 Good morning, Ms. Loreen. Welcome to the session. I would like to run a quick test with you to check your audio and video connection. So you hear me well, right? I hear you very well, yes. And yes, it's the same for me. I can hear you and I can see you. So I think everything is okay with you. Okay. Will I see the other panelists here or? Yes, you will see other panelists. For the moment, Pinky, you are the only one joined to the session. All the other people are a technical team from the hot tub. On-site people. Okay, then thank you very much for testing. Bye bye, see you later. See you. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Just wanted to make a quick announcement. We will be starting our sessions 10 minutes later than initially planned. We still have some participants coming in, so we want to accommodate them as well. So just a 10 minute, let's say, delay. Recording in progress. Hello. May I ask everyone to get seated, please? Thank you. Okay. So good morning, esteemed participants and guests. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the second day of Accessible Europe, ICT for all. Yesterday, we embarked on a journey together to deepen our commitment towards building an inclusive digital society in Europe. And just as a recap, yesterday we began with a pre-forum workshop led by Mies Roksonovit Mariliaskou, senior coordinator of digital inclusion at ITU with valuable contributions of Mies Immaculata Placencia Porero from European Commission. So we first explored the fundamentals of ICT accessibility together, and then the opening ceremony further established a focus for our forum. We were honored with the insightful addresses of many distinguished leaders in the field. First, we had the special video addresses of Dr. Kosmos Lakisanzava Zava, director of the telecommunication developer bureau of ITU, and commissioner Mies Helena Dalli. And then we had the keynote addresses here on site from her excellency Mies Maria Gonzalez Veracruz, secretary of state for telecommunication and digital infrastructure of Spain. And her excellency Mies Maria Rosa Martinez, secretary of state for social rights of Spain, and also Mr. Miguel Carvalleda, president of the social group. And we also had the opening remarks from Mr. Jaroslav Ponder, ITU head of ITU office head, and Mr. Jesus Hernandez, accessibility and innovation director of Nocio Anonse, and also the director of accessible EU. And we also had Mies Ana Pélez from European Disability Forum here with us. And we first delved into the European regulatory landscape together for our first session. This was followed by a special message from Mr. Tafik Jalasi, assistant director general for communication information of UNESCO. And then we had a special UN session with many UN entities present here. And finally we, the day culminated into a vibrant fishing competition with 11 innovative companies showcasing their solutions here. And then we had the social event held by Ponce. And finally we awarded the winner and the runner-ups of our fishing competition. And once again I would like to congratulate, voice it, the winner, and the runner-ups, finally in PDS from here. So this is how it went yesterday. And as we start today's program, we really hope that we carry forward the momentum insights and inspirations from yesterday. And we just continue this collective cast to create a digital inclusive society in Europe. Welcome to the day two of the forum. Welcome to the day two of the forum, this is better. Okay, so now we have our, well, the third session of our forum, which will be moderated by me. So please let me change my spot. And I will be introducing, I'll be inviting our speakers to the stage one by one. So I would like to, first of all, have Mr. Guillermo Rodriguez here, Dr. Eric Bellaman, Mr. Daniel Montalvo, and Mr. Stan Eric Scottiera. And we also have me, Susanna Lorraine, joining us remotely. Okay, so I think we're good. Well, distinguished participants and guests, welcome to the session three, State of Web Accessibility Realities and Good Practices. I'm H. Malaiso Surman. I'm a digital accessibility consultant at the IT Europe office. And it is an absolute honor to moderate this session. Today we will examine the present state of web accessibility, addressing both the challenges and successes that shape this vital area. And we have the very wealth of, well, speakers that bring a wealth of knowledge here today. So let me first introduce you to our distinguished panel. So first of all, we have Mr. Guillermo Rodriguez from the Government of Spain, representing Spanish Observatory on Web Accessibility. So Mr. Rodriguez has a double bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics and a master's in data science. And he leads the area of websites, design and accessibility, and the general secretary at a digital administration of the Government of Spain. And we also have Susanna Lorraine joining us remotely, as you can see. So she is the Chief Research and Innovation Officer at PUNCA and also the representative to the EU for the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs. Ms. Lorraine is bringing over 20 years of experience in digitalization, inclusion, and e-government. Next up, we have Dr. Eric Vellaman here. Welcome. He is a Professor of Inclusive Digital Design and Engineering at PUN University of Applied Sciences. He's also a founder of the Accessibility Foundation in the Netherlands. And he's also an innovation expert at the Barton Maze Institute for the Blind and the Visually Impaired. And then we have Mr. Daniel Montalvo. He's an accessibility specialist at the World Wide Web Consortium Accessibility Initiative. And Mr. Montalvo is involved with editing the curricula on web accessibility and supporting various accessibility groups and task forces. And last but not least, Mr. Stan Eric Scottiera joining us here as the CEO and co-founder of Inclusa. He's a certified web accessibility specialist. And he has over 20 years of experience in ICT accessibility from developing assistant technologies to providing strategic management consulting. So as you can see, this session promises to be a deep dive into the realities of accessibility today with our esteemed speakers bringing so much knowledge. So I would like to leave the floor to them. So first of all, we would like to start a first round of questions to each one of them. So I will start with Mr. Guillermo Rodriguez. So with the Spanish Observatory on Web Accessibility's role in enhancing digital accessibility, could you share your insights into how the observatory's methodologies and tools are shaping the accessibility landscape in Spain and what lessons could potentially be applicable across Europe? Thank you. Thank you, ML. First of all, thank you for the opportunity to participate in the seven. I recognize that this is the first time I am going to participate in this kind of event as a speaker. So sorry in advance if I make some mistakes. The Web Accessibility Observatory monitors the stage of accessibility of public sector. We prepare and present the report to the European Union. One of our main objectives is to help organizations to improve accessibility and comply with the European regulation. We have some tools and means for the organisms. We have a tool to automatically check the accessibility of a website. This is one of our main assets. With this tool, we check more than 20 requirements and we also generate a report with the error location and suggestion of how to solve them. We can analyze websites with their URLs or their own code. We have got a tool to generate accessibility declaration and a tool to automatically check that an accessibility website has got the accessibility declaration and the correct files. We are continually trying to improve our tools and we are going to put into production other fetters in the next month. We are going to be able to use our accessibility checker as a browser plugin, make it easier to use it, especially for these websites that are not on the Internet. We want to be able to receive automatically requests from machines and give the organisms the possibility to schedule periodic executions. This accessibility tool is provided for the public sector as a service but we have the project open on Github for everybody and we want to improve the mechanisms to install this tool using dockers. Apart from that, we are decoupling the part that generates the reports from the part that check the accessibility requirement because the third part is more specific for Spain or methodology and typology of organisms but within that the second part, it could be useful for everybody and we want to increase the capabilities of our accessibility checker including the possibility to analyze PDF documents that is not only the content of our website, it will be checked but also the documents attach it. With this measure, we are going to increase the accuracy of our estimation. I think that there are our main initiatives. Thank you very much. We started the session with a very concrete good practice example from Spain. Now I would like to go more into the policy and legislation area. I would like to turn to me next who is joining us remotely. Can you hear us? Can you confirm? Yes, I hear you. Yes. Welcome. I just wanted to ask you given your extensive work in EU policy and legislation on accessibility, I just wanted to know how do you currently evaluate the alignment of these policies especially with regards to the evolving accessibility needs of diverse user groups and if you have any strategies that you would suggest for enhancing the implementation and uniform application across Europe, it would be much appreciated. Thank you. So thank you and thank you for making sure that I can do my contribution here online. I'm sorry I couldn't be with you today. So let me first start with what we heard from the observatory in Spain because I think it's extremely important to understand that the monitoring methodology used in all the member states are built up on two different parts. There's the simplified method which was explained here with where you can use an automatic tool to monitor. That can only monitor non-compliance. You can find things that are not working but with an automatic tool and the simplified method you can never say that something is actually accessible. To do that you need to check all the requirements and there are no tools in the world that can do that today and also there is a need for manual evaluation. So that is why we have the in-depth evaluation as well. So that is how the Web Accessibility Directive Monitoring Methodology is set up. Myself and Eric Feldman and other experts created that so we know it very much in depth and it's extremely important not to mix the two and to believe that an automatic tool can actually check what is accessible because that is not what they do. So just to clarify that first of all otherwise we have one question. I focus my presentation on automatic reviews but obviously we make a manual report and all the organeers make a manual report. Thank you. I just, let's not answer questions from the contributors. Thank you. We can do it afterwards. Thank you. Please, Ms. Lurie. Yes, so when we did the review of how the implementation of the Web Accessibility Directive is the success of the implementation in the different member states we found many good practices and for me very positively because I've been working with the transposition of the legislation and we had quite a lot of pushback in the early days from the member states but when the monitoring agencies have started this work we have seen a lot of positive effects and also both the public sector bodies and the monitoring agencies generally are very positive even though there are of course things that can be improved and so on but really the good thing is that most of the member states are focusing not so much on the monitoring but rather supporting. So facilitating training and making sure that the public sector bodies that are in scope or that have the chance of being evaluated or monitored that they get the support they need so that it's not just the police coming and say hey you're making mistakes here but rather saying look what we found and here is how you can solve it. So having that consultative approach I think that is really a best practice across Europe and then there are many tools and good ways of doing this but your question was if the policies are meeting the requirements for the actual users and then I would say unfortunately no not yet and that has to do with mostly two things the standards and I'm also doing standards so I believe standards are extremely important and we need them and so on but the current standards we have have a really wide gap when it comes specifically for people with cognitive disabilities. So the current legislation the policies and the standards the technical requirements are mostly focusing on people with physical disabilities and very much the technical parts which means how the assistive technology works together with with the websites or app which is extremely important and really the baseline everyone needs to solve that but there are at least two-thirds or so of the actual user needs that we do not really yet control for a test for in to that extent because those are mainly soft recommendations that are not part of the legislation. So that I think is something that needs to be improved in the future and I hope that in the current update of the standards that act as presumed conformance for the legislation that we will be able to sneak in some requirements that make this more useful for a broader scope of users in the in the next version and of course standards needs to be continuously updated and also I think it's a problem with or not it has to be this way I guess but the technology is evolving extremely quickly we get new assistive technologies also out on the market and the user behavior and user needs is also changing very quickly so of course standards policies regulations they do not keep up with this with this development so we will always be as policymakers and standards development organizations we will always be a little bit behind I think or sometimes a lot behind but everyone is doing their best to to make sure that we get get to the point where where the technology really supports as many users as possible another thing that I think is really something that needs to be improved not only when it comes to the implementation of the web accessibility directive but in general when it comes to accessibility work is that we need to involve the actual users much more we need to be able to involve users with disabilities in standardization and also in monitoring and in testing and I hope that more and more people disabilities will will make their voices heard because there is a really good right in the in the web accessibility directive for providing feedback which is of course golden gifts if if the public sector body website responsible for the website or website owner if they get real actual feedback from real users that is so much more valuable than than what any technical expert can can provide in a boring report so involving the users in every step of the way and of course in development and design and so on that is extremely important and we see also that that is one of the biggest I think gaps in how the implementation of the directive is happening across the board in in the European member states so that is what I'm really hoping for for in the future and and we in standardization are trying our best to make sure that the standardization processes and methods are as accessible as as possible and I also want to make sure that everyone knows maybe in this audience we only have standardization experts so then it's not an issue but this time around when we update the EN 301549 which is the European norm the EN standard that is harmonized to act as presumed conformance both for the web accessibility directive but then also when the accessibility act enters into force in 2025 this time we have a much more transparent process so even if you are not involved in standardization yet which I of course hope that you are and and and will continue to be then there is still a chance to to make comments and follow the work in in GitLab that Etsy has provided so make sure that you if you have views and ideas on how the standard can be improved then every the contributions from everyone is is most welcome and it's also easier now to understand how the process of this work is is happening because we have this this open forum for for discussions around the requirements thank you thank you very much for the great overview as you know the the session is called State of Web Accessibility I think Ms. Lauren has provided a great example of an overview of what is currently at stake and where there is a room for improvement so it is much appreciated and now I would like to return to Mr. Daniel Montalvo and I would like to just go okay so we have two very very um let's say a hot topic discussions later during the day we're going to be looking at AI and Metoverse and so on so I would just like to start a bit on the theme with basically just having this link between emerging technologies and how web accessibility is keeping up so I would like to ask Mr. Daniel Montalvo so in your role at the World Wide Web Consortium so how are you addressing the challenges of integrating emerging technologies like AI and interactive media into into global web accessibility standards and how do you see these global standards supporting or complimenting regional accessibility efforts thank you very much for your question and it's a pleasure to be here with you all we first of all when W3C thinks something could go into a standard firstly we need to do is to actually gather user requirements get involved get engaged with people with disabilities making sure there's solid basis for us to then be able to include those those requirements in the standards and of course with with artificial intelligence we are doing that actively we have some documents that collect user requirements in the context of augmented reality and multimedia and RTC those requirements are now a little bit probably old now that they were they were started in 2019 but of course we could update those in the future there's also active promotion of research from within W3C in in in relation with artificial intelligence we have had two symposia for related to to AI and accessibility the last of those was actually more focused on evaluation how artificial intelligence can influence accessibility evaluation and at this point I'd like to to bring up the question as to what actually do we mean by AI AI can be so many things we can actually be thinking of an AI that's able to evaluate a website better than we're doing now with with all the tools it may or may not be possible but AI may also be used as an assistive technology itself you could have AI that's able to query the information that's on the website and based on people's questions or people so users input they can give you the information you're you're looking for they can give you summaries and they can give you so basically there's all sorts of things that respond by the name of artificial intelligence and we are we are actively tracking those as to how this is going to be part of the standards this is uh I'm sorry to say this is a little bit premature at the moment to say we do anticipate that probably the conformance models of future standards may be influenced by what artificial intelligence can do in terms of evaluation and how they can express the results and the outcomes of this evaluation uh if as you probably already know WCAG is based on whether you pass or fail the success criteria there's been of course comments that this is unfair in some situations and I completely get that so maybe in the prospects for WCAG 3 there is and there probably should be another way or different ways in which we can actually express the the accessibility evaluation outcomes that's pretty much what I think for first question is is good let me just remind another efforts that we're doing in in W3C that could be potentially affected by artificial intelligence and for which artificial intelligence may end up being part of there's in W3C under the accessibility guidelines working group we have the accessibility conformance testing task force this is basically making sure we can reduce as much as possible the ambiguity and the test results disparity between different tools and methodologies and I do see we're working already on that uh ways in which we can use artificial intelligence to to make sure we