siemens Solution
Many Siemens mobiles are equipped with a serial or infrared port; in conjunction with a software tool called GSM Utils, one may use a personal computer attached to a mobile to access its data such as battery status, address book, etc.

4.4.2. The Italian Solution
In Italy, two systems are being developed:
- Speech access via the server: The company TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile) together with the Italian Association of the Blind runs a speech server: By utilizing a special Sim card and by dialing a special number, one gets speech messages (including SMS) from the server. Similar services are also offered by Nokia.
- Speech access via Blue Tooth and PDA: Together with the company Voice Systems, the Italian Association for the Blind runs a project to enable speech access for every mobile equipped with a Blue Tooth facility. On a PDA, currently on the IPAC from Compaq, there runs a self-voicing software that communicates to the mobile and grants speech access to it. The software sells for €250 and is available in several European languages.

4.4.3. The Spanish-German Solution
ONCE is developing a Blue Tooth enabled speech synthesizer through which mobiles with a Blue Tooth interface shall become accessible. The synthesizer will be available in several languages for approximately €200.
Finally, a very promising solution was demonstrated by ONCE: They developed a software program called Mobile Accessibility, which runs directly on the cell phone under the operating system Symbian [2], grants speech access to the device. The striking advantage of this system is that it does not need an additional device to enable speech access to the mobile phone. Because Symbian shall be used in most future mobiles, we do have a chance that this system will be universally applicable for us. The Spanish presented the system to us on a Nokia mobile, but it will not be confined to that brand. In Germany, the Mobile Accessibility system is marketed by the company fluSoft [3]. They also have a special web page dedicated to their talking cell phones [4].




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4.5. Smart Cards (WP item 7)

At our London meeting, Dr. John Gill from RNIB gave an extensive presentation on the topic to us. One of the most essential items communicated at that presentation was the fact that there is an ISO standard that provides for tactile orientation markers on smart cards used in hotel rooms. We currently try to convince hotel companies to use smart cards that comply to that standard, such that blind people may feel the right way of inserting them.


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4.6. Educational Software (WP item 10)

The ECDL (European Computer Driving License) is an increasingly important European standard for qualification in the labour market. The possibility to attain this qualification is therefore crucial for our target group to remain competitive. Despite serious efforts to facilitate ECDL accessibility, some countries still report on considerable problems. In addition, ECDL is currently completely remodelled, and it is still unclear whether our interests are properly taken into account. The commission passes a special resolution to the Board that is dedicated to these concerns. Moreover, the chairman is confident that the ECDL-PD project [8] shall prove to be a major contribution towards an improvement of the situation.


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5. Proposals for the Next Work Period

As already mentioned, The commission felt that the work plan of the current period was simply too extensive to be fully treated. On the other hand, it should cover the most important technical aspects of blind and visually impaired individuals in Europe. We did our best by picking items we considered both important and tractable.

For a future commission, we would suggest a selection from the list presented here, perhaps one that continues some of the items covered by us, but also one that includes some of the items more or less neglected during this period.



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6. Appendix : Resolutions

The commission passes two resolutions to the General Assembly :

6.1. Resolution on Technically Oriented EU Projects for the Benefit of Blind People
The commission recommends to the EBU board that information relating to European projects in the areas of technology and blindness under evaluation be submitted to the EBU Technical Commission. This commission further proposes that the EBU Technical commission members be recommended by the EBU board to the EU as evaluators.

Explanation: This resolution is motivated by weaknesses in the current EU evaluation system, seen by the Commission as follows :
a) Little knowledge of blind people.
b) Little knowledge of the specialized technical matters.
c) Little knowledge of the players in the field.
d) Little knowledge about the possible success or achievability of projects.

6.2. Resolution on ECDL
The European Blind Union recognizes that parts of the current European Computer Driving Licence are inaccessible to blind people. The license definition is under review. The European Blind Union requests that the access issues of blind people be presented during this consultation process.
In addition, in the cause of equality, the European Blind Union demands that the license be defined in such a way that blind people can succeed in gaining it.



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7. References (from the Web)

[1] Information on Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act : www.section508.gov
[2] Information on the Symbian operating system for mobile phones : www.allaboutsymbian.com
[3] The fluSoft company : www.flusoft.de
[4] Talking mobiles marketed by the German company fluSoft : www.sprachhandy.de
[5] Gnopernicus (Braille, speech, and large print access to graphical Linux) : www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html
[6] Gnome – One of the flavours of graphical Linux : www.gnome.org
[7] KDE – probably that flavour of graphical Linux most widely used,
but still completely inaccessible : www.kde.com
[8] The ECDL-PD project: ecdl-pd.aib.uni-linz.ac.at




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