Study Group 16 has
published an ‘Accessibility Checklist’ for the makers of standards to ensure
that they are taking into account the needs of those to whom accessibility to
ICTs are restricted, the deaf or hard-of-hearing for example. Experts say that
such a list will help to ensure that accessibility needs are taken into account
at an early stage, rather than ‘retrofitted’. The list will be published on a
new webpage acting as a repository for accessibility in
standards information.
Study Group 16’s standardization work in the field of
accessibility aims to ensure that all sectors of the global community have
equal access to communications and online information. This effort goes back to
the 1990s with V.18 (an ITU-T Recommendation on a multi-function text
telephone).
The work takes into account the fact that users
of ICTs have a varied capability for handling information and the controls
for its presentation. The source of this variation lies in cultural and
educational backgrounds as well as in age-related functional limitations, in
disabilities, and in other natural causes. Everyone can benefit from this
accessibility standardization work as anyone can be permanently or temporarily
disabled due to physical, environmental (e.g. a phone call in a noisy
environment) or cultural (e.g. spoken language diversity) conditions. Moreover,
we will all grow old and lose facilities that we take for granted now, thus
enlarging the part of the population that benefits from accessible
communication.
The most important goal of ITU-T’s accessibility
activity is to make sure that newly developed standards contain the necessary
elements to make services and features usable for as broad a range of people as
possible. Standards describe how equipment should interact and what
quality is necessary for media to be usable for all, additionally suitable
methods of media delivery for people with disabilities are described.