first expand our current set of test cases so that we have probably uh of course a broader range of test cases but also more you know realistic test cases that come probably from from real websites that then can be used for for actually making sure they adhere to their rules the current rules format so yeah I would encourage people to keep an eye on that it's a a pity that we cannot share URLs in this in this panel hopefully there's a follow-up with the organizers and I will be sending URLs for you to to follow the work that W3C is doing in in that regard but we're we're basically uh on on that but yeah artificial intelligence at the moment we're not quite sure first of all how this can be evolved it's so fast and so quick the way some things are evolving that you know from from a standards organization perspective where everything happens at a slower pace it's difficult to predict at the moment but we are definitely on top of that and and we're actively monitoring the results thank you very much uh first of all I would like to uh say that if you have any any links any additional information that you would like to share with our attendees we would be more than happy to distribute them so thank you so much yeah I'm sending those perfect so we did start with the new technologies emerging technologies now and thank you very much to Mr. Montalvo for his valuable contributions we will I guess we will be seeing a lot more on the topic during next year's maybe the sixth seventh edition of accessible Europe hopefully this is the fifth so we're we're still discovering that that that field let's say so um touching upon new technologies I would like to turn to Mr. Stainer Scottia so in your leadership at Incluso I wanted to see how you were navigating the the challenges of incorporating inclusive design and the development of new web technologies so and also what key strategies would you recommend for for diverse industry sectors as well thank you thank you thank you very much um it's uh it's an honor to to be invited to this panel um just for context Incluso is a a fairly small consulting company based in in Denmark we are working with both private customers and we also are contracted to do or to support in the monitoring of the implementation of the web accessibility directive monitoring in um in the Danish public sector so we have also been heavily involved in in developing and I'd also almost like to see you say frontiering the uh the methods for how to reliably evaluate website accessibility both in the simplified and and in-depth monitoring methodologies but before I go into the details I'd like to to bring your attention to some some more broader terms because um in your introduction Ekmel you are asking about how we can work with inclusive design uh so I just quickly like to touch on a few key principles that I think is important and I tend to vision this is a mountain at the top of the mountain maybe they're up there in the in the foggy clouds somewhere there is the concept of universal design that's where we need to be universal design is the concept of a world that provides equitable experiences for everyone um you can't always see that goal maybe it's even slightly utopian uh but that's where we need to strive for you also have the act of climbing up that mountain that is what I look at uh when I think about inclusive design because inclusive design is action oriented it is moving towards the top of that mountain moving closer to that goal of of universal design and then there is the concept of accessibility to me accessibility is the amount of meters or feet you have climbed so far it's a measure of how far you've come and and I think that's really important and it would also cut into some of the things I will be touching on so it's so it's important to keep keep the focus on this this this mountains up because that's where we need to go um so I have I've I've actually identified three barriers that we see in our work both for supporting private companies especially we see a an increasing focus in the bank and finance sector um of course with relation to the european accessibility act coming into force which is a really really a positive thing um the first one is complexity because the whole system or uh community if you will around accessibility is very very complex it is technically complex um working with inclusive design as a designer or developer is a completely new skill set that we need to acquire um and currently this is very rarely taught in educations so how do we expect the young and upcoming designers and developers to know this if they are not taught um in their education secondly it's it's technically complex uh because you are not always in control of or your of all your digital solutions you might may procure something third party from another vendor you may be using um of the shelf products where you at least to to a little extent can can improve the accessibility so we need to work on really a lot of different levels it's a lot of advocacy work it's a lot of inspirational work um and and looking at some solutions for this I think including inclusive design and accessibility into curriculum in higher education is one of the key factors um the second barrier that we meet is slightly related uh because um it is technically complex and many of the building blocks if you will or systems that we are working with in this field are almost actively working against us because they don't support the uh needs that we as accessibility experts and accessibility advocates or users or website owners or app developers have so every little uh bit of work we do needs to be almost customized sometimes it feels like we are building uh building uh electric trains with Lego bricks so for each time we need to build something we have to file these Lego bricks to look like uh electric train uh tracks instead of just having um building blocks that we could use out of the box that would at least bring some level of accessibility as a basic so I think that's another factor where we need to focus on building um as much support for our work in the systems that we use uh that can be anything from a PDF generation software to uh component libraries for developing apps or websites and the third aspect I'd like to point to is the uh the concept of compliance because compliance is only only gets you as far as as the law or the legislation requires and as Susanna completely correctly pointed out the interesting thing here is whether whether it works for the users in principle a user doesn't care if something is compliant if it doesn't work for them the way they need to use it um so we need to ensure that these these building blocks are become better we need to ensure not only involvement of users but meaningful involvement of users um because if it's not meaningful then it can be a more of a show-off thing than an actual improvement to the to the process and and and the work um from our experience starting from a compliance perspective is very rarely uh constructive our experience tells us that the best way to approach improving accessibility in any organization or project is to start by creating a shared language around accessibility a shared understanding of the um user needs that we are needing to to think about uh building empathy building understanding and on top of that uh implementing processes that we can trust so if we trust these processes we will also as a almost as a byproduct end up building compliant solutions um because legislation is a good trigger and a good motivator but it's not the end goal and in my view it should not be the uh the tool that we use to drive this work it could be a trigger motivator but it should not be the the tool so those are some of the perspectives from from our world and and we and they resonate in both the the private sector and the public sector in in in my experience thank you very much um so first of all i would like to uh just say that we also have a another panel uh following up on universal design and standardization so we had a really nice introduction within the context of web accessibility as well which is super appreciated and um so now i would like to uh turn to dr eric veloman here and um i will have a bit of a futuristic question for you uh because you have extensive research in the area so i i would like to hear from you about the emerging frontiers and digital accessibility research that you believe will significantly influence um um policy and practice in the near future um especially with regards to the um realm of inclusive web design thank you yes so that that is not really a simple question so so i prepared a 20 page document here and uh just to see where to start you know the the emerging technologies are also on the program today uh we'll have uh people present presenting about ai and about the metaverse and about other technologies um i i work at the han and at the han we are currently supporting next generation internet uh projects that the EU has these continuing calls like everybody who's interested here every two months there is a technical call where you can fill out a a form of about three pages and then within three weeks you know if you get your funding and that the funding is up to 50 000 euros and and the idea is that you are working on innovative next generation internet applications and then looking at accessibility security privacy and aspects like that so if you're wanting to build an open source platform or whatever a tool uh to uh to test for accessibility this might be the best instrument to get funding for that um so at the moment we are supporting about 600 of these innovation projects and we all send them information about accessibility and um and we we help them with other partners we help them on privacy security packaging diversity inclusion everything um to make sure that they implement accessibility from the start of their project we have not only auditors at han university and a lot of organizations who work with us but we also have users with disabilities and we try to sort of link them up with the projects and then i said 600 projects i don't know if you and i have any idea how much work it is to consult 600 projects on accessibility but it is fairly easy because uh i think about half of the projects uh and i will say beforehand i work at han it is a i work at the technical part of the university of applied sciences so i'm surrounded by technical people and i think about the half is too much but one third of the projects we have really difficulty understanding what they are doing so that is the level of innovation we're looking at and that is also if you look at the guidelines and the standards uh is something that is difficulty to difficult to catch in standards so we see a lot of application new projects where we have difficulty applying existing standards so we sort of have to sit down with users and sort of think up a way of what will these standards have meant or what will users have meant to that these standards exist and what does that mean for this specific application or project that is really uh gigantic work so 600 projects but it is great fun we see the newest things going by so the idea is of the the funding of next generation internet the idea is i think that the uh out of 100 projects or maybe 600 projects there is one that is the next facebook or the next twitter or well whatever or the next tesla so but we have a few problems we also at han and at another organization where i work we get a lot of questions now from industry i mean we talked about public sector body organizations and how they implement accessibility and we learned a lot from that but now we're getting questions from industry and looking at the accessibility act and getting sort of alarmed because in one and a half years they have to comply and uh and what you see is that they first they are searching for help and some of them we need a lot of help so we talk to two banks in the netherlands and every one of those banks has more than we we think a thousand products and services so and for all these products and services they are looking to have audits and based on these audits they want to have plans on how to approach this to be ready in on the 28th of june 2025 which is closer than you would think and what we see is that at the same time the dutch government in this case is asking us to audit all public sector body websites which in the netherlands which is a really small country um are about 16 000 websites so just imagine every audit by a user and a professional two days using tools and and a manual audit maybe one day still 16 000 days that is and i think it's two days so it will be around 32 000 days and then that's just the public sector bodies then i haven't looked at all these companies who are all that you looked at the list it was presented yesterday by ima placentia porero this gigantic list of companies that have to uh uh uh comply with the accessibility act so what are we missing we are missing professionals we are missing like stein eric said in the curriculum i almost see no curricula where accessibility diversity equity inclusion is a part so at the moment there are still students coming out of university who have never heard of accessibility what we i mean and and i i like the approach uh by uh by susanna laurin who said that the consulting approach is good so not just send a a boring report but help them yeah well i like that but for that we need a lot of people and and the other thing is the users where can we find the users to actually help these organizations like in the Netherlands like these 16 000 websites but all these companies in the accessibility act so we have to come up with a way of involving users and finding these users in the Netherlands this is very difficult and then this new technology where i mean if you've never heard of accessibility and then you're in some sort of a strange technology uh uh how would you how would you even understand what you have to do um so let me see in the last one here yeah and then i see that the approach is stein eric also addressed this is from is mostly on compliance and i think what is missing is the organizational processes so i did my phd on so that's why i always come back to organizational processes but i'm i'm sure that is the thing so making websites is not accessible or making technology accessible is not the work of an individual in an organization it is an organizational process where this individual is supported uh where where his colleagues receive training and there are users who help if you can find them and professionals it's not only a technical job it is not only normative it's not only compliance it is a nice start as i think susanna said but it's there is more to it so you should look at which organizational processes influence the successful initiation and implementation of accessibility and that is i think a work we still have to do a lot of work on i know that w3c has a document on that the maturity model i think they call it and i think it would be good for everyone to have a look there and see what this maturity model entails and how you can implement it into your own organization and in my phd study i found a sort of a relation uh correlation between five processes and the actual successful implementation of web accessibility so anyone interested can have a read there wonderful thank you so much and um now we've uh let's say set the context with the with many with our experts from diverse backgrounds and expertise in this panel so we discussed policy standards design innovation as well all together right now now i would like to well we have 10 more minutes left so i would like to just make a very brief second round with one question for all of our panelists and it would be more of a takeaway message from you because we've already addressed um uh well the current state and and where a lot of a lot of gaps are remaining like difficulty applying standards need for more experts compliance functionality and also involvement of users with lived experience but i would like to hear from uh each of our panelists uh what do you perceive as the most pressing gap in web accessibility and what practice would you recommend uh to address this gap directly but you know you don't have to this is uh this is a very short takeaway message let's say so that we can also have time for the coffee break so i will i will give the uh floor to each one of you again uh to see um what do you think should be prioritized um so i would like to leave the floor to mr. Guillermo Rodriguez thank you uh well i think there is a bit different between organisms obviously a town hall with uh 500 inhabitants uh hasn't got the same capabilities to improve accessibility than a ministry and apart from that uh so their speaker say we recognize that it is difficult to include uh accessibility in development cycles uh sometimes the focus is not placed into accessibility until the website is developed and at this moment is very difficult to tour back and to face the problems in our organisms uh in the digital administration secretary we establish a methodology we check the accessibility of the designs and wareframes to solve the problems early and we annually schedule accessibility reports and when we identify problems uh we establish a three month period to solve them and after this period we review again to verify that the problems are solved and we have an initiative that is a design design system uh that we have created and the i think that this initiative is interesting because apart from other benefits like uh common language uniformity and usability uh we create a web accessible web components and we guarantee the accessibility of this component when other organisms reuse them uh is going to be more difficult to make mistakes no no more thank you very much from what i understand you do have a structured process that is working well so congratulations on that i would like to return to me slurring for the same question please so i think we have already touched on the most important parts which is the lack of competence and the need to train more more experts and so on and also for my for me personally i think that that the whole industry is kind of working backwards uh i don't see why why we first develop things that are inaccessible and then we try to remediate them afterwards so i would like to change that and kind of shift left that would be the best way to do this so that it's default you know by default built inaccessible from from the start so we don't need the whole group of of experts i mean i've been living from doing that for my whole life and it's a nice it's a nice job but i think we our competencies can be can be used better than than remediating the same problems all over again but really the biggest gap i think is the attitude of society that this is still seen as something that uh you can discuss if it's a small or a big group but still a specific thing for specific people or specific target audiences i think that is the mind mindset we need to change because with uh internet being such a or digital interface is being such a big part of everyone's life these days accessibility isn't just about people disabilities it's really about everyone and we see in all our research that users who do not claim to have any accessibility issues or any disability whatsoever still struggle with with the similar issues that people disabilities do of course because we're all human so i i think that attitude shift and and making it making sure accessibility is is kind of a broad and holistic uh part of what every designer ux designer or developer or content manager should should think about that should be kind of a natural part of of working with digital interfaces that that's where i where i think the biggest gap is will we have may i ask there are also questions in the q and a will we have time to respond to them or am i supposed to respond in writing um we might take one question if we manage to finish the time but the cunei uh i believe our colleagues would be able to help you if you would like to answer on the chat as well but we might be able to take one question let's see okay so thank you very much uh i would like to without further ado uh let's uh let's turn to mr daniel montalva thank you very much uh so i'm i'm not on zoom so if someone have questions for me uh i'm sorry i can answer right now but i guess there's all the means to reach me or to reach like mel if you know there are specifics so briefly uh competence lack of competence everyone said that to expand on that uh there's two main focuses in addition to of course developers designers don't know much about