eAccessibility

European Internet Accessibility Observatory: let's make accessibility measurements, accessible to everyone!

Accessible Presentation of Measurements from a Web Accessibility Observatory

Patrizia Bertini, FBL, Italy and Terje Gjøsæter, Agder University College, Faculty of Technology, Grimstad, Norway

Downloads: Full Paper (PDF) | Presentation (PPS)

Introduction

Accessibility is increasingly becoming a huge priority to improve e-democracy and to remove the digital divide which affects not only the elderly or disabled, but can affect virtually every citizen.

37 million people in Europe are disabled and the society is aging rapidly. Digital application and services could greatly improve disabled and elder people's everyday life, providing valuable services through an Internet connection.

But in order to allow everyone to take advantage of the information society, we need to ensure that information is accessible and the interface is user friendly.
For this reason Accessibility has become a huge priority for national governments and also for the European Commission which, since the meeting in Lisbon in March 2000, adopted the so called Lisbon Strategy, which is expected to show its full potential by 2010, and released a number of important communications concerning accessibility.

The European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO) (http://www.eiao.net) is an IST project launched in September 2004 which aims at creating a new tool for government, associations, stakeholders and EU decision makers to get a clear picture of the accessibility status across Europe. The lack of common metrics and the number of national regulations which have came into force in the last years asking for accessible websites, shows that web accessibility needs to be monitored and controlled based on a common set of rules. EAIO is going to provide a concrete answer to this need by developing a technological infrastructure consisting of a web crawler, web accessibility assessment modules, and a data warehouse for storing the measurements, which will enable us to show developments in the results over time.