VOICE Project's Objectives

ISIS 1999 ANNUAL REPORT

ACCESS
Access to Education for People with Disability
author: G. Pirelli

The ACCESS Project investigates the development of multimedia applications for helping people with disability in accessing the Information Society in their education and training. The research aims are twofold:

• Provide design recommendations for contents in the Internet which can be accessed, irrespectively of the required Human-Computer interface; "design for all" approach.
• Recommend best practices, to enable the access of people with disability.

ACCESS targets to students with special needs, but it also benefits the elderly. ISIS has a long standing, hands-on experience for supporting European policy makers, e.g., Netd@ys-Voice in 1998 and Netd@ys-Access in 1999, Socrates' MOISE and active participation at the Inter-Service Group on Disability. There ISIS helps identifying the user needs and translating them into recommendations and technical specifications. Workshops, videoconferences, tele-education sessions and Net-meetings offer opportunities for sharing common experiences and for the dissemination of new ideas. The Internet ACCESS Forum discusses the adaptation of multimedia systems to the special needs of disabled people. Results and conclusions are published on the Web in several languages. This presentation follows the current recommendations for creating Internet contents accessible by people with visual impairment or reduced mobility as an example of a web-site designed following the rules of "Web-accessibility to all" http://voice.jrc.it/access. The technical and human facets of ACCESS overlap and help raising awareness for the problems faced by people with disability.

Figure 1. The basic idea of ACCESS is to provide the written voice of a teacher and friends to those who cannot hear the spoken voice. This concept also applies to people with visual impairment who will be able to listen to the spoken Web pages by means of text-to-voice synthesis of the written page content.

Figure 2. ACCESS Forum's Web Site. Proposed as an Internet Server for collecting and spreading information on technical aids for people with disability, the Forum follows the rules on Web accessibility to all.

Some ideas in this field are presented in the:

• Netdays-ACCESS Proposal