accessibility there's also the issue that authoring tools that's a probably a w3c very specific term so i'm meaning lms cms the tool you used to create the website no one these days sits around and writes their own html scissors and and and even javascript code these days you just you know pick your own tool and and start from that these tools uh could do more for accessibility let's put it that way and that would solve so many issues from the very beginning if you had a tool that's able to create accessible content then there's at a browser level what is happening there browsers could browsers are now much more forgiving in the sense that if you make a mistake pretty much nothing happens you may get a warning or you may get a error on the console no one except the very technical people have a look at that but they could also try to you know if not solve at least guide the author in a way they are creating their their accessible content i'm thinking more how to handle focus how to handle some some of the keyboard interactions that these days you pretty much yourself have to code or you have to rely on the you know tool that you're using that this has been coded correctly so those are the main issues that i see there in terms of best practices uh there's a lot happening these days in the wpc ecosystem in the web platforms test that's wpt that in addition to being a world paddle tour this is web platform test in the wpc contest that's wpt.fyi there's a lot of way aria that we're trying to move in terms of testing to to that automated test that's going to give much more reliability as to what kind of area you can use and how you can use that and there's a lot of resources there's a lot of outreach resources under w3.org slash way that's w3.org slash wai that you can check last thing for me main takeaway all the things that that i said are important but this one is very important don't go straight away to WCAG don't do that this is not useful if you don't you know if you need some information go to the other resources first uh get information and then check WCAG i know so many people that you know get to WCAG they're not really able to understand that they never came back to the to the website and that is a problem because we do really have resources that are informative that are good for outreach but if you know if you go straight away to WCAG that's a very technical document and it's not for everybody to read and understand we do want people who is trained in accessibility who have competence in accessibility and the first thing they should do is actually get to the to the other outreach resources that we have thank you very much now i would like to uh turn to mr stain eric scott yeah thank you eggmail um and um thank you to eric for actually making it very clear to me what my proposition would be for the biggest gap because you are you are exactly right i think our biggest challenge is scalability and sustainability because as much as i love supporting organizations in in working with inclusive design and accessibility there are only so many of us accessibility experts and also users uh to support this so we need to build out more scalable ways of of ensuring that accessibility is um let's say become the default in any system in any innovation process so that they do not need support on uh on remediating as susanna excellently also put it because we need to build out uh educational resources we need to build out systems that support us rather than work against us and we clearly also need innovation to be able to handle these things without intervention of consultants at at every step so i think that is my main main takeaway from from this session thank you very much and last but not least dr bellarmine please yeah so i think i already made my point more or less but i i do support what the other speakers in the panel said so i i sort of really agree with them i i think make sure you get this in the processes in your organization and don't leave accessibility to to one person or two persons make sure everybody supports this this is also the mindset i think that susanna talked about that that is needed in the whole of society thank you very much and with this contribution i would like to um thank all of our panelists i believe we have gathered uh immensely um helpful insights into the web accessibility um well the current stage of web accessibility and what is to come as well and um of course for that to um be be helpful we need a realistic picture of what we have in hand and um i believe that your insights have um really helped us understand better what specific challenges are challenges are lying and how we can address them effectively so thank you very much for all of our speakers for being here today with us and now i would like to invite everyone for a 15 minute coffee break in the next room uh you can see to the right uh and um uh we will reconvene at 11 30 thank you hello everyone can i ask everyone to get seated please thank you please get seated so that we can start thank you everyone and welcome back from the coffee break i hope you had a nice uh little break and now we're going back to our sessions uh thematic sessions and now we will be delving into universal design and standardization um so this specific session will be moderated um with uh many thanks to it telecommunications standardization bureau uh by karu mizuno a program coordinator at the study groups department there uh so i would like to invite me's karu mizuno to the stage welcome and uh we will be joined by uh again an impressive lineup of speakers so i would like to invite mr roberto sano ict accessibility expert at um at cn accessible eo welcome uh you can go yes perfect and i would like to invite mr adel hussein a senior expert at the authority for universal design of ict of norway welcome and next up i would like to invite me's lydia best a president of the european federation of um hard-of-hearing people and uh next up i would like to invite mr rickardo garcía vajamonde head of accessibility and digital inclusion at atos iberia and last but not least i would like to invite me's kathen bow hill director of esg development at an impact at telephonica i would like to thank all of our um esteemed panelists and i leave the floor to our moderator me's kou mizuno thank you thank you very much ecmaire their colleagues panelists and participants hello and welcome to session four on universal design of technology for digital accessibility it is my great honor to be the moderator for this session as already introduced my name is karu mizuno i'm a program coordinator in the study groups department of the telecommunication bureau of it use standardization sector i'm working on accessibility coordination through my role of acting as secretary to it groups related to accessibility one is it u i r g a v a that is an intersecting group working on working on audio visual media accessibility standardization and other is it duty jca af this is the coordination group on activities related to accessibility within it and also with other entities to foster a collaboration and to avoid the duplication of efforts for those who are not familiar with it ut it develops international standards known as it ut recommendations its work on accessibility has started at early 1990s a number of it ut standards on accessibility have been developed since then it use approach is based on universal design concept so that products and services complying standards are usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized design it use standards are also built on consensus based on mature technologies collaborating with other entities and sdos including organizations in europe of course we also collaborate with other un agencies like wto to develop standards on accessibility of e-health now this session will explore how universal design is integrated in technologies while emphasizing the role of standardization as universal design was addressed by several panelists yesterday and today it is one of the important key approaches for developing accessible technologies i am very excited that we are joined today by leading experts in this area from both public and private sectors who will be sharing their insights and experience with us at the first round i would like to ask all panelists a general question to open the discussion by understanding their focused work activities experiences as they have vast experiences in this area so i would appreciate if you could include a very brief introduction of yourself before elaborating your answer so now please join me in welcoming our first panelist i would like to ask mr adi adi hussein who is an expert of universal design from norway thanks for thanks for floor my name is adi hussein i'm from norwegian digitalization agency and we use term universal design in norway instead of accessibility but when we say universal design so it means accessibility the authority for universal design in norway is responsible for following up the regulation on universal design of i-city and it is linked to the act on equality and anti-discrimination so our task in norway is to check that the organization are complying with the requirement for the web solutions and self-service machines including electronic documents and mobile applications we also have a role to inform and advise on legal and professional i-city question about universal design of i-city both in national and international level we obtain an overview of status on universal design of i-city in norway be an expert authority specialization in developing in universal design we are also responsible for for the development of our regulations linked to universal design both nationally and internationally so we want in norway we want a society and of course in europe we want a society where everyone can participate therefore universal design of i-city is a legal requirement for both public and private sector so we work continuously on development of regulation development of standards helping our businesses both in public and private sector to understand the legal and technical requirements on universal design of i-city thank you very much for sharing the comprehensive overview of the universal design concept now i i would like to ask mr robert schiano he is an i-city accessibility expert at the and accessibility u and my question is how can the principles of universal design be more effectively integrated into the current technology development process to create universally accessible accessibility digital products and what role does standardization play in this integration thank you this question is more difficult than the eric one the before it's very very difficult because when we talk about my universal design also also in italy but also in international body a lot of years ago we talked about utopia because someone say is not possible to guarantee universal design this is the most important topic that we need to to know when we write standard the the most important topic is to involve the company the public administration people with disability when we develop standard because we need to create something that suggests all the stakeholders we cannot create standard without involving the people we cannot create standard that change completely the activities the life of people without giving them benefits so our work is a difficult work to guarantee the possibility like by susana say there are some lack of situation like the cognitive disabilities that are not yet a lot up yet but we need to to guarantee that the all the environment is injected about accessibility and universal design because if we we don't insert for example standards for how the developer need to develop products we need to increase knowledge we don't need only to have web accessibility expert we need to have developer that know about accessibility we need to have designer that know about accessibility so we need to work in a big field for guarantee the utopia of universal design and we have some experience for example in Italy we have set one standard but I think we talk later about this one involving also people with disability for make a methodology for evaluate website that go over the requirement of the european accessibility directive thank you very much your insight highlighted the importance of collaborative work and thank you very much for sharing practical experience from Italy now I would like to ask miss Lydia best she is the president of european federation of hard of hearing people and we I know very well it for big throughout through the work of itut jca agf she is a co-vice chair of that group and she's an active active contributor to the itut standardization accessibility I think I would kindly ask Lydia to consider to consider your response to the to this question taking into consideration of your experiences in standardization process of recently achieved itut standards such as the overview of remote captioning services such listening guidelines for personal sound amplifiers and accessibility helps now Lydia you have the floor thank you very much for inviting me to to participate here and for the floor so it's very nice introduction so thank you Carol it's always nice to work with you all and I have to say I haven't been really born with accessibility in mind and you know I'm actually my original training is in fashion and I have made a move from fashion to accessibility and standards yeah I was just thrown in a deep water and I had to learn to swim but I do have a degree in a way of lived experience and understanding how myself and my colleagues my members are using technology in the day to day life and it's so important to to make sure that there are standardizations areas and requirements which provide for a very same expectations regardless where you are so when I am in the UK where I am living I know that the expectation the level of captioning will be exactly as I expect or in the US but there could be some other countries which may not have same level of captioning and then that's this appointment I can't follow I can't participate fully for this reason we have developed together with ITU the overview of remote captioning because right now the most popular is the remote provision and to make sure that this is the standard this is where we need to get to we know that it's not possible to get there immediately you have to train people you have to use the right tools but this is where we go so progress of a perfection but this is the perfection so that's that's the role of standards I am myself a cochlear implant user so I need access to captioning but also I need access to sound so for example hearing globes or assistive listening devices they do create the similar requirement of universal design and the standardization so again we work together to provide the overview to make it less technical and more approachable to people new to those kind of topics and lastly the latest one was thanks to the pandemic and the telemedicine moving into the telephony or the video conferencing where a lot of persons with disabilities have been left behind again as always so what we needed again is to make sure that the persons with disabilities myself and other experts work together with ITU and the World Health Organization to bring on the minimum requirements to understand what is possible what's not possible needs to be as the minimum requirement so everybody no matter where they live they get the same access the same expectations are there and I have to say it is wouldn't would not happen without the global initiative on accessible ICTs from us who is a member of ITU and make sure that we provide the delegation and a platform for experts with disabilities to participate in the standardization directly and I think you know without that I would not be able to participate so that's for sure and I am also a proud member of six thousands or so certified professionals in accessibility core competencies so I have moved truly from fashion to the other side now for sure and yeah I hope you know this brings some understanding of where the universal design comes in and where the standardization come in and the minimum we call it key performance indicators that gives us the understanding if we are providing the right access and I'm just recently flying with airlines to Japan and then just flying last night with Iberia was huge difference some airlines have entertainment so on the airline which I was flying to Japan there was this tree prompt some kind of entry which I couldn't substitute with seaport or just normal headphone jack I just couldn't substitute for my assistive listening devices but I could do that now with Iberia so there is a lot of different things which people don't realize but actually universal design applies everywhere in all areas of life thank you thank you very much Lydia for sharing impressive work you have been involved in and highlighting the importance of collaborative work with all stakeholders I also would like to thank you for mentioning Japan for as your recent experience and because there is a lot of difference in culture and there is a need to consider the cultural gap to implement universal design now I would like to ask Mr Ricardo Gracia Bahamond sorry for my pronunciation and he is the head of accessibility and digital inclusion atas Iberia so my question is the same how can the principle of universal design be more effectively integrated into the current technology development development process to create university accessibility digital products and what role does the standardization play in this integration thank you so much good morning everyone and I want to thank the ITU for inviting me to be in this panel it's a great question many of my colleagues and the friends here have already touched on some of the key aspects that need to be considered and I think we are kind of connecting dots here or ideas that make sense in the whole discourse that we are putting together we have standards I mean we have many elements so as to be able to work effectively in in making products and services more accessible and usable by everyone I think universal design are the key areas or the key aspects of course that should be followed by should be followed by whom we've been talking during the coffee break and early this morning yesterday as well of the shortage of accessibility professionals that need to know about accessibility in their daily tasks not only in design of products and services but actually in different business processes that take place in an organization like ATOS or in any government organization at different levels on a daily basis right so the first question is okay so who's involved here right who's who is affected by accessibility from the point of view of the workflows that we are all involved in on a daily basis and in our in our daily job right and in this case we were talking earlier this morning the panelists were talking about the shortage of persons with disabilities or users with disabilities or experts with disabilities that get involved become involved in in the these workflows in designing products or services and I think at this point it's it's really important to think of the different user personas that we can incorporate when designing something when designing a product or service and the user journeys because eventually this is as as it's already been mentioned here this is all about so what we do on a daily basis when we go shopping when we work when we you know when we travel tourism when we try to do some uh uh procedure with you know with some government entity file or taxes it's about being able to do it and being able to do it in equal terms and uh and eventually have a reasonably good experience right so this is the user experience the famous user experience thing in ATOS for example we're working in improving the employee experience the employee experience is about any of us being an employee of an organization so from the moment we get through the recruitment process to the onboarding retention develop our career until we leave the company but during all that time we're going to need several things that to make our life easier and to become uh productive and whatever we do has to have a really good impact on our productivity right but this is all about our experience so where does universal design what's the role that universal design for example plays in a in a in a work environment in a workplace environment and obviously accessibility right so are the is accessibility present in terms of all the tools that are applied or are used during the recruitment process right the job portals right can we all you know apply to