RESEARCH :: e-Inclusion :: Research – eAccessibility projects
Research and Innovation – eAccessibility projects
EU-funded high-tech research and development makes a reality of legal requirements and policy initiatives that aim at unlocking truly equal opportunities and rights for citizens with disabilities.
Besides
offering smart solutions to empower persons with disabilities, digital
technologies are becoming more and more necessary, when not the only means, for
one to access information and services, and participate in certain social and
economic activities. That is why, giving to the 80 million Europeans with a
disability, the same access to ICT as to all other citizens is imperative to
counter the emergence of new digital divides.
The Digital Agenda for Europe and European Disability Strategy embrace a vision of ICT as the key to making the living environment, services and products personalised and adaptable to the abilities of people with disabilities, and not vice-versa. In addition, EU legislation on electronic communications and audiovisual media already stipulates equal rights for persons with disabilities when it comes to access and quality.
As a way to develop and realize its policies and commitment to the rights of people with disability, the European Union is also supporting research and development, and pilot activities aimed at delivering e-accessibility, i.e. making sure that ICT creates opportunities and not barriers.
Since 2007, the European Commission has earmarked approximately more than 110 million euro for research into accessible and inclusive ICT. Thanks to such funding, pan-European teams of researchers, public authorities, organisations representing citizens with disability and industry work together to deliver meaningful technology for disabled people in all life environments.
The full list of running
projects in the area of e-accessibility and assistive technologies
Examples of EU-funded research and innovation projects for eAccessibility
DTV4All project
screenshot of a signing service provided on a virtual channel © DTV4ALL
Access services are services that enable those with physical, mental or
age-related impairments to access the storyline of a television programme.
Digital television is currently being rolled out across Europe – bringing about
opportunities to improve those services. The large-scale pilot project DTV4ALL
(Digital Television for All) pilot has aimed at ensuring that those
opportunities are not lost by identifying:
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Improvements to existing access services and ways of addressing the key technical, organisational and legal obstacles to the sustainable take-up of these services under the digital switch over
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Key emerging access services, and the devices and platforms needed to support them.
DTV4All has now issued recommendations for future access services and has presented them to the UN's International Telecommunications Union and to the European Broadcasting Union.
Learn more about the DTV4All project.
HaptiMap project
If you are walking or cycling, and do not want to (or are unable to) spend most of the time focusing on a screen, the use of mobile devices tends to be a frustrating experience. The same is true in bright sunlight or if your eyesight just isn’t good enough to see every detail on the mobile screen. The HaptiMap (Haptic, audio and visual interfaces for maps and location-based services) project will enable digital maps and mobile location based services to be accessible to a wide range of users by using several senses like touch, hearing and vision.
Learn more about the Haptimap project.
REACH112 project
Since 2002, EU telecom rules have required that the 112 emergency number is available free-of-charge everywhere in the EU. However, disabilities, like for example hearing or speech impairments, can make access to the emergency services via the traditional voice telephony impossible, thus putting lives at risk. The EU-funded pilot project REACH112 is validating – over several Member States – alternative modes of communication, may it be real-time text, sign language, lip reading, voice or any simultaneous combination of these modes, as per the Total Conversation concept, both for calling the emergency services but also for any telephone call.
Learn more about the Reach112 project.
AEGIS project
The integrated project AEGIS (Open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards) aims at helping designers and developers to embed accessibility support into every aspect of ICT in particular for Unix desktop platforms, web applications and mobile devices. It provides them with an open accessibility framework based on third generation interoperability architecture for interfacing assistive technology. As part of the validation/demonstration, some compatible assistive components are developed. For example a module for OpenOffice to output documents as Braille encoded files or to print them directly to a Braille embosser.
Learn more about the Aegis project, you can also watch a video.
Brainable project
Motor disabilities of people arising from any origin have a dramatic effect on their quality of life. Some examples of neurologic nature include a person suffering from a severe brain injury resulting from a car collision or individuals who have suffered a brain stroke. For years, the severely disabled have learned to cope with their restricted autonomy, impacting on their daily activities like moving around or turning on the lights and ability for social interaction. The research project BrainAble is about empowering them and pursues to mitigate the limitations of the everyday life to which they are confronted to. The project aims to research, design, implement and validate an ICT-based HCI (Human Computer Interface) composed of BNCI (Brain Neural Computer Interface) sensors combined with affective computing and virtual environments.
Learn more about Brainable project, you can also watch a video.
More on BNCI.
Last update: 13/09/2011