Building national public infrastructures on our way to a global inclusive infrastructure

Abstract

Broadband technologies are rapidly becoming integral to education, commerce, employment, community participation, health and safety Yet there remain multiple barriers to effective and affordable access by people with disabilities, elder, or those with low literacy creating an increasing digital divide. There are assistive technologies that can provide access for some. However it is not available for all disabilities, not affordable by many, and lags mainstream developments and deployments. Even when the latest AT is close to the latest IT, few people have the latest version. The cost of keeping up with mainstream technologies reduces resources available for innovation in assistive technologies and new directions in broadband technologies will require an already strapped AT industry to retool and re-architect their products. We are moving to an ICT environment with a profusion of hardware models (desktop, laptop, netbook, smartphone, tablet, set top box, game systems, players), multiple operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Maemo (Nokia), Bada (Samsung), WebOS, etc.), hundreds of software applications that embed another universe of widgets, plug-ins, and players, and a networked information environment that adheres to no standard and mutates far beyond the initial conception of the Web. Our current access technologies and infrastructure cannot handle this; the assistive technologies that now exist do not address all disabilities well, particularly cognitive, language, and learning disabilities, deaf-blindness and the mixed problems faced by elders; current assistive technologies often add, rather than reduce, complexity; finally, but importantly, people are not aware of what is possible, see it as complicated, and do not have any easy way to determine that there is something that can help themA coalition of academic, industry and non-governmental organizations and individuals are coming together to promote the creation of a National Public Inclusive Infrastructure (NPII) to address these problems. The purpose is to ensure that everyone who faces accessibility barriers due to disability, literacy or aging, regardless of economic status, can access and use the Internet and all its information, communities, and services for education, employment, daily living, civic participation, health and safety.An NPII would provide key software enhancements to the physical infrastructure to allow lower cost accessibility that could be invoked on any computer, anywhere. Its key components would be a cloud based delivery system that would allow anywhere, any computer access, a personal preference system to allow systems to automatically configure themselves to users, a system of wizards to make creation of a preference profile simple even when a professional is not available, a metadata server to allow users to find accessible media or captions or descriptions for inaccessible media, a trusted source for malware free solutions, a rich development environment with common building blocks, and an awareness program to make more people aware of what is possible for them. All of the NPII components are being designed to support both commercial assistive technologies and free, built-in access features (universal design). The NPII will include a delivery system, personalization profiles and a rich development system and common modules. In addition to lowering development costs and increasing the number of solutions for different disabilities, the NPII can also enable new types of assistive technologies and services, including assistance-on-demand services that allow consumers to invoke computer or human assistance whenever and wherever they need it. The goal is a richer set of access options that it is less expensive to create and distribute and that can address the needs of a wider range of disabilities than is possible today. And a model infrastructure that can be replicated internationally and bring this wide variety of access options and the lower cost delivery system for both commercial and free access features to countries world-wide.