a job online on equal terms no we know that but even if the the job portal or the application form we've all had to go through application forms right feeling them out we know it's a it's a headache you can make an application form very accessible to meet the standards as already been mentioned but what about access the usability it can be accessible it can be conformant to the standards but maybe it's a nightmare in terms of usability so we did a project so some years ago some of you here may remember and we tested some job portals and some of them were more accessible accessible conformant to than others but some of the usability of those port the usability of some of those portals was not too good right so so some of the testers with disabilities that were involved were telling me hey Ricardo you're my friend so I'm going to stick to the end we're going to try to complete it but otherwise I would have left because this is impossible right so this is all about bringing in people that more and more people that can work in accessibility in the different stages of developing and using something but obviously if you are to design a product and service that is going to be used by a whole range of users you need to know what those whole range of users are going to need right so involving persons with those different needs any of us right whether you have a disability or not or some kind of environment or you're in the gray area many of us are in the gray area right so you need to give you say something about that hey I would like this to be this way or the other right and we know that's very optimistic and that's very very challenging to do but obviously the standards are there to provide some common ground or some minimum very basics to be able to work onwards on on designing something that makes the whole experience much better and just real quick we are working on as I said generating more professionals or bringing in more professionals with with disability more professionals that work in accessibility with disability if possible we are working on certain programs apprenticeship programs and so forth because this is the one of the key issues or key challenges that we are facing the lack of the shortage of accessibility professionals that become aware of the importance of accessibility universal design but I could work hands-on in applying accessibility or accessibility principles in one way or the other in different business processes within the organization whether it's testing whether it's coding a print application whether it's procuring something of course in different in different areas so that's my take on this thank you thank you very much for your insights and sharing the practical experience in various process to make the services more accessible and highlighting implementing aspects to highlight the importance of usability of services including challenges and that needs to be addressed so now I would like to ask Miss Catherine Bohill she is director of ESG development and impact from Telefonica so I'd like to ask the same question so floor is yours thank you okay so first of all I'd like to echo my fellow panelists and like my colleague here I'm looking for an utopia as well and I want to make accessibility or universal design fashionable like Lydia because why why does Telefonica want this utopia because it's a question of business it's a question of reaching more people with our products and services it's a question of getting more talent you know there's a war on talent at the moment we want to make our company as inclusive as possible to get the best people no matter what disability further ability this is an opportunity and we really believe it now I agree and I think it was really interesting to hear Ricardo you know there is a lack of accessibility professionals and and this certainly is true but looking around the room and this great line of panelists there is loads of brains loads of clever people loads of technical people here in the room I can't imagine what everybody here is capable of doing the problem is not here in the room the problem is everybody else right and it's easy to say it's everybody else what can we do well it's our job too to change the culture to make this a CEO problem in the case of a corporation you described Lydia that that experience between the unnamed provider and the the wonderfully Barry I can tell you that that certainly wasn't the case a few years behind and again you know I'm fortunate enough and I currently I don't have a disability I may have in the future and but there's lots of things as a person without a disability I benefit and telephonic as customers benefit by accommodating because that portal frustration I've had and it's nothing to do with the disability so to summarize it's about customer and employee experience and it's about reaching more people and achieving you know you guys all know guys and girls all know the statistics 15 of the population have some kind of a disability right and we need to provide for that and we need to access this talent and this is why it's a priority at Telefonica this is something that is from the top down our mission is to make the world more human connecting people we're a telecommunications provider we connect people want to connect more people our president and CEO has echoed these he's very vocal it's a priority and within our strategic strategic plan we have clear objectives to address accessibility so you know we still have a long way to go there is difficulty and I loved the last panelist I mean I love what she said it's really sad what she said I think her name was Susanna and who connected by video and she was explaining that you know it's very hard to rectify things post we need to try and address things by design which goes back to my colleague from from the Norwegian and had the Norwegian focus it's definitely by design and that's the way we needed to focus thank you thank you very much Katherine you have thank you for your view from private sector highlighting the importance of reaching people to make services more inclusive now I would like to go to the second round of the questions so now first I would like to ask Adil in your role in fostering the universal design of ICT in your national authority please elaborate key strategies to effectively support implementation of requirements of national and EU legislation regulations on universal design what are the challenges and opportunities you perceive from your experience thank you thanks again I think universal design principles aim to create product services environment in a way that everyone can access that without their abilities and our disabilities so integrating these principles in the technology development process is crucial for creating universally designed accessible digital products and services there have been mentioned my colleagues and the previous panelists have been mentioning a lot of things about inclusive design thinking user-centric design and accessibility standard compliance with these guidelines and education training lack of accessible professionals and I will go I will just I will not go through all the discussion that have all been always being discussed but I will go first directly to a role of standardization I think a role of standardization is to establish the baseline so it helps to establish the baseline it provide us the minimum requirement to make our products universally designed but this is not this should not be the goal to just compliance with the minimum standards I guess companies need to integrate universal design and accessible into their policy and furthermore I guess the standards that are being developed should be interoperable like standard ensure the accessibility feature work consistently across different platforms different devices and application they have been very much focused on web accessibility but I want to elaborate also the accessibility issues connected to mobile applications and electronic document almost I don't know the statistics but I believe almost majority of world population now have access to smartphones unfortunately most of the mobile applications that have been developed are not universally designed and there are not much focus on accessibility of mobile applications and their lack of there are standards for example web accessibility directive also apply to mobile applications there are lack of guidance there are lack of testing procedures there are lack of testing and providing guidelines to developers designers how they can design the inclusive mobile applications and when it comes to documents there are a lot of documents PDFs are almost many people are familiar with PDF which are not always accessible so I guess there is a lack of guideline universal guideline and harmonize understanding of these standards how these understanding these standards can be applied across different platforms different devices and different ICT solutions and I think when a person land to a website or a mobile application or a document it's a it's a relation of I guess trust because trust I think is a glue between all the relations when you land on the website for example Ricardo mentioned to apply a job application you have a trust that if you land you this platform will provide you to a kind of opportunity to actually apply this job without any frustration without any hurdle without any barrier if I'm sitting on this chair I have a trust in this chair that I will not fall down off this church if we are we are standing on the floor for example so we have trust on that floor that this floor will not inside so we we have trust so I guess when a user land to a website or a platform the user have initial trust but when they interact with their ICT solution our environment our service so their trust is actually being break because the services they're in the the products their environment they're interacting with are not accessible for that person so I guess we have to keep their trust built and have to make that start that trust strong and the next point that I want to elaborate is collaboration and industry involvement there have been many many discussion about using involvement yes user is very important because they are the people who are going to use the applications and yes the business is thinking why we should implement universal design Catherine mentioned that it's about the business like you get more user for example if you have a hundred thousand user and fifteen percent of the population in a country is not able to access your your solution then you are missing fifteen percent of the customer that could be your customer if your product is universally designed so I guess here the businesses need to put their business interest on one side and come to a collaborative environment arenas where they can sit and put their business and interest behind and user interest on top of that and contribution to standards there have been mentioning a lot of my colleagues mentioned today the contribution there are W3C is working a lot with the guidelines that are described in a way that the businesses and the authorities can follow and implement in their legislation but we need more people to contribute we have I have been part of a project by tools project my colleagues are also there who have been working with that project where they develop harmonized standard harmonized test procedures test rules to test the web content but we have also developed a community in that and we need more volunteer to actually contribute that community to develop these harmonized test rules that can be used not only across the Europe but across the world this is also one of the challenge different countries have different understanding of WCAG in Europe I will just focus on the Europe so we need such a harmonization understanding of the standard and of course procedures to test ICT solution for the more inclusive employment and inclusive procurement this is very important I guess inclusive employment we need diverse people in our organization which know their pain and then they can gain the goal the other people in pain so in Norway we have a Norwegian standardization agency which is responsible for developing standards so they have actually draft two standards which are soon for hearing in parliament the first standard is about inclusive employment digitalization the standard actually named digitalization and universal design to achieve inclusive employment and the other standard which is soon on hearing is digitalization and universal design in procurement my personal experience is that the people who are working in procurement they have lack of competence in universal design they don't know the standard they don't know the requirements when they buy product and services they see in theory there is a requirement for universal design but they don't have routines they don't have this procedure competence to actually test these products against the legal requirement I guess we should also emphasize on the procurement department so that we can have inclusive employment experience we have inclusive product that deliver I don't know if I have more time more time to speak okay because I have a lot of stress in Norway as well because after the implementation of web accessibility directive so we have we are only 22 people who are working in authority Norwegian observatory or Norwegian supervision agency but after the implementation of web accessibility directive we used to perform only 10 supervision every year from 2015 to 2023 we have our national legislation on universal design since 2013 but we were not capable of supervising all the industries all these all the businesses but after the implementation of web accessibility directive so we have almost 6000 web applications that we have to perform testing mobile applications and as I said we have lack of testing procedures harmonized testing procedures are testing tool that we can use to test 6000 app in a year we have 78,000 almost 78,000 web pages I'm not talking about websites but web pages that we have to test according to our national and EU legislation and we have a lot of automatic or self-services machines like a ticketing machine we have checking machine and airport we have self-service machines in Norway and I hope in other European country we have self terminal where we can buy the things from grassy store and pay and go outside so we have self-service machines but we have in Norway we have almost according to our statistics we have 180,000 automatic machines which come under the national and international legislation so it's very hard actually to cover all the aspects so therefore we perform supervision which are risk-based supervision so we do not test all but we test some which impact we test some solutions and some businesses which impact the whole society so we have a six step supervision process we first send the notification to business get access to their ICT solutions if it's a website if it's a mobile application or automatic machine or electronic document and then we make a sample and test their web pages against a sample of our test rules that we have we have also developed our own interpretation of web accessibility guidelines WCAG and based on that accessibility interpretation of accessibility guidelines we have developed our own test rules which are also our our I want to also mention that our interpretation is also integrated in ACT rules that have been developed harmonized ACT rules that have been developed in Y tools project so our now we are developing also test rules for mobile application for the new requirements as well so we are we are almost done we we have just three months in that project and we will be publishing our test rules for mobile application as well later in in March so after we test we send a report to company to we have discussion with the business or company and then we give them 12 weeks deadline to correct that if they correct then the the case is closed if they don't correct their violations in 12 weeks then we actually announce the fine and fines in Norway are very high and we in 2022 we actually have performed the supervision on one of the largest university in Norway and they had to pay 150,000 Norwegian Kron per day fine so fine are very heavy but as I said we perform supervision which are risk-based but it impact the whole whole society in Norway for example we perform supervision on examination system in one university but the same examination system is used by all other universities so if we perform a supervision on one university if they force their supplier their render to fix these violation it means all the universities in Norway who are using this system will have the university design ICT solution so I don't want to go I would don't want to take a lot of time but I just want to come to the last point web accessibility directive how we are implementing how we actually handling the web accessibility statement as my colleagues mentioned there are two I will say it's a three main things in web accessibility directive it's a simplified monitoring it's a in-depth monitoring and we have a web accessibility statement I will start with a web accessibility statement which I have two part it's kind of wall of shame that business have to publish a statement about their ICT solutions what part of their ICT solution are not accessible and they have to provide a feedback function this is required by the European web accessibility I guess the feedback is very important that we hear the user user we hear user what user our experience what pains are they they're feeling on our ICT solution so we get the feedback what we did would develop a centralized solution for register for businesses to register their web accessibility statement so that all the user if they learn on a website for let's say Norwegian hospital they have the same format and same method to read the web accessibility statement as if they have read the web accessibility statement of police website so the web accessibility statement we develop is fully accessible so if the businesses use that format then the web accessibility statement will be accessible for all the business so that's how we do we do one standard and then we impact the whole society and for just 10 seconds maybe first a simplified monitoring we have developed our own platform to perform a simplified monitoring we used automatic tool developed by developed by our portuguese friends qual web that is an integrated on in our platform which is based on the harmonized ICT standard and for in-depth monitoring we have already experience from 2013 and we have our manual inspection to perform the in-depth monitoring thanks thank you very much for providing your comprehensive views and experiences from the perspective of national authority and highlighting various aspects of accessibility solutions and processes now I would like to ask Robert so considering your vast experience and as being expert in web accessibility and being a member of etsy and accessible IU as well as being the chairperson of e-accessibility commission in the Italian normative national body how do you perceive the impact of standardization on the effect effectiveness of universal design in digital environments could you share an example where this synergy has led to significant improvements in accessibility thank you I want to thank you the colleague because he is the reply is the answer of the question we have also in Italy some situation that the company understand the business about accessibility and understand that they can aptly standard they can involve people with disability in testing so they can guarantee more accessible product and service this is the most important topic when the friend of W3C before remember the old phrases read the free handling manual so read the WCA I want to suggest also to read the why content for the business part because it's the most important topic for integrating promote universal design if the company understand the benefit of accessibility they will improve the accessibility in their service then we know we need also love in Italy for example we have a love we have extended the web accessibility directive to big companies if they don't conform to accessibility they pay an amount they can reach the five percent of their balance that is a lot we put this one because a little fee they prefer to pay the fee instead of fix accessibility because the fee cost less than upgrade the product and service but we see that also with the italian love requirement we don't talk with technical department we talk with compliance we talk with the responsibility of the corporate social responsibility