Description of Work

Project Duration: 1st October 2000 - 30th September 2003

At present, existing guidelines on Universal Access are of a high abstraction level. This renders them impractical or even unsuitable to be used by industry designers without major efforts. Neither the resources (regarding the number of personnel, and the amount of time and money involved) nor the expertise needed to apply these high level guidelines to the needs of individual sectors are available within companies. As a result, despite the fact that the basic wisdom about Universal Access in many cases may exist, the available guidelines remain unused. This gap has been identified as one of the main drawbacks that prevent European industries to apply the principles of Universal Access. IS4ALL aims to fill this gap by:

• Defining an appropriate set of instruments to elicit and document best practice and experience in the area of Universal Access;

• Extracting and developing scenarios (from a regional Healthcare network) to demonstrate the validity and applicability of such a code of practice; these scenarios will be formulated around an agreed common theme, which is that of the electronic healthcare record; the specifics of each scenario will be decided by the Working Group within the first three months of its life;

• Consolidating these findings into a code of Healthcare practice;

• Developing a validation strategy for demonstrating the applicability of the recommendations by means of a collection of experimental prototypes which will embody the agreed design code for Universal Access;

• Disseminating the accumulated wisdom to the industrial, academic / research and standardisation communities through several outreach activities, including a Web site and seminars, participation in international conferences, and by submitting technical reports to on-going standardisation activities.