Cost 219ter
Standardisation: Seeing the Forest Through the Trees
Jan Engelen
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, B-3001 Leuven
jan.engelen@esat.kuleuven.ac.be
Abstract
This contribution to the programme of the Cost 219 ter workshop on "eAccessibility Legislation and Policy, the Role of Standardisation" intends to give an overview of the formal, the ad hoc, the company driven and the recent, increasingly popular informal standardisation activities in Universal Design.
Standardisation: general overview
In very general terms, producing a "standard" (fr: norme, standard;
de: Norme; es: norma) is a voluntary action set up by commercial partners
who believe that the standardisation will permit easier exchanges of products
and goods. This implies very often that the acceptance of standards is
also voluntary and based on expected commercial benefits.
On the other hand, laws in many countries are referring more and more
to the required acceptance of several standards (e.g. on safety or on
ecological aspects). The net result of this need for standards is that
nowadays many standardisation initiatives are stimulated (= subsidised)
by public bodies or, in Europe, directly and indirectly by the European
Commission.
Formal standards
Probably the best known examples of standards are the ISO standards (ISO
= International Organization for Standardization). These are very formal
documents created by an accepted international body after consultation
with many national standardisation organisations and a rigorously established
voting procedure. The immediate consequence is that producing these standards
(and even updating them) takes a long time.
In Europe, standardisation work has been delegated since many years to
the official standardisation groups (CEN, CENELEC and ETSI). Each of them
has its own domain to cater for.
Fig. 1: The ESO's, the European Standardisation Organisations
A few of these have agreements with ISO and ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union- Telecommunication Standardization Sector) so that some of their work can be shared and that some standards are just taken over from each other.
Standardisation related work ("informal standardisation work")
Over the last years several of these standardisation bodies have set up standardisation-related initiatives that are easier to manage and can produce outcomes much faster. They all have special designations so that they cannot be confused with the "real" standards. E.g. ISO has developed a new range of "deliverables", or different categories of specifications, allowing publication at an intermediate stage of development before full consensus.
Some of these standardisation related activities are given below:
| Name | Website | Names of related activities |
| ISO | www.iso.ch/ |
|
| ITU-T | www.itu.int/ITU-T/ |
|
| CEN | www.cenorm.org/ |
|
| ETSI | www.etsi.org/ |
|
| CENELEC | www.cenelec.org/ |
|
| CEN/CENELEC |
|
Examples in relation to DfA are given below.
Ad hoc and industry standards
Quite often some companies are able to put forward one of their developments
as a standard to which others have to adhere in order to build, e.g.,
third party products. Well known are the technical specifications of Microsoft
products and a few others.
Equally often industry groupings are working out guidelines or recommendations
for standardisation of matters important to their community. Widely known
examples are Open E-book, Daisy, WAP, Bluetooth etc. Strictly spoken also
the IEEE standards (e.g. on WiFi) fall in this category.
New developments in DfA related standardisation
As DfA standardisation was explicitly mentioned in the eEurope2002 plan, several new actions were established over the last years in the European context (Engelen, 2003). In my opinion four major recent changes can be distinguished: the set up of coordinating working groups and organisations; the democratisation of the standardisation processes themselves; the increasing impact of non-formal standardisation bodies and the establishment of standardisation related discussion fora open for non-specialists. Each of those aspects will be briefly explained in the remainder of this contribution.
Coordination initiatives
ICTSB
The ICT Standards Board (ICTSB)[1] is an initiative from the three recognised European standards organisations with the participation of specification providers as partners to co-ordinate specification activities in the field of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).
The ICTSB listens to requirements for standards and specifications that are based on concrete market needs and expressed by any competent source. The Board then considers what standards or specifications need to be created, and how the task will be carried out (and by whom).
DATSCG
The "Design for All and Assistive Technology Standardisation Co-ordination group[2] was created within ICTSB as a direct response to the eEurope2002 plan. It has the following objectives:
- To ensure co-ordination of the ICT related standardisation work in
the DfA and AT fields;
- To act as an overall focal point on design-for-all and assistive technology
standardisation;
- To assist in organising promotional activities on design for all and
assistive technologies standardisation requirements in ICT;
- To promote the knowledge and awareness of existing guidelines and tools by the market-players.
