White Paper: promoting Design for All and e-Accessibility in Europe

This White Paper results from the collaboration of Design for All (DfA) and e-Accessibility expert bodies representing the European Union member states [ref: the coordination centres of the national European Design for All e-Accessibility network (EDeAN) in 23 European Union Member States, in this document referred to as NCCs]. The objectives of this White Paper are threefold: (1) to present the current state of affairs of EDeAN, active since 2002 as part of the European Commission’s action line supporting the development of the European Information Society; (2) to outline a roadmap for future initiatives, actively reflecting views of the EDeAN network in specific domains related to DfA, e-Accessibility and e-Inclusion; and (3) to bring forward a set of suggestions and recommendations regarding the activities of the network, aiming to support the creation of a fully inclusive European Information Society. The paper is organised as follows: Section 1 provides a short introduction to DfA and Accessibility in Information Society (IS) and Information Society Technology (IST) developments in Europe. Section 2 provides an overview of policy as well as R&D activities related to DfA and accessibility in IST in Europe. Section 3 briefly describes the role of EDeAN and the new challenges that emerge as a result of the changing European policy environment. Section 4 presents current challenges that emerge in five domains directly related to DfA and accessibility, such as policy and legislation, industry, monitoring and evaluation—benchmarking, standardisation, R&D, and education and training. Finally, Sect. 5 puts forward a number of recommendations with regard to future activities for EDeAN. The contents of this paper reflect results from the open discussion forums supported in the EDeAN website (ref: EDeAN Special Interest Groups, SIGs). The draft paper was written by the EDeAN Secretariat for 2005, FORTH-ICS (Greece), and completed with the support of all NCCs. Support was also provided by the European Commission DG Information Society and Media and by the D4ALLnet project (ref: an EC funded project with the code IST-2001-38833).