Users with disabilities and standards

Abstract

Industrial standards are accepted practice for ensuring safety, quality, compatibility and interconnectivity but also as frameworks for products and services and business opportunities. Very often they are only considered as a matter of pure technology and only for industry with little direct relevance to the users. However, in case of missing standards or bad standards the relevance to users becomes pretty obvious. Therefore, consumer organisations have started to recognise that they have a role in standardisation. Nevertheless, there seems a broad gap separating users from participation in standardisation. In principle, the standardisation process is open and transparent for participation. Reality is often different. This paper gives an introduction to this issue and deals with the relevance of standards to users with disabilities and the relevance of users with disabilities for the standardisation. It presents an approach for user participation in the standardisation process. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.