Specialist Task Force 333:
European Accessibility Requirements for Public Procurement of
Products and Services in the ICT Domain
(EC Standardization Mandate M 376, Phase 1)

Who we are:

What we do :

In response to the European Commission’s Mandate M 376, the European Standardization Organizations (ESOs) have responded by setting up a project and dividing the work between them according to their respective strengths and skill sets. The authoring of the ETSI contribution to the ESOs response to the mandate is being carried out within the ETSI Human Factors Technical Committee, by STF333.

The team is developing ETSI Technical Report (TR) 102 612, that sets out the results of the ETSI part of Phase I of the M 376 work. The TR:

·         Characterizes the public procurement of ICT products and services;

·         Provides a listing of existing functional accessibility requirements:

·         Identifies gaps where no accessibility requirements exist;

·         Provides a list of relevant existing national, European and international standards and technical specifications; and

·         Gives proposals for standardization work for the development of requirements and award criteria that still do not exist or that are not yet standardized.

The TR (under development) is intended to provide all the necessary information to fully support the standardization activities required in Phase II of the mandated work.

The parts relating to the assessment of suitable testing and conformity schemes are being authored by our colleagues in CEN BT/WG185/PT, in close co-ordination across the ESOs. The two projects are closely coordinated.

The ETSI work and draft TR have been presented to the public with several occasions, e.g. at the ICTSB DATSCG meeting on April 16 (presentation available here) and the Open Meeting, held during June 3-4, 2008, in Brussels (presentation available here).

The Terms of Reference document for this work is available here.

Why we do it:

People with disabilities and older people make up a large part of the population in the European Union. An estimated 90 million people, or 20% of the population, belong to this group showing that accessibility is a major issue. With the changing age structure and the fact that disability is strongly related to age, the European Union faces a coming major challenge to maintain and improve the quality of life, independence and integration of these citizens. ICT plays a growing and important role in the economic, educational and social life of Europeans. Therefore, access to mainstream ICT is crucial for all, including people with disabilities and older persons. Making this technology, and the services using it, more accessible would facilitate the inclusion of this already disadvantaged group. It is socially, ethically, economically and politically important that the advantages of ICT are made available to as many citizens as possible.

Although the new generation of technology provides numerous new opportunities for people with disabilities and older persons, new technology can also be troublesome from an accessibility point of view. There has not been sufficient market reaction to what has been done at a policy level to enhance accessibility. This new mandate builds upon previous work, and deals with the development of European accessibility requirements for public procurement of products and services in the ICT domain.

ICT products should be designed in an accessible manner so that people with disabilities and elderly persons can use and profit from them in the same way as everyone else. In doing so harmonization of these requirements will not only facilitate the work of industry, it will also enlarge markets, and provide potential buyers with better products and services. The inclusion of accessibility requirements in public procurement will constitute an incentive for manufacturers to develop and to offer accessible devices, applications and services, which in turn will benefit people with disabilities and older people but also will be to the benefit of other users. To achieve this accessibility goal, it is necessary to:

- harmonise and facilitate the public procurement of accessible ICT products and services by identifying a set of functional European accessibility requirements for public procurement of products and services in the ICT domain, and

- provide a mechanism through which the public procurers have access to an electronic toolkit, enabling them to make use of these harmonized requirements in procurement processes.

EC Mandate M/376 requests that the standards organizations work to harmonize, throughout Europe, those accessibility requirements that may be applied, regardless of the value of the purchase to public procurement of ICT products and services and thereby to achieve interoperability.

The work performed under this Mandate could give an incentive both for the market and public organizations to take the aspect of accessibility into further consideration, and to foster interoperability and harmonization at an EU level. Although the most significant field of application of the results of the mandate is for public procurement, the results could be useful (as guidelines and recommendations) for other purposes, such as ICT procurement in the private sector.

Time plan for the work:

This is a draft time plan that may be adjusted at many time:

How to contact us:

We welcome your requirements, input and comments. The preferred means to contact us is by e-mail to the STF leader Bruno.vonNiman@etsi.org. Alternatively, we can accept:

-         Voice calls: +46 733 66 12 34,

-         Text calls (v.21): +46 8 556 002 05 and

-         Total conversation (SIP only; speech, text and sign language supported): info@sip.omnitor.se

Note: Comments provided on a specific numbered version of the draft ETSI Technical Report (TR) must respect the commenting deadlines specified above and use the form provided in Annex 3 of the draft TR. Other, general comments may be provided at any time (until August 11, 18:00 CET, 2008).

This home page will be kept updated for the latest news, development of the work and latest available public draft version.