Antonio Conte
He graduated in Electronic Engineering from the University "La
Sapienza" in Rome, November 1984. From November 1986 to August
1990 he joined ITALCABLE Headquarters in Rome, as system engineer in
charge of the development of Packet Switched Data Network (PSDN) projects.
He joined the European Commission DG XIII in September 1990. Initially,
he acted as project officer in the Conformance Testing Services (CTS)
programme, aiming at providing harmonised tools and facilities throughout
Europe to meet the market requirements for telecommunication equipment
testing services. Subsequently, in DG III he was involved in the management
of the Information Society Initiatives for Standardisation (ISIS) action,
supporting work of an application, validation, or demonstration nature
focused on the standards underpinning Information Society related domains
of high economic and social impact.
He moved to DG Enterprise after the re-organization of the Commission
services that took place in 1999, and was in charge of the management
of sectoral consensus-building initiatives and, more recently, of the
development and implementation of a standardization action plan in support
of the eEurope initiative. He currently advises on ICT and e-business
policy matters with a particular focus on security and e-accessibility
standardisation.
Standardisation policy in support of e-accessibility
It is important to realise that disabled people are not just a tiny
minority of the population of the Europe Union. Moreover, even the number
of what are traditionally perceived as disabled people (people with
physical or sensory disabilities) is rising. Both cognitive and functional
disability (the second largest group of disabled persons) is strongly
related to age with around 70% of people with these kinds of disabilities
aged over 60.
A number of relevant policy initiatives and standardisation activities
supporting e-accessibility have been launched and are ongoing, namely
the eEurope Action Plan and the supporting standardisation activities,
the Directive 2002/21/EC on a common regulatory framework for electronic
communication network and services, and the Communication COM(2003)
541 on the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting.
However, there are still some pending issues that the stakeholders,
e.g. industry and standardisers, will have to address.
Presentation: