Harmonization of International Standards and Guidelines as a Basis for the Inclusion of Everyone

By Urte Thoelke, SAP Product Standard Accessibility, SAP AG – November 18, 2010

This article introduces a new aspect of the general topic of "inclusion of everyone": the global harmonization of standards and guidelines to ensure a barrier-free life for future generations.

 

The Concept of Inclusion

"Accessibility", "Design for all", "Inclusion": If you search the Web, you’ll find a whole host of terms that set out to describe how people can live their lives in a self-determined way and in an environment that supports and does not exclude them. The ideas behind these terms may differ, because they focus on different areas, levels, or even legal requirements, but, in the end, they all target the same goal – inclusion of everyone.

Some of the barriers and obstacles to inclusion are obvious: A wheelchair user will have difficulty getting into a bus that has narrow doors and steep steps; and a blind person will not know when the pedestrian light turns green unless there is an acoustic signal. Some of the barriers are less obvious, for the majority of us at least. For example, you will not be able to access your bank account online if it is secured by a CAPTCHA (a distorted image of letters and numbers that prevents automated use of websites by requiring human interaction) that you are unable to "see" when you scan through a Web page because your screen reader can’t locate it.

CAPTCHA

Figure 1: Example of a CAPTCHA (O'Reilly Website – creating a new account)

Over the years, thousands of accessibility and other experts have met in working groups to discuss the different aspects of "inclusion" and to debate about the best way to include everyone, irrespective of their age, nationality, physical impairment, and so on.

The UN Convention on the rights of disabled people marked an important milestone in this process. It was hailed as a victory for the human rights of people with disabilities, who are often overseen and forgotten by our society. After many years of meetings, mainly between disabled people from countries across the world, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was finally signed in December 2006. It signaled a significant change in attitudes toward the global community of people with disabilities, who felt that the world was at last listening to and acting on their concerns.

The convention sets out a legal framework for the rights of disabled adults and children. These include the right to protection against discrimination, the freedom to make decisions about their lives, the right to vote, the right to work, and the right to protection against enforced medical intervention. The underlying principle is "full and effective participation and inclusion in society" (Article 3c) to ensure that disabled people can live on equal terms with non-disabled people. In the meantime, more than 150 countries have signed the convention. This does not mean, however, that clear action plans with follow-up activities can be reported from the majority of these subscribers…

 

Harmonization – A New Concept for the Inclusion of Everyone

In addition to the approach described above, recent years have seen a growing focus on the global harmonization of standards to eliminate the barriers caused by geographical boundaries and regional interests. People do not benefit from products that have been defined and produced according to a standard in one part of the world but are useless in another because, for example, the power adapter does not fit or the voltage is different.

French power plugs German power plugs
UK power plugs US power plug
Euro power plug Different adapters for power plugs

Figure 2: Different power plugs and an adapter set for power plugs

The vision for the future is that everyone should be able to buy a product and use it anywhere in the world without having to rely on adapters, regional product specifications, or different types of assistive technologies, for example, to read a Brazilian Website in France. This is the idea behind "global harmonization," an ambitious and far-reaching vision that aims to achieve harmonized standards so that the same requirements apply whether a product is made in the United States, Germany, Japan, or New Zealand.

Product development must follow clear requirements from the outset so that everyone has a chance to make use of them. If this does not happen, users, governments, industry, and many others will lose time and money on the journey to building a society and a world that includes everyone. Moreover, the growing reliance on visual content in many instances will deepen the sense of exclusion felt by certain parts of the population if they are unable to perceive content and if alternatives such as voice output or text equivalents are not provided.

Disabled persons' representatives, policymakers, standards bodies, and industry associations who are involved in the standardization process must agree to increase their focus on the goal of globally harmonized standards. Their aim should be to establish regulations and legislation and to avoid national peculiarities that may have some supposed local benefit but that fail to support a barrier-free future for people all over the world.

 

Conclusions

I believe that there is a chance of achieving this goal, albeit perhaps not in the next ten years or so. But if we summon up our energy and commit to this objective, our grandchildren will hopefully benefit from our approach and from the efforts we make today!

 

 

References

 

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