they put accessibility inside the corporate social responsibility now we talk about sustainability we need to put more accessibility also in this topic so if we develop standard that standard evolve we have a stable standard that can be happy at we have a lot of company that create new products and service that are compliant that help also customer to be compliant you talked before about the pdf we have a lot of products that we can create documents that are compliant and but we need to teach to the to the customer to the employer of a public administration of company to use correctly the products to export correctly the documents so also in this case there is a lack of knowledge of the power of the products that they have so the most important topic and I close so you can move to to other expert is that we have the standard we have the implementation of the standard and now what we need we we need to expand the interest of the companies to apply the standard as an opportunity not as a love requirement thank you very much for sharing your practical example how to foster the implementation of requirements highlighting that it is an opportunity not requirements thank you very much now I would like to ask Lydia the given your unique perspective as an expert with live experience how do you see standardization enhancing universal design in digital solutions for the herd of hearing people what standards do you believe are crucial in this context and I have an additional question how do you see the roles like your role your capacity of IAP CPSCC in supporting efforts in both standardization and universal design in ICT Lydia who are you thank you very much floor again so I haven't been here yesterday but I heard that yesterday there was a lot of discussion about the need of more accessibility professionals and I'm hearing it today as well so I'm the global initiative on accessible ICT on inclusive ICTs has been working for a few years now on their accessibility rights education which is digital there sorry DARE which is digital accessibility rights education and created a fund to ensure that the persons with disabilities become themselves a experts in accessibility and bring that expertise further of course it's not enough we need more we keep hearing that but this is the start and this is a collaboration with international association of accessibility professionals which provides the certification and they are of course looking forward to working with accessible you and my association European federation of hard of hearing people has been quite active in making sure that of a person especially hard of hearing experts to realize that there is this opportunity and we can apply for the fund and to to participate in standardization further and provide the expertise I think it's important it's important to encourage the experts because personally sometimes I'm looking around and I see all these different job offers for accessibility professionals but I'm just keeping away from it because it doesn't feel like it's something that I can give to the persons to the companies and yeah it is sometimes it can be very confusing and complicated I once asked it's mostly around the visual issues which is true you know that the ICTs themselves are not accessible but then my experience with aeroplanes is in high city so yes there is also accessibility so I think we need to be much more encouraging and more creative in bringing the expertise to the table as well to make sure that the experts realize that yes you may not fit exactly to that job description but actually you can fit in another one so you need to widen the scope basically not to narrow it that's one thing in terms of standards which are the requirements for majority of people who have a hearing loss use hearing devices be it hearing aids or cochlear implants access to sound is important because often it's enough for some of the people and so we need to be able to either have access to environment like here build environment with hearing loop which access directed to the microphone or we're using the assistive devices so they just simply can plug into whatever ICT is out there and they can swap this from the standard headphones which do not support our way of the needs of hearing access and then captioning captioning and the quality of it and then yes very often we see captioning being provided but is this actually usable is this something we can use if someone provides me on the entertainment on the plane or anywhere else a movie with captioning which is transparent and therefore it's very difficult to read the captioning especially when it is white background in the tele in the in the movie when you haven't provided me with accessibility you think you did but I can't follow it so I can't read it therefore there isn't one so these standards are very important and of a standard which is increasingly important and it's needed is the telehealth we just started the telehealth but from what I've seen and I think everybody else in this room have seen that the medical professionals have discovered the telehealth in a way as widening the reach to different people but also not realizing that it can stop you from gaining the access to to to health professionals so the accessibility of those services are crucial if I am supposed to make a call to my practitioner who sends me the information via the short message on my mobile yes here is your appointment if you want to change it please make a call I'm sorry but it's not accessible no you have to make sure that I can actually do it using my mobile using the application and I'm going to do that so I think those are very important parts and of course the ability what I see also is the trend of going pushing for the digital way as much as possible without having a backup so don't break something or change something what is working well just use complimentary services when a user does not really feel comfortable of using the ICTs and you know we think about majority of the people with hearing loss are people who are older and they still struggle so we need to make sure that we are catering both ways ICTs are great but sometimes the traditional way is also important so I don't think I can add more and I've got lots lots of ideas in terms of what standards are needed safety included in the hotels but that probably is a discussion for another time and I would like to mention that as part of the G3 ICT which is the global initiative for inclusive ICTs our organization is also drawing from the knowledge and participating in smart cities for all to ensure that we are also making sure that cities are accessible to all and Monika my colleague is here as well so she's just hiding now she is living on that program so just widen the scope to ensure that you can bring that talent of pool available to you you may even not know who you've got but also ensure that the whatever is being brought in whatever is brought forward like everybody else before me have said start from the beginning because it's so difficult to change things afterwards thank you thank you very much Lydia sorry I was not aware of the time construction so how much time do we have okay so maybe I would ask quickly quickly to Ricardo and Catherine as the final comment so probably I prepared a question but I would like to ask you as a final comment as a takeaway thank you thank you final comment so we've been talking about implementation of accessibility and standards and under legal mandates at different levels country levels Europe also organizations I think it's really important that country level at a national level or a regional level even so that it can you know trickle down a transfer onto organizations that there is a change in the narrative right there people that someone mentioned earlier this morning that persons with disabilities are still to a great extent are invisible so I think it's really really important to change the narratives just as other topics have been successful at doing that so in this case I want to give kudos to this organization Fundación on there for what they've been doing in the last 40 years 35 years and in this case Mr. Jesús Hernandez has been playing a cute role in that I think it's really really important to send that message and to let that message sink into society because that's the way that it's going to sink into organizations in what they do and obviously within an organization they need to become aware of all this and from a governance standpoint policies are super critical Roberto was mentioning earlier today that without governance without a policy you're not going to be able to do anything so we've adopted that at ATOS and we we tend to say that we see accessibility barriers as pollution as pollution as a result of the production process in this case of the digital production process that generates accessibility barriers if not all the standards are follow all the rules are follow you're going to have pollution right and Eric Bellman this morning he mentioned maturity models as well we do a lot of those as well and we and the best takeaway that I get from those is that you open the eyes to the people that you talk in an organization and you do a maturity model assessment because you involve people from different key areas and you talk about this and you ask them the questions and the methodology we follow and the key variables and enablers we we analyze and you guide them through these conversations and they open their eyes to stuff that they didn't know about you know they were not aware in their own business areas that's why this is important how they are affected and what they really need to do about that to move to the next level of maturity so in that case procurement you mentioned a deal they did this morning we've successfully implemented accessibility into our into others procurement processes that's been a long a pretty milestone significant milestone but we are proud of that because that's going to start that's going to trigger other processes with our vendors internally as well right and the finally just to highlight that as I said in order to gain traction and in order to gain scalability all these processes need to be interconnected and obviously the key to me to raise all these awareness and to get all the process started is to gain buying from the top leadership of the organization whether it's government or whether it's an individual organization in public sector or in private sector and corporate so that's all for me thank you thank you very much and gasoline yeah just quickly so three points first point this is about business I think that's very clear and we just have to make that is a global people take it consciously that this is valid and I think we need to work hard everybody spreading this message and getting it to the leaders right also the second point is this is by design we need to think about accessibility by design we're doing this at telephonica we have a goal that 100% of our new products and services by 2025 will be accessible along with sustainability and artificial intelligence ethical criteria so accessibility is a key pillar and it has to be done by design rectifying things after takes longer and is more costly the third point is this is a huge ecosystem this is about working together with alliances telephonic has alliance with on say we're working with the itu this is really important we don't work in isolated my colleague was explaining about the problems with mobile apps we deliver mobile services mobile apps is part but we can't do this alone we have to do our part but this alone and this is why standards and international standards are so important I think the itu my last role in telephonica was spectrum and they seem to be able to get the spectrum bands very well organized in a global area and I just wonder because the it's closer to the money and I think we need to make sure that accessibility is understood as being close to the money thank you thank you very much dear panelists for sharing the valuable views views and experiences I believe the discussion will continue for the afternoon session on AI and metaverse the new areas of technology we need to work hard further and together I would like to thank you for all of your kind attention with that this session has concluded thank you thank you very much to all of our panelists for their valuable insights and now I would like to invite everyone for the lunch break to the next door next room we will reconvene at two here again in the main room thank you recording stopped recording in progress can I please ask everyone to get seated please thank you and get seated please we're about to start thank you hello and welcome back everyone I hope you had a nice lunch break and you're enjoying all the delicacies Spain has to offer so now we're kicking off with the the last part of our event so now in the afternoon we are going to have two sessions one on AI and emerging technologies and the second one on metaverse so it's quite so future oriented I would say so to begin with I would like to first of all invite to the stage our next panelists and the moderator of the AI and emerging technologies in improving digital accessibility session so I would like to invite to the stage Mr Guillem Martinez Rura artificial intelligence and robotics program officer of ITU and also I would like to announce that this session is moderated with many thanks to Guillem and also AI for good initiative so we're very happy to have them here with us today so next up I would like to invite Almudena Arcade director of research development and innovation of Nassia Nonsei welcome yes and then next up we have Mr Daniel Casas accessibility policy officer from European disability forum welcome and next up we would have Georgia or George whichever you prefer founder of Sinovatar joining us yes we also have two speakers that are joined to be that are going to be joining us online today so I would like to introduce Mies Maria Ignacia Rodriguez Espinoza head of public and international affairs of foundation the screw them up and their participation is is also thanks to the zero project that they're partnering with so we are going to have them you're going to have them on the screen soon and then next up we have Dr Carlos Duarte associate professor of University of Lisbon joining us and we have Dr Miguel Angel Valero Duvor professor from the full technique University of Madrid joining us today please and finally last but not least we have another remote panelist joining us Mies Polina Lavandoska she's the secretary of international federation of hard hearing young people we are very honored to have such an impressive lineup of speakers and I wish you all the best with your session and thank you very much so thank you very much eggmail I hope everyone can hear me well so dear colleagues distinguished panelists and participants good afternoon everyone I would like to thank you all first of all for inviting ITU AI for good to join this panel I'm Guillem Martinez Rora I'm the AI and robotics program coordinator at the ITU in Geneva and I'm working at the AI for good platform and initiative for the ones who don't know AI for good is the leading United Nations platform on sustainable and inclusive artificial intelligence and is organized by the ITU together with 40 UN sister organizations and could convene with Switzerland and it's a privilege to introduce this session today and moderate this panel this esteem panel of speakers on AI and emerging technologies for digital accessibility at accessible Europe 2023 so some introductory remarks from the moderator as AI continues to advance its impact becomes increasingly evident in all aspects of of our life demonstrating tremendous potential for social good and the wage the ways in AI can really enable economic and social progress are endless with a transformative character that really can help us achieve the sustainable development goals that were agreed five years ago by the member states of the of the United Nations to improve life on earth by 2030 so AI for good was created like really for this to identify practical solutions using AI and scale those solutions for global impact and really help accelerate progress towards the sustainable development goals and as we navigate the ever abled being digital landscape it is crucial to recognize that inclusivity is not a mere option but an essential element for a truly equitable digital society and there is there is exactly where AI emerges as a powerful tool holding immense promise for bridging the accessibility gap and empowering individuals with disabilities to fully participate in everyday life activities and today we gather here at foundation on theme to delve into the latest developments in AI powered accessibility explore emerging trends by our our expert panel on this topic and discuss the challenges and opportunities ahead and together we can and is what we want and this I think it's the first activity of many more on on this topic on AI and accessibility that we can shape the future where digital accessibility is not just a goal but really a reality for all and this session will constitute of two main parts so in the first part we will look into use cases and opportunities on AI when it comes to increase digital accessibility and for that I will be asking our steam panelists two questions and in the second part we will explore challenges and the way forward in terms of regulation followed by a Q&A with with all our audience today so we have a distinguished panelist distinguished set of panelists today but as always we are counting counting on you the audience to really help create a very interactive session and without further ado I would like now to give one minute of initial remarks to each of our speakers so they can present themselves so you have one minute and I would like to start with Modena she's the director of research development and innovation for that you're not there thank you very much good afternoon everybody thank you for having me here and representing from that you're not there and the research and development and innovation area my remarks my one minute remark will go to I'll be very happy to present and to share with you some of the projects that put artificial intelligence at the center and the core of our research to help and improve the lives of people with disability in different areas but I've just brought two examples to you this afternoon and but I also would like this session to talk about what I think are the three pillars for artificial intelligence now and the future which are data for me and I would go on three pillars would be data data and data but but I'll be a bit more creative and I'll say is that we need to talk about data we need to talk about algorithms and we need to talk about use cases and for us those three aspects are three different focuses for us all and in particular for the for the purpose of our research now I would like to give the floor to Daniel Casas so hello everyone I'm Daniel Casas I come from the European Disability Forum which is the umbrella organization that represents persons with disabilities at the European level what I'm trying to do with one minute is basically explain what we are doing on artificial intelligence so in the last years we've been quite active on the field of digital accessibility in ICT because there's many legislation being developed at the European level and many standards so we try to be active with the whole disability community in those discussions so when it comes to artificial intelligence it's true that we started working on it as a reaction to some extent to the European Commission proposals that was presented now some years ago and there was a partial agreement quite recently so in that moment we realized that we needed to come up with a strong position and what it really means AI for persons with disabilities and we had two basically main things that we wanted to stress on the negotiations the first one was accessibility so when the technology was being developed we needed to ensure that it was accessible for persons with disabilities and that no barriers no new barriers were being created and I can talk about it later and the second part was also to ensure that there were no new cases of discrimination as a result of the technology so this is when we started working on on this topic and also recently we get funding to implement a project on AI and I have a colleague which is called Kave Nori you can search on the website who's the AI policy officer he's doing a great job and his task is twofold on the one hand to ensure that the perspective of persons with disabilities