Led by Fundación ONCE, ACCESSIBILITECH aims to raise awareness among suppliers, product and service developers of the importance of generating accessible technologies.
The ACCESSIBILITECH project, led by the ONCE Foundation, presented the first version of a European map of accessible technologies that includes solutions applicable in fields such as education, teleworking and telecare, at an online event held on Thursday.
The event was attended by Inmaculada Placencia, senior expert on Disability and Inclusion at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion; Enrique García, consultant and expert in the Accessible Technologies department of Fundación ONCE; José Martínez Usero, Senior Project Manager at Digital Europe, and Miguel González Buitrago, Research and Development Officer at the European Association of Service Providers for People with Disabilities (EASPD).
Moderated by Antonio Ingelmo, a technician from the Universal Accessibility and Innovation Department of the ONCE Foundation, the meeting was also attended by Alejandro Moledo, from the European Disability Form (EDF); Sara Bombardieri, from Social Economy Europe (SEE), and Letizia Manzoni, from Philea, partner organisations of ACCESSIBILITECH.
As explained at the meeting, the ACCESSIBILITECH map of accessible technologies allows finding projects in different stages of maturity (idea, prototype or final product) to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities in the fields of distance learning, teleworking and telecare.
From this perspective, its main objective is to provide reliable information on the solutions identified, so that people with disabilities can select the technologies that best meet their needs.
To facilitate consultation, the tool has a list that can be filtered by topic (distance learning, teleworking and telecare) or by country. In addition, each project will have its own web page with the most relevant information so that anyone can contact its creators.
As for the products and services it collects, they can come from any company, research group or individual, who will include them with a manual insertion form, although there will be a team of experts in accessibility and inclusive technologies to filter them.
About ACCESSIBILITECH
ACCESSIBLITECH is a European project designed to develop a mapping tool and methodology to assess accessible technologies at any level of maturity that have the potential to improve the quality of life and experience of people with disabilities in the areas of telework, distance learning and telecare. It is being developed by Fundación ONCE, Digital Europe and EASPD, in collaboration with EDF, SEE and Philea.
In addition to the development of the map of solutions, ACCESSIBILITECH aims to raise awareness among suppliers and developers of technological products and services, and society in general, of the benefits and importance of generating accessible technologies.
To this end, its promoters have designed three free online workshops on distance learning, teleworking and telecare in which they want to show the needs and barriers encountered by different groups of people with disabilities and how the technology sector is solving them.
In addition, a ‘hackathon’ will be organised to which programmers, developers, entrepreneurs and students will be invited and challenges will be launched in each of the areas (teleworking, distance learning and telecare) to develop accessible applications or innovate on existing ones.