Over 2 billion people worldwide have different types, degrees, or combinations of disability, literacy, digital literacy or aging related barriers that impede or prevent use of ICT. Not long ago one could live without access to ICT quite well. However today access to ICT is required for most education, employment, and commerce, and is increasingly required for travel, health, safety, daily living and participation in most of our society. We cannot afford anymore to have a large percentage of our society excluded from Internet access.
Therefore, a large consortium, of which AGE is partner, has launched the Prosperity4All project with the support of the European Commission Research Programme (FP7). The project will last 4 years and aim at developing a new infrastructure to support the development of accessible ICT and assistive technologies while ensuring their availability, adequacy with users’ needs and affordability to ensure that all citizens can benefit from them. Prosperity4All will build on the work done by the Cloud4All project which focuses on personalisation of user interfaces.
This infrastructure will use cloud, crowd, game and smart technologies, to bring new players with both low and high technical skills, and combine auto-configured access features built into mainstream products with assistive technologies and services to create the rich milieu of options needed to bring all citizens into our digital future.
Within the project, AGE will ensure that the end users’ perspective is adequately taken into consideration and will help disseminate the project’s outcomes to a large variety of stakeholders, including older persons and policymakers, to ensure that the project will succeed in developing a new ecosystem for accessible technologies.
Are you a user? We want to hear about your everyday situational disability. What IT obstacles are you encountering? When you’re using an ATM? A ticketing machine? Purchasing online? Tell us your story!
For more information, visit Prosperity4All website here or contact Ophélie.Durand@age-paltform.eu