is present in the policy debate that is taking place currently all over Europe and the world so that the rights of persons with disabilities are present and on the other hand to train and to build the capacity of the disability community as well to be present in this type of discussions because we know that AI has lots of benefits for society for persons with disabilities there's also some challenges and sometimes the the discussions get technical but we have to be and we have to be key stakeholders so this is what we're doing right now and the last thing also is that there have been some I would say the word in English it's some kind of official documents from the board of directors where we explain what is our position on AI and digital technologies which we also encourage to read to see a bit how the disability community takes a position on that respect so that's it okay that's that's great Danielle and now I would like to give the floor to Georgia Dimitriyevich okay Dimitriyevich he's the founder of Sine Avatar I think a startup very active in this field hi hi everyone hello some of you have listened to my pitch yesterday so I'll briefly introduce myself to ones that weren't here yesterday my name is Georgia I'm one of the founders of Sine Avatar it's a startup that makes us offer a translate speech into sign language automatically and our vision is to enable deaf people around the world to have content in their native language and right now our first product is being used in transportation so we have this product that's called transport sign and what it does it automates the PA system to be into in sign language so everything that you can hear on the PA systems is available for deaf people in sign language on dedicated screens around the train station or an airport or on your app I'm here today because I wanted to present my solution in front of all of you guys and to basically help you understand why such a product is really important for the deaf community as we're looking to expand into other countries as well because our software is currently live in Serbia and Belgrade central station and soon we'll be available on the Belgrade airport and we want to expand it to other countries as well and basically become a cornerstone of accessibility because deaf people deserve the right to have everything in sign language that's me okay thanks a lot and now I would like to give the floor to Carlos Duarte he's associate professor at University of Lisbon thank you and let me thank you for inviting me to this panel it's a great pleasure to be here I'll take the opportunity to start with a disclaimer I'm not an AI scientist okay I'm an accessibility and interaction researcher so that's my background that being said AI is everywhere and we're definitely researching how to use AI for accessibility so that justifies my presence here and we as my focus point now we were just during the lunch break joking a bit around some problems that exist accessibility and not only accessibility related and what we were always saying is that AI will fix it okay we were joking right so AI won't fix everything and I guess it's really important that we don't make the same mistakes we did with the web and with mobile applications where we now end up as was clearly said this morning in a remediation position where nothing is accessible by design so we have to remediate it and so AI is moving really fast and we need to make sure that we don't make the same mistake and that AI will be accessible by design and just to add something to the first intervention data data data and you also mentioned algorithms use cases and I will have interaction so we need to make sure that everyone is able to access those AI systems okay thanks a lot Carlos and now I would like to give the floor to Dr. Miguel Angel Balero Duboy his professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid thank you good afternoon thank you to ITU and Fundación Once and all the super organization my background is on telecommunications, engineering and telematics applied to the field of accessibility and and health in in very wide sense we have been working at the university on the applications of reasoning techniques and reasoning model in web services mobile application and at the smart home that is a place where the independent living is fostered as much as possible just as a briefing introduction like an appetizer or a dessert after lunch I'd like to say that intelligence deals with empathy with understanding to each others both in cognitive physical and sensorial points of view so if intelligence is not accessible it's not intelligence and this is a very important point artificial intelligence deals by itself and should deal by itself with accessibility because if not it's not smart at all we can talk about data data and data I'd say impact impact impact reasoning reasoning reasoning how these these emerging opportunities are going to support the human the human rights by by having an ethical point of view when we talk about ethical point of view we are talking about the ethics of the consequences the positive consequences with in mind for the human for the human being and and this is something we will discuss right now and I do believe that an an appropriate accessible AI can can support a better lives if we take into account these ethical person-centered considerations thank you okay thanks a lot and now I would like to welcome our online speakers so I would like to give the floor to Paulina Lewandowska she's the secretary of the international federation of hard hearing young people so Paulina and she's joining us as well like she's she's our young kind of representative as well in this panel of like really young people so so I think Paulina the floor is yours thank you very much so good afternoon panelists and moderator and participants and I'm really honored to be here today to represent the community with the hearing law especially hard of hearing the young people because I am a secretary of I for which stands for international federation of hard of hearing young people but also I represent the european federation of hard of hearing and we as the federations we wanted to make sure that the voice of hard of hearing community is hard in public that's why we are actively engaged in advocating for the rights and well-being of this community and also where privately I am passionate about harnessing technology to break down the barriers and create a more inclusive landscape also the digital one and during this panel I want to show the point of view as someone who is a hard of hearing myself because I am a hard of hearing person too and I am also a person who has a life experience of disability so I believe that I have experienced firsthand the positive changes that technology particularly AI can bring to our lives but also that there are some challenges of course that we have to point out that's why I want to share this with you from also a practical site thank you okay thank you very much Paulina and now I would like to give the floor to our last speaker today she's Maria Ignacia Rodriguez Espinosa and I think she's joining us online as well she's the head of public and international affairs of Fundación de Escubre. Hello everyone thank you so much to the ITU for inviting us to be a part of the accessible Europe conference I am as just said the head of public and international affairs of Fundación de Escubre a Chilean-born and Chilean based NGO that promotes disability inclusion but we are focused on promoting this topic on Iber-American countries and that includes Spain and that is why we are here sort of in the limits of Europe in a sense so in my initial remarks I would like to just point out how the promise of artificial intelligence is can improve the lives of persons with disabilities and when we've seen it in in some technologies such as artificial sorry assistive technologies that can be personalized and customized for the needs of persons with disabilities for example for improved communication improved mobility for persons with disabilities as well more access to information or information that is present in a way that is easy to understand or it is present in a way that persons can actually understand it which is not necessarily the case and also employment opportunities and we can see so many promises of artificial intelligence that for persons with disabilities however we could not forget also the ethical considerations that we need to have when we are developing these technologies for example artificial intelligence could sustain biases that are present in society and when these tools are not designed with persons with disabilities at the center they they could reproduce these biases and prejudices against persons with disabilities and of course that is something that we do not want so that is why we need to have accessibility in mind universal design from the beginning as just said also we need to to sort out their representation of persons with disabilities in the development from the sign of artificial intelligence based tools because otherwise they will not be accessible and as just our colleagues said they would we would need to fix it sort of along the way and of course that is not something that we want we should of course apply the principles of inclusion in universal design when designing any kind of tool and with artificial intelligence I think that is not in any kind of exception but also because of the impacts can be much bigger and broader so we definitely need to consider these ethical considerations and also the challenges that artificial intelligence faces as we move along on this path so and that is why what I would like to discuss further when the questions are asked and of course anything else that the audience might want to to discuss with with us or the the panel today then we are very much welcome to okay thank you very much for all the speakers for this first intervention and I would like to turn to our first speaker today Al Modena I would like to well first of all thanks a lot for hosting us here for this session in Fondation Onthea and really joining us to explain how AI can be leveraged for digital accessibility for people with disabilities and in your role you have played a pivotal part in developing groundbreaking AI power solutions could you share with us these two examples of projects that show how Fondation Onthea is bridging the accessibility gap and empowering individuals with disabilities the floor is yours thank you yes we brought two samples for you today of course advances in artificial intelligence have given us a lot of ideas a lot of opportunities and there are many more use cases good use cases of these artificial intelligence but I've brought you two one of them is I'm going to talk to you about it and the other one I'll show you a video the first one is we got the idea of integrating many different algorithms into just one solution and that solution was for a video conferencing tool similar to any other tool that you may know Zoom teams whatever what we did was to brought to put together a speech to text intelligence vision computing vision intelligence so people could actually have the material being shared during a meeting or during a conference video conference audio described automatically by artificial intelligence we brought together the we put in together abilities with the audio channel so we could use artificial intelligence to summarize what the person was saying in a different channel to the original version that summary could be a simplification of the language again done by artificial intelligence so people with cognitive or language accessibility needs could follow the meetings we also used summarizing services so after a meeting you're able to just press a button and have the summary the summary recent summary of what is being said apart from the original transcription also that summary can be can be generated in simplified language so a lot of different utilities that they were all out there that brought together meant that people with different profiles and different needs could come together to a working or a training session by video conferencing with the stress less environment of a tool that could actually make that meeting or that session available and accessible for everybody so that's we've finalized that research we've been into that for the last two years and will be very soon out there and you'll be hearing about access meet and you'll all use it and the second project that we wanted to share with you is called access robots and it's a completely different line of research this is in robotics and I've got a video that it'll show you what it does so please enter video robots are already among us and a hit make our everyday life that bit easier at on se foundation and in certain innovation we believe that the time has come for a new generation of robots to foster and enable the autonomy of people with disabilities therefore two new fully accessible robots have been developed under the assistive robotics research line meet Ari the first intelligent robotic assistant accessible for large environments Ari is able to guide any user with a disability from one point to another in a completely autonomous way it is designed for large environments making it perfect for train stations airports or shopping centers among other features it is capable of intelligently recognizing and interacting with the environment and making stops at intermediate points along the route want some help getting to your platform done a pit stop at the toilets on the way done something to eat done the robot can not only memorize stops along the route but can also avoid any obstacle thanks to its sensors moreover it has been designed on the basis of feedback received from users with real needs the robot is therefore ready and able to adapt to any situation thanks to the height and inclination of the handlebar along with the general ergonomics and speed of the robot and how does the user communicate with the robot communication is fully accessible for all disability profiles using a simple mobile app and the robot's own display which features light signals sign language and pictograms the user can arrange to use Ari robot services at any venue or place where the robot is available Ari is the perfect assistant for large environments this research has been financed by association in certain innovation part of Grupo social on say through prospecie science and technology parallel inclusion a i e within the project access robots so not wishing to take any more time of the following the speakers just to say that this is part of that pillar that is the use case use case scenarios for artificial intelligence applied to improve the lives of people with disabilities in an ethical and in a fair way so my next question I will address data and algorithms exactly so so I think I think like thanks for sharing those two like really like really good examples like the robotics example you know is at the core of the work some of the work I'm doing at the ITU as well and uh and for sure like this like uh like really great project to showcase and I think now I would like to ask you about uh you know like it's what we have been talking is like that when developing this kind of technology we need to be aware of the challenges and there are like a few things that we should be taking into account when developing like for example like the two use cases that that you have been mentioning and explaining now now to us so what should be we are aware of when uh we expose ourselves to AI developments uh and uh and research well like I said I said before I think there are three pillars here and is data algorithms and use cases with all the considerations about the use cases that our other panelists was all the panelists have been talking about but I think we should focus the challenges we should focus on the first on one pillar more than others they I'll start with the algorithms the algorithms artificial intelligence algorithms are usually nature inspired and they they've been around they've been around for a long time now they started with and colonies uh genetic algorithms uh simulating alien algorithms neural network um so they are more or less well known the the the challenges is to implement them correctly but that's the software issue almost a software issue any model that works to solve a given problem is is published into the academia into the industry there is little room for um for um I was gonna say for improvement there are a lot of room for improvement there but what I'm saying is not a key is not it's not something that I think should it poses a real challenge for the growth of artificial intelligence where is data data is actually the the data is where it serves to train those algorithms to give solutions for those models to actually give solutions to problems so in my opinion data is the center the core for advances and the real challenge and in data there are many in data I think we should be looking at data quality and data sharing I think they are the two main topics for data quality what is data quality for artificial intelligence if you look around google or whatever um data quality is um is sometimes well measured by dimensions like well it's very good quality data because it's very close to my purpose of my applied artificial intelligence or it's very up it's very up to days or the data source is very reliable or is um is well captured and is well maintained or whatever but um and there are metrics that tells us with certain with with quite rigor yes that's quality in those terms but there is a dimension that we're forgetting and it's fairness and it's fairness of that data towards quality of that data towards the fairness of that data towards minorities towards people with disabilities towards women although we are not a minority of a sleeper towards women towards um any gender age whatever and we there is no metric to establish whether a data set that is actually um training artificial intelligence for a use case whatever use case there is that there is a metric to say okay yeah that's a fair set of data is quality data because it's fair and the other challenge is data data sharing and um because if there is no data sharing there'll be no artificial intelligence that covers lots of use cases that we would like to for center we would like to address and data sharing is also a difficult challenge here do we want to share data do we want to do it freely openly do we want to share personal data anonymized data um what channels can we withdraw my data although it's anonymized can we withdraw my profile can I make variations in that data how those variations really get represented so data sharing in a federated way I think is um is a real process a real challenge and for the last one is use cases and use cases of course we are um at the explosion of all use cases for artificial intelligence and we all feel at risk insecure um sometimes even with uh discriminated but um I think um there is no way back that's for sentin that there is not we can really go back and I think the same happens if you remember when cybersecurity one security one technology came and computers and internet came along security was we all felt the risks of using our credit card or web browsing or whatever we were always all the time being going to be attack hacked nothing was saved and it was for a long time it was on us uh the users that was the responsibility was placed upon like you need to learn about antiviruses and you need to learn about how to navigate in a safe way whereas and you need to know how to get your bank account without getting into trouble whereas now is more or less we feel more or less safe and secure in that environment we do everything in the internet with no fear of getting real into trouble not even e-commerce now represents a threat to us so I kind of imagine a world in a few years time when technology actually protects us from the bad uses of intelligence of artificial intelligence so um we will be told whether a picture is fake whether a voice is being cloned whether a news a piece of news is not um it's not legitimate it's not it's not real we would be told when we've been um profiled or by these or that other technologies I think there'll be there is a world of opportunities for this industry to grow into with no knowing that the in a few years will be protected so thanks a lot Almodena and thanks for sharing as with us you know like these three main pillars data quality that data sharing and the case studies and maybe like really the need for benchmarking and metrics to make sure that AI