Although membership is on invitation, DATSCG tries to have as many organisations as possible involved in their work, including organisations of, or for, persons with a disability. Especially the contribution of the European Disability Forum (EDF)[3], as representative of the final users is very important. Also the Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe (AAATE)[4] has an observer status to the DATSCG.
DATSCG has proven to be an important channel for information exchange on standardisation issues as it groups the main players in this field.
eAccessibility expert group
Mainly as a consequence of the eEurope actions for the promotion of ICT use in Europe, the European Commission has created several working groups to keep an eye on the actions promised by the different EU countries and by the Commission itself.
The High Level Group on the Employment and Social Dimension of the Information Society (ESDIS) was established in 1999 for supporting the European Commission in the analysis of the impact of the information society on employment and on social cohesion.
Working out the eEurope topics related to persons with a disability or elderly persons was delegated to the eAccessibility expert group[5].
With respect to standardisation the eAccessibility group produced an overview document[6] by the end of 2002 (Engelen, 2003b).
After a short period of inactivity, the eAccessibility group was recreated as an expert support group for the eInclusion activities of the European Commission's Directorate General on Information Society and Media (EC-DG INFSO-H3). eAccessibility now reports also to the I2010 action, the new IST promotion action to boost competitiveness in the ICT sector that is building on previous eEurope activities[7].
Standardisation efforts through workshops
As stated before (in 0) a democratisation process is taking place in the standardisation arena. Besides formally established committees for creating the "real" standards, all standardising bodies now have working groups and task forces where all interested people are welcome, minimally as observers but often as contributors too.
CEN Workshop agreements in the DfA field
Examples are the establishment of a CEN Workshop on "Design for all in ICT", CWA14661 "Guidelines to Standardisers of ICT products and services in the CEN ICT domain" and, more recently, the creation of the CEN Workshop on website certification, in full "Specifications for a complete European certification scheme concerning the delivery of a Quality Mark for Web Content Accessibility - WS/WAC[8].
This CEN/ISSS Workshop has been established to obtain a first level European agreement on a European certification scheme concerning the delivery of a Quality Mark for Web Accessibility. Such a scheme has previously been investigated by an EU IST project (Support-EAM), part of a cluster of projects which is defining an overall European methodology for assessing web accessibility in conformance with W3C WAI content guidelines[9]. This European Quality Mark is based on the use of a methodology for assessing Web Accessibility within a European certification scheme.
In view of recent thinking about more open standardisation work, participation to the CEN workshop discussions is basically now open to all interested parties, willing to pay a small administrative fee.
ETSI STF's
Specialist task forces are typical for ETSI. An STF is a team of highly-skilled experts working together over a pre-defined period to draft an ETSI standard under the technical guidance of an ETSI Technical Body and with the support of the ETSI Secretariat[10].
Some of the DfA-related STF's have been focussing on:
- Requirements of Assistive Technology Devices in ICT (STF 181)
- Speech recognition, Voice user interfaces (STF 182)
- Study on the multimodality of icons, symbols and pictograms (STF 183)
- Design for All: Guidelines for ICT Products and Services (STF 184)
- Key issues, solutions and actions for ICT multimodal interaction, communication and navigation (STF 204)
More recently a few new STF's have started in which DfA principles play (or should play) an important role:
- Human related technical guidelines for real-time person-to-person
communication services (HF 2362)
- Enabling and Improving the use of Mobile e-Services (HF 2366)
- User-oriented handling of multicultural issues in broadband and narrowband
multimedia telecommunications (HF 2372)
- Duplex Universal Speech and Text (DUST) communication [e-Inclusion] (STF 267)
"Informal" standards: W3C Guidelines
In relation to Design for All or Universal Design, there is one very well known example: the World Wide Web consortium and especially the Web Access Initiative[11] that produced several guidelines on web accessibility. Although almost universally accepted as the primary reference point for web accessibility matters, many countries establishing legislative actions for imposing web accessibility, were not able to refer to the WAI guidelines as the W3C cannot be considered a standardisation body in the proper sense of the word. Unfortunately, this has already led to several national variants of web accessibility guidelines.
