Inclusion and Accessibility News Ministerial e-Inclusion Conference 2008 Ministerial e-Inclusion Conference 2008
- 02/12/2008
A Ministerial e-Inclusion Conference was held on 30th November to 2nd December 2008 in Vienna, following on from the Ministerial Meeting on European e-Inclusion Policy held in Lisbon on 2nd – 3rd December 2007 in the scope of the Portuguese Presidency of the European Union.
The main themes of the Ministerial Conference were: e-Accessibility in Europe, Ageing Well in the Information Society, e-Literacy, Investment in e-Inclusion and the Future of e-Inclusion Policies.
The Portuguese delegation was headed by Graça Simões, from the Board of Directors of Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC), who made a presentation entitled Inclusive Public Services in Portugal: An Engagement of All for All.
EU Presidency Conclusions were published after the ministerial conference. The European Commission’s Communication “Towards an Accessible Information Society” was published on 1st December, together with the documents Status and challenges of e-accessibility in Europe and the Report on the Public Consultation on web accessibility and other e-accessibility issues.The European Commission’s communications places particular emphasis on the accessibility of Internet content in terms of compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), yet deems that the time is still not ripe for European legislation to be adopted for this subject.
The reports from a study conducted from February to October 2008 for the European Commission on accessibility to ICT products and services by the elderly and people with special needs were also published: Evidence-based analysis for a possible coordinated European approach to web accessibility and Towards a framework for further development of EU legislation or other coordination measures on e-accessibility.
In Portugal, the Government defined guidelines on the Accessibility of Government and Public Administration sites on the Internet through Council of Ministers Resolution No. 155/2007 (content in Portuguese), which made achieving the W3C’s WCAG1.0 “A” level conformity mandatory for sites with informative content within 3 months, and “AA” level from the aforementioned guidelines on accessibility for sites with transactional services within six months. This stipulation follows the guidelines of Council of Ministers' Resolution No. 97/99 (content in portuguese), of 29th July, which makes it mandatory for central public administration services to adopt means of organising and presenting information on the Internet providing for accessibility for citizens with special needs, without however defining a standard to be compulsorily met, making Portugal at the time the 1st country in Europe and the 4th in the world to approve legislation with this objective.