systems are being implemented are really like inclusive and taking into account minorities woman and other collectives so so thanks for that and now I would like to turn to our next speaker he's Daniel Casas and uh and he works at the european disability forum and uh is an organization like really dedicated to promote as you are mentioning the rights and inclusion of people with disabilities how do you view the potential benefits and challenges of AI for this community thanks I'll try to be brief and not to rush at the same time so I guess like I mean we've seen these over the panels and presentations during this conference that there's a huge potential for technology to enhance the autonomy and independence of persons with disabilities I mean the united nation convention on the rights of persons with disabilities is one of the first human right treaties that gives access to technology the category almost of a human right the UN special reporter had a report on artificial intelligence and highlighted this potential and in all all the work that that that we do we see that there's something really good and interesting going on that can really make a change what's really interesting about artificial intelligence and when accessibility is embedded to it is that all those features are also part of mainstream products and services that we use on our daily life it's not a separate device that we use something that we carry with us that is normalized that we can find anywhere like in the world and install it so also there's a really potential on it but I have to say also that there's some concerns that that we have at the same time for us here that we work on accessibility and technology we all can be on the same page on why excessive artificial intelligence is an enabler but if we take a look at the bigger picture and how society understands AI then it's I have some concerns so the first one is that artificial intelligence alone is not the solution to accessibility because when we were discussing here we did not say we cannot guarantee accessibility because we don't find that we don't have the technology we said we cannot guarantee it because we don't have any awareness we don't have training part of our work is not to say you have to implement this solution is to convince people to implement accessible solutions that already exist but that they need to implement so if we think that AI will change certain mindsets I'm not that confident on that so this is that the first thing that I wanted to raise and I think that it's important so we need to really see that there's a huge potential but that there's a transformation in mindset in society in general when it comes to accessibility that still needs to take place and that AI per se will not will not solve the second thing is that for many businesses and companies and society in general using AI is basically in most cases to reduce costs and and increase efficiency of presences which is of course really necessary but the main goal it's not always to improve the user experience there was a really interesting report published by the OECD on employment and AI that highlighted really good practices and tools that can be used to reassure that persons with disabilities can participate in the labor market but there were some things that were highlighting is like that the AI solutions for these specific cases were not receiving enough funding that there were not enough professionals on the AI field who wanted to work on that sometimes they were developing good AI solutions for persons with disabilities will require resources and money and we don't know if the market is ready yet going to support this this this effort so it's another thing that I that I that I wanted to highlight and the third point also is that the positive potential of AI for persons with disabilities which is clear and I think it's undeniable should not divert the attention also from from the challenges that that exist in mainstream AI that there's new barriers being created and that can create further discrimination I can give a personal example which I think it's kind of applicable so my credit card got blocked in I live in Belgium so I wanted to go to the banking to the bank to get it unblocked and they said we cannot do it you just need to call a phone number they used to do it in the past but now they change it and I said okay I'm gonna call so there was not a person there but there was a robot for saying okay press one print press two and they they said okay describe your problem and then on the basis of the problem you described will give you the solution so I speak French but I have an accent so the technology that was analyzing my problem basically got everything wrong and I tried for a long time to say okay I just want to unblock my card what can I do so the algorithm was in that case was not really understanding what I was saying and this could happen to me as a foreign person but also a person who has a speech impairment that has an algorithm that does not read and here we're talking about accessibility in mainstream technology because what it's really good to have specific devices that can really support inclusion and we need them but if we're not taking into account the bigger picture and how all the new products that all citizens are using and we ensure that they are inclusive there we can have a problem and this is one of the barriers that I wanted to mention and there's many more and the last thing is that AI for persons with disabilities should help to make life better and we need to understand that in some cases the digital solutions will be really positive but in some cases and this is the example of the bank a person will prefer to have physical contact it's I don't want to to draw like a kind of a big image I think that we all agree that there's many positive things about it but I think it was interesting to bring this this perspective there's also the issue of discrimination but I think there's other colleagues who will talk about it so these are the many issues thank you yeah exactly and Danielle to continue with you I would like to ask you about the way forward for responsible use of AI especially when it comes to people with disabilities I mean here there's I mean as part of our work and like we're representing together with other organizations and persons with disabilities when it comes to accessibility our experience has told us that legislation standards and regulation is important as a starting point a thing that sometimes living to the market to regulate itself in certain cases does not work and we've seen how I mean what that was the case in the US with the legislation accessibility that really made a change this is not enough because you can comply with the legislation and a standard and not having a usable product and it was as it has been said so there needs to be a change in mindset on really understanding accessibility as a process that's that needs to exist at all the time to really reflect on how you're designing a product a service how it affects the user to engage with persons with disabilities this is also key because as it had said there's these expertise of lived experience and when any product is being designed or service you really ensure that this is done in the most accessible and inclusive way and there's many good practices there's many companies who do it who do these others that don't so this is an area and also when it comes to AI also my proposal is that there needs to be proper testing so when there's an application we develop so there's a certain level of saying okay how inclusive is this solution how it works and also is this really what we really want to achieve or not so there needs to be more control and decide and also transparency on the way these technologies are being developed access to the data having diverse data this is also really important so these are some general ideas yeah thanks a lot Daniel like really like to make user experience at the at the core of the solutions is very important like to build inclusive like truly inclusive datasets especially when it comes to mainstream services like all of these I think we're going to have more like during the during the panel discussion so now we'd like to turn as well to one of our online speakers so I would like to give the floor to Maria Ignacia so how do you think the development and deployment of AI technologies should be guided to ensure that it aligns with the principles like with the disability with the disability rights promoting inclusivity and avoiding unintended biases or discriminatory outcomes a bit you know like following what Daniel was mentioning yes of course thank you so much for the question I would like to express my views on eight points which I try to to decrease the number but I believe it all of them are important so I hope you bear with me so the first one is of course in order to ensure inclusion we need to create with inclusive design in mind for the since the beginning now as it was mentioned also in the introduction we should not need to solve accessibility after a technology is designed but rather design it with accessibility in mind and for this it is absolutely necessary and I'm going and going to the next point it's the collaboration with persons with disabilities which would be also users we're not speaking solely about solutions that are designed for persons with disabilities but also regular solutions just as Daniel was mentioning just now that could also be potentially used by persons with disabilities so the collaboration with persons with disabilities as well as disability advocacy groups such as the EDF or many more that are around the world is fundamental to in order to ensure representation of certain groups that will be users of these technologies but also to ensure that the testing is done right now that the testing includes these perspectives and point of views that are so necessary to ensure inclusion but as it was also mentioned we cannot expect for the market to solve itself or to solve everything we need to to press for epic for standards and regulations that that guide the market in that direction that we needed to be guided so this is where we would need to not only establish accessibility standards and regulations for AI based solutions but also follow the ones that already exist such as the WCAG standards for web accessibility for example and we should also in our perspective ensure that that advocacy from disability groups and representatives is present at the policy makers arena otherwise this this opinions is points of view that are necessary to ensure inclusion will not be heard and will not be present so in order to ensure inclusion we need to include all people know it sounds a bit obvious but we know it's not so we need to push in order to to get there but also I would if we go a bit further from you know policy legislation we also need to ensure that testing is robust and includes the people that we are trying to include now so we would need to ensure robust testing and validation before the solutions are launched to the public market and of course aligned with that we would need user feedback mechanisms of course if we want to include people we would we need to hear how their experiences are I am not a person with a disability so I cannot ensure that that a technology is accessible I can follow all of the guidelines but I might miss it it might not be enough so we need to hear the voices that of people that are being impacted by these technologies so user feedback mechanisms are mandatory I would say and of course we will need training education so people can actually know how to use this in the best way possible because you know technologies are not the solution technologies are a means that improve lives of persons with disabilities but it should not be the end in itself so in order for them to actually be an asset in the lives of persons with disabilities we need to train persons with disabilities in how to use them in the best way possible and last but not least and I don't want to extend so much because we have a great and big panel of course continuous monitoring and auditing of all of the technologies guidelines policies that we're developing is fundamental this is the only way in which we can ensure continuous improvement in what we're doing so that that would be the main points for us so thanks a lot maria nazia and now I would like to turn to uh to georgia like the founder of sign avatar I think uh like really like now we're going to talk a bit like a bit deaf communities and how your your project is enhancing communication accessibility and there is an increased demand for sign language interpretation how does your technology specifically address this need and why it's primarily to empower interpreters rather than replacing them maybe and as well there is a significant gap in accessibility when it comes to public places as well and I think your solution like really tackles this this specific issue how and why do you think that this is the case and uh what's what's your you know like your plans for future to expand your product to really that it's like accessible uh and widely implemented in public spaces yeah hi hi once again uh so uh like you mentioned uh our goal is not to replace interpreters I hereby uh say hello to the two interpreters that have been with us uh for the last two days I would never want to replace them so they're valuable as they can be and our goal is not to replace them but rather complement them have them in the places where they couldn't normally be uh there are many reasons why they couldn't be there the first one is there's a national shortage of interpreters everywhere not just in spain not just in Serbia or the US there's a little little of them I'll give you a short example in Serbia there's 40 interpreters so less than people in this room for the entire country which is like 100k deaf people that means you cannot have an interpreter if you wanted to do anything related to medical anything related to courts laws and stuff like that so you would need interpreters to be there you don't need interpreters on train stations if they're necessary to be at the doctors they really need to be at the doctor's office but because of that because there's a national shortage and the technology has gone better that's why we believe that AI can help us bring interpreters to places where they previously couldn't be we want to scale them not replace them so that's the first thing that I really wanted to address as far as as far as the panel questions asked but the second thing is what we really wanted to do is how like I'll give you a short intro on how our company started so our grand idea is to enable all content out there in sign language so imagine playing a video on youtube and just pressing one button like you you're not doing with cc we want to do the same thing with sign language and that's the big idea that will enable education that will enable content like media like you know having fun and all that we want to enable that in sign language but that's a really long process and like the what's what's a big issue with that is the adoption many deaf people know about like previous avatar avatar usage for sign language and the truth is they were just bad they couldn't represent the nuances of sign language they couldn't you really cannot identify as a deaf person to something like that but now technology has gone better and today avatars can and really should capture the nuances of sign language and that's why we talked to a bunch of deaf people a bunch of deaf organizations and we asked them okay we have our end goal that is going to be translation of everything or real-time generation but that's a long way down the road that's first of all really hard to do and the second of all deaf people wouldn't accept it then we were like yeah let's let's try and find a use case where we could really build a system build a technology that will be able to help them but also do it in a way where they would you know they will find a good use case for it and that's when we started with transport so like you mentioned our first product I told you about in the beginning so now we have all the PA systems in sign language and that's something that was really well received by the deaf community of course our avatars aren't as good as interpreters and they probably never will be but they are good enough and they can represent a deaf person that's what the important thing is especially among the younger generation so after our first survey after our first implementation we did a nationwide let's say survey among deaf communities and we got 85 positive results which is which is the thing so a really a really cool really cool thing for us is that all the negative views was were among a little bit older people that's that's what the future gives us and that's why we want to implement this and you know help the younger generation to strive in technology to basically basically you know have everything accessible for them okay that's that's amazing okay thanks a lot so now since we are a short of time I'm gonna turn to Carlos Duarte and I and basically a bit following what we were saying that we won human augmentation rather than than replacement in particular in the context of digital accessibility how can we achieve this balance and foster a collaborative relationship between humans and AI to create a more equitable digital landscape for all and and a bit as well like how like really how can we make this like harnessing the AI capabilities while mitigating potential pitfalls those are two questions and I will try to be brief but it's challenging to to do it I probably would need an AI system to summarize my response but yeah let's start with with the first perspective of augmenting human and I think that's probably something that would make us a lot more comfortable with AI instead of looking at AI as replacing humans having AI augmenting human capabilities and I think everyone can relate with a non-disability related exam in reaching a diagnosed then that's okay it's a tool it could be an AI based system that looks at the next ray for instance or a CT scan and detect something there that might have evaded the doctor so that's one way that AI can be augmenting human capabilities instead of replacing humans and we can take this also for the accessibility for the assistive technology fields in fact there are a lot of I wouldn't say a lot but there are products starting to appear there are I won't name brands but most of you probably are aware that there are already applications that you can use to describe an environment around you which is really useful for blind people we've seen yesterday during the pitch addressing people with speech disabilities with deaf people so there are a lot of things out there already that can augment your abilities and to try to shorten this moving a bit on to how can we harness this without falling into the pitfalls that AI can bring and I think here I'm going to start quickly by addressing one of the issues that Almudena has raised which is data fairness so that is definitely important because this is all related to ethical development of AI right and if the examples that we've seen yesterday during the pitch and those uses of AI as assistive technology they don't really suffer from this issue right because they use data from users with disabilities they're addressing a problem of users with disabilities but those aren't going to be the major developments in AI they aren't going to be the major products and those products for those it's important to ensure data fairness it's ensure that data is representative of all potential users and so that the system isn't biased against a user and this can have terrible consequences I don't know if you remember but there was this very public situation of an autonomous driving vehicle that ran over a user on a wheelchair a person on a wheelchair right that was crossing the road because a person on a wheelchair wasn't recognized as a pedestrian so that the car just didn't stop there was nothing there and so this is an example of how it's really important to have representative data and it's not it's not shouldn't be the amount of data shouldn't replicate exactly the percentage of people with with specific abilities right we need the data to consider equally all abilities okay and also related to how can we harness this and here I'm going to focus specifically on what is the current trend AI is a huge field and it's not new in any way more than 50 years and as mentioned some of the of the topics but currently it's large language models