European Centre for Accessible Media
Introduction
Access to information is increasingly being recognised as a basic human right; and the emergence of digital technology provides a massive opportunity to ensure that that right is enjoyed by all older and disabled people. In spite of some success in making the unregulated Internet accessible, the main driver has been regulated broadcasting but as the media increasingly converge and compete, the high standards set by television in particular may not be met by competitors. It is therefore important that a level playing field, at a very high level, is established with broadcasters taking the lead.
Not surprisingly, accessibility to unregulated DVD content is patchy and not susceptible to methodical lobbying, the impetus for making Internet content accessible has come from the self regulatory World Wide Web Consortium which lacks a strong European pillar but in the field of broadcasting there has been a high European performance, notably in Scandinavia, Spain and and the United Kingdom.
Legal definitions vary but there are approximately 40 million, or 8%, disabled people in the European Union and, because disability is largely linked to ageing, the number will rise as life expectancy increases. This number can be broken down according to disability cluster as follows:
- Learning/Cognitive/Development difficulties - 40%, 16 million
- Physical Disability - 28%, 11.2 million
- Deaf/Hearing Impaired - 18%, 7.2 million
- Blind/visually impaired - 14% 5.6 million
Without accessibility measures, almost all disabled people experience severe difficulties in accessing digital information from computers, televisions and mobile telephones:
- Blind people need spoken versions of text
- Deaf people need text subtitling of audio
- Physically disabled people need ways of controlling data
- People with congitive learning and development difficulties need to simplify what they receive.
Blind and visually impaired people experience the greatest problems with information access, particularly in using the Internet.
It is estimated that if information is made accessible for this 40 million people this will greatly improve the access and performance of an additional 160 million people. In other words, sound design for disabled people is good design for all.
Information cannot be made accessible to all of these people unless their needs are met by creators and providers (web masters, broadcasters, software companies, data aggregators and suppliers) and equipment manufacturers. Unless accessibility is regarded as an end-to-end factor in data production, transmission and reception, effort in one part of the process will be wasted because of failures in another part; there have been cases, for example, where regulators have required audio description but where there is no receiver equipment for the service.
Over the past two decades the importance of standards has increased as regulation has declined. It is therefore vital that EU standards bodies such as CEN (The European Committee for Standardisation), CENELEC (The European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation) and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standardisation Institute) receive timely and authoritative input that reflects activity across all channels and user interfaces.