Public discussions
One of the unique developments in the standardisation field, especially in relation to design for all, is the potentially large involvement of specialists, users and user representatives in the discussions.
EDeAN Standardisation SIG
The European Design for All network (EDeAN) was established in 2002 as a response to the European eEurope programme for stimulation of IST use. One of the action lines was the "creation of a network of major expert centres in Design for All". Another was the "Publication of Design for All standards for accessibility of information technology products, in particular to improve the employability and social inclusion of people with special needs". Although discussions on the latter topic also took place in the eAccessibility working group (cf. above) a more open approach was established through the creation of a public discussion forum.
Electronic information exchange within the EDeAN network was set up by the D4ALLnet project (IST-2001-38833, Design for All Network of Excellence) that created the HERMES collaborative web-based platform[12], developed by FORTH-ICS. D4ALLnet is a Thematic Network funded by the European Commission (1/1/2003 - 31/12/2005) that supports the operation of EDeAN by providing an accessible web - based platform to enable virtual networking and cooperation as well as information and knowledge exchange between EDeAN network members (Bühler & Stephanidis, 2004). Members of the EDeAN network are exchanging information within so-called Special Interest groups. One of the discussion lines (to date there are 5 topic based ones and one for management use) is on Standardisation.
Although the Hermes system provides several interaction modalities, in practice the MESSAGE BOARD and the DOCUMENTS AREA, linked to it, are the most popular ones.
Currently the SIG Standardisation group has 108 members. About 100 come from Europe (but new EU member states are underrepresented), a few from the USA, Australia and Hong Kong. Also observers of the European Commission are taking part in the discussions.
The favourite discussion topics within the Standardisation SIG are shifting in time. A snapshot of the February 2005 situation can be found below.
Fig. 2. The HERMES page with an overview of the open discussion lines within the Standardisation Special Interest Group (SIG) of EDeAN
In the "Past Topics" section, threads on Japanese Standardisation
work, Mandate 283 and the potential conflict between security and accessibility
of electronic devices can be found.
The Hermes platform has been shown to be a unique means of bringing information
on ongoing standardisation activities directly to persons, interested
by this subject but not member of formally established standardisation
task forces or working groups.
Conclusions
In this contribution we have tried to avoid enumerating the many details on DfA and AT standardisation actions[13] . We have focussed on the very important changes that take place in the standardisation field (e.g. the informal work, more open discussions) and especially on the impact of these changes for improving the situation in de field of Design for All and Assistive Technology.
References
Bühler, C., & Stephanidis, C. (2004). European Co-operation Activities Promoting Design for All in Information Society Technologies. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP 2004), Paris, France, 7-9 July (pp. 80-87). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag
Engelen, J. (2003). The next hot item for Assistive Technology and Design
for All: standardisation. In "Assistive Technology - Shaping the
Future", ed. by G. Craddock, L. McCormack et al., ISBN
1-58603-373-5 (pp. 34-42), IOS Press Amsterdam-Berlin
Engelen, J. (2003). The work of the eAccessibility Expert Group, presented at the International Congress "Accessibility for All", org. by ETSI, CEN & CENELEC (Nice, 27-28 March 2003); published electronically at: www.etsi.com/cce/proceedings/6_1.htm
[1] Link: www.ictsb.org/
[2] Link: www.ictsb.org/DATSCG_home.htm
[3] Link: www.edf-feph.org/en/welcome.htm
[4] Link: www.aaate.net
or http://139.91.151.134/
[5] Link: europa.eu.int/information_society/policy/accessibility/index_en.htm
[6] Available at:
europa.eu.int/information_society/policy/accessibility/dfa/standards/a_documents/
eaccess2002_dfa_std_review_report.html
[7] Link: europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/i2010/index_en.htm
[8] Links: www.cenorm.be/cenorm/businessdomains/businessdomains/isss/activity/ws-wac.asp
and
www.support-eam.org
[9] Link: www.wabcluster.org
[10] Link: portal.etsi.org/stfs/process/home.asp
[11] Link: www.w3.org/WAI/
[12] Link: www.edean.org
[13] More details can be found elsewhere in the COST219ter workshop proceedings.
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