that have all the the spotlights and these models they do create an issue and this kind of AI models it's that they can't explain how they come to a decision so it's really hard to trust them if they can't explain how they come to a decision so if you if you hire an expert you expect that expert to be able to tell you how it came to a conclusion those models can do it inclusive researchers are developing AI models to explain the conclusions of other AI models so we can get into a loop of AI trying to explain AI but at least we can try to ensure transparency of those models if we clearly state on which data that's that the minimum that we can do on which data was this model trained so that we can better understand what to expect from it another very quickly another two issues security of the data that's really important also to to ensure trust in in the models so for transparency we also need to explain how do we capture data how do we secure the data so that people are more comfortable in using it and a very important one accountability this is something that it's really not well defined nowadays so when a model makes a mistake who is accountable it's the the service provider or is the company that develops that model so this is really a gray area now and to finalize we've all mentioned about the importance of involving people with disabilities in in the process but I want to highlight something and this is following this morning panels it's about education and training really so a very quick show of vans who in this room works and excluding people that presented yesterday the that pitched yesterday who works with AI okay about 10 people or something so every everyone else we don't need to create awareness so those 10 people here are probably aware of the importance of accessibility but AI scientists AI practitioners they very likely nowhere in their training on their education at any input about accessibility so we're seeing that currently with computer scientists programmers so we were just discussing this this morning so it's really really essential that AI and accessibility are part of computer science curricula for instance because every computer science curriculum nowadays includes topics in AI but they don't in accessibility so this might be already an opportunity because I have experience of making or taking part on AI on accessibility courses that couldn't find people interested in so if we mix AI and accessibility and since AI is really a an odd word nowadays perhaps we can bring people into accessibility through AI exactly yeah I think I think I mean it's really fascinating and we could you know like talk for hours but I need to move to our next speaker of course I mean it's like a big panel of seven speakers so that's why and I would like to give the floor to Paulina she I would like to ask her she's well like working with with people with hearing loss and and I would like to ask you about which is the concrete impact you think about AI having with people people with hearing loss and especially how we have been talking already about inclusivity but especially inclusivity and accessible accessibility in this specific field of of people with hearing loss the floor is yours Paulina okay thank you for this question so for sure the AI has potential to enhance accessibility for individuals with disabilities not only with people with the deaf and hard of hearing but I would like to focus on mostly on people with the hearing loss so one significance can't hurry our artificial intelligence can make a difference for people with a hearing loss but of course not only is in speech-to-text technologies which are an increasingly available feature on platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Mix or even in smartphone applications that generate live text like live transcript and this is of course an essential an essential tool for everyone with hearing problems but not only including me because we as a people with hearing disability we are that we need a visual support from what is happening in the society and also advance AI-driven transcription services can provide real-time captions making information more accessible in various settings where human captioning is not possible because of for example financial reasons or the emerging need that is happening right now so when we are in a in a public place when we meet someone on the street and that person needs us a need to ask us about something this is not possible to use human captioning at that moment so that's why automatic captions work perfectly but of course there are some limitations that maybe we have a chance to say more about it and also this is not that this only not facilitates better communication but also promotes inclusivity in social educational or professional environments and this also increase also increase in accuracy of automatic captions in less common languages it happens also such as in my example of the Polish language because I have experience of using automatic captions in Polish so I can give us an example so then comes to automatic captions in those languages is of course in every step forward and this was particularly seen in remote education and work of course during the pandemic because in an instant we as a harder-fearing community we had to adapt to the situation and somehow get access to information so it happened through the automatic captions because there was a lack of human captions so this is one of those positive aspects and the impacts that it generates for a harder-fearing community also secondly the AI has the capability to customize experiences based on individual preferences because I am working within the educational environment too so I could give an example as in educational settings for example adaptive learning platforms that uses AI can cater to diverse learning styles including those of students with disabilities too so this platform can adjust content presentation provide visual aids and also can offer like real-time feedback fostering an inclusive and effective learning environment and also it is worth mentioning about the AI powered hearing aids cochlear implants and any kind of assistive listening devices as they can be tailored to individual preferences so that amplify specific sounds or voices while releasing background noise but of course there are again some limitations but this means also that it ensures a more personalized and effective experience for users with different degrees of hearing loss because I have to mention this that people with hearing loss they have they may have like different degrees of hearing loss which causes like a complexity that the problem arise around the making like accessible for everybody that has different experiences yeah so I don't know if I have time to say more about the challenges and pitfalls I think I think we are a bit short yeah okay yeah but maybe maybe then like in the wrap up I'm gonna mention some of the challenges and for sure we're gonna like further the discussion because I think we just this panel could take a few hours so I think I would like to turn to our last speaker today Miguel Angel maybe so so so we have been talking really about how AI can effectively contribute to accessibility and as well like really how we can see AI like having a real impact in our lives you know that it's not that it's like really a use case that we have on our daily lives like rather that's something that we told but we cannot see and experiment ourselves thanks a lot as we are running out of time I'm just going to share very briefly my own use case I started working on ICT in with children with disabilities in the 1995 and our mission in the Anatology unit of Hospital San Carlos of Madrid was the early detection of disabilities and this was very hard because children very low age children the newborns may have visual disabilities here in disabilities cognitive for motor disabilities and this is very hard to be early detect to take into account access accessibility opportunities and and and the right to develop to play to learn and so on on that we started building the first information systems ICT is in the middle nineties and we start to thought about neural networks and artificial intelligence techniques because we had huge amounts of data and the and the doctors the the psychologists were not possible to to monitor so big amounts of data and and this is why artificial intelligence start to be useful because we were able to to establish some kind of automatic correlations in the development of each child with the other children so that we could take into account some kind of accessibility and learning opportunities artificial intelligence when more and more solutions start to be cheaper and cheaper web pages came and we gave the opportunity to the parents to be able to to monitor the children according to these learning models based on semantic models ontologies other techniques so that the system was going to be able to give us more information about the expected possibilities of participate toys come to the stage and as children with disabilities also have the right to play we try to customize and to make advice on accessible toys so that the children could also play and enjoy living and learning and so on and and artificial intelligence again came to a stage because how do you discover barriers in accessibility through interaction as children maybe could not interact as we expected with the single toys we we need accessible toys but we start to build smart toys so that the toys can measure how the children interact with them in visual hearing and physical interaction even cognitive as toys can speak and right now we are using interfacial intelligence for early detection of potential disorders in the neurodevelopment thanks to the interaction of lack of interaction this artificial intelligence is private because we are betting on local reasoning is is also low cost because we are using single electronic devices and 3d printing and and we are being able to infer new knowledge because because the the knowledge about the development that the accessibility needs in the children when they grow from zero to six years old is is hard to be acquired because the standard tests are not ready for that yet so this this use case sorry for explaining it so fast is applied to everything because artificial intelligence in terms of accessibility can monitor in a private way how we interact with the contents and can provide a personalized accessibility accessibility means for all but we not everybody want the same kind of interaction and and and this is a very good opportunity in that sense because depend on the different multimodal channels to communicate children adults elderly people the information we are gathering in a private way that is a huge amount of information that we cannot process by ourselves can be customized and adapted according to everyone's needs desires expectations and rights to participate in an in an equal work so when we talk about a ICT for all artificial intelligence can be a powerful private ethical elite in the way the impact of interaction participation is is got more and more so thanks a lot like for summarizing like going so quick but so I would like now to wrap up this panel I was counting to have a bit time of Q&A and panel discussion because I think it's fascinating but I would like to wrap up really looking into how this panel we have been highlighting that we need useful case studies to increase accessibility like for example Stein avatar like Ari and others that you have all the panelists you have been mentioning like useful case studies like for people then as well that we need data fairness data to ensure the ethical development of AI and this means inclusive data sets that really like take into account like all all like minorities people with disabilities you know like female representation and so on like another another key point accountability as well for when it comes to AI developers and service providers as well benchmarking when it comes to ensure that AI algorithms are inclusive with people with disabilities as well include people with disabilities in all the discussions like from early product development race public awareness because I think this there's a still a long a long way to go with this testing and validation I think some you were mentioning like as a mandatory like characteristic when it comes you know like to develop like like products that are going to be used you know like for for the mainstream and are not necessarily like just targeting to people with disabilities but need to like have these features and ensure those features make the user experience at the center of when when those solutions are developed and ensure that universal design and accessibility are taking into account from the early stages of product development I would like to thank you all the panelists all our team panel panelists and the audience I'm sure you have like plenty of questions and I would like to encourage maybe like after in the networking break like to join the speakers and ask all all the questions you may have and stay connected thanks again for having me and what I would like to mention really briefly is that the ITU is intensively working on the promoting of the use of digital technologies for accessibility and at the ITU study group 16 on multimedia and digital technologies so we this the lead group at the ITU study groups on human factors and ICT accessibility for digital inclusion and it works to mainstream the consideration of accessibility when it comes to multimedia standards technologies and services then as well and I think that this the next topic that we are going to have here on the metaverse we have the ITU focus group on on the metaverse working as well on accessibility to make this technology like really accessible for for everyone and as well on ITU study group 20 and last but not least of course a bit of I want I want to mention that ITU's AI for Good initiative that provides a unique platform to identify these kind of practical applications of AI to advance the SDGs and help scale those solutions for global impact to really help capitalize on the latest advances on AI on AI and machine learning to help solve some of the humanities bigger challenges and one of them being to ensure that digital accessibility is at the core of you know like when developing like these new technologies and the people with disabilities are really taking in into account in all the process and I really encourage you to check our AI for Good program online and join us in person for the AI for Global Summit in Geneva next year 30 31st May to learn more about this topic and I already mentioned it before the start of this session I think this is just the start and I would like to welcome all you on board to further the discussion not only in the networking break but for many more projects together so thanks a lot and looking forward to continue the discussion thanks thank you very much to all our esteemed panelists now I will start inviting to stage our next session panelists so first of all I would like to invite Dr. Pilar O'Rero professor at University of Barcelona and also the co-reporter hello can we have a bit of silence please because we have the next session right away thank you okay we're almost there for the metaverse session which is the final session of today the foreclosing so we have Dr. Pilar O'Rero here can I also have Dr. Anna Matamala from yes University of Barcelona and also the director of Access Cat Network we also have Dr. Christopher Hughes director of computer science at Salford University and next up we have Mr. Renault Di Francesco director of Europe Europe Technology Standards office at Sony and we have Mr. Ivan Reijón vice president of strategy and corporate affairs at Ericsson Spain in Portugal we have Mr. Morgan Friedrichsen CEO of Negun and finally last but not least Mr. Ignacio Posse business development manager at Pangeinik so without further ado I leave the floor to Dr. O'Rero for her moderation and thank you very much everyone for joining thank you very much the session today well first of all I would like to thank Fundación for inviting us to to be here and ITU for organizing these fantastic events so thank you very much and also to give the floor to the metaverse because though it is a bit sort of science science fiction what is the metaverse it is something that as Carlo Duarte said before if we don't make the metaverse accessible by design straight away it's going to happen what happened with the internet so that's why we just running very much to make sure that the metaverse is accessible first of all I would like to give you the definition of what is the metaverse and its novelty it was approved last week so the metaverse in ITU so the metaverse for ITU is a virtual world involving integrative and unified ecosystem which is based on networks and enhanced reality systems it offers immersive experiences to participants during the their digital and synchronous interactions a new value generation opportunities to organizations of participants in the virtual world so as you can understand that very much that for the ITU and for Europe the metaverse is citizen centered and if it is the citizen centered it must be accessible by design so with this I would like to start this panel by introducing all of you and I first each of them to think of an example of the metaverse because what to me one of the problems that we have is that none of us really can pinpoint what is the metaverse for us so what is the metaverse for us so yes not sure well first of all who are you and and then give me a definition of or an example of the metaverse for you absolutely well my name is Ignacio I actually come from an economics no not really linked to the technology side of the quest and well to start from I represent a company called Panjanic we are actually venturing into private AI but at the very same time we were working for the last five years into natural language processing so we developed our models basically focused mainly on translation but of course given the latest development of course we have to venture into a whole different spectrum of services and yeah private AI was it's basically what we put the focus over the last I'd say years since the eruption of GPT right so when it comes to the metaverse given my background I would actually say that the definition of course we got it there it's already set but we we have to let a little bit the market tell us what it'll what it'll be probably it's a definition that we'll get to the full extent you know I don't know maybe five or ten years and we're lucky enough over here in Europe that basically we go to we got a regulatory framework to actually define or at least at the very least tell us where to build from it probably will cap a little bit the growth or the fast development of it but at the very same time it will give us the possibility of developing from an ethical point of view and yeah I mean I know when when it comes to panels normally yeah people expect to for for presenters to go a little bit wild but yeah I gotta be really conservative about definition because it's still too early and we have to let the market tell us a little bit where it's actually gonna go about examples well as I tell you from a translation point of view which is basically where I work with at the time well we've got the AI systems we've seen it like last week with the presentation of Gemini where it's already recognizing not just a speech models but also images so at the recent time we already have the possibility of checking into information that a computer is actually seeing towards the creation of content the creation of of translation in this case that would actually give us a definition or sorry yeah definition of the environment that we actually surround with them so yeah basically that would be the first use case that we can actually look into okay Morgan yeah first of all I don't agree with the definition of the ITU of course that's that's that's that's a given I think it's a bit narrow why why all the focus on only virtual so we have this idea that metaverse is virtual reality and we experience it but naturally the person who is in this virtual reality needs to control his environment of it and all of a sudden we have the real world imposing on the metaverse right and also I should tell you who I am so I'm the CEO of Nagun and I I'm sort of a jack of all trades in these types of environments I used to work with films and then founded the game development company so I've worked with developing these 3d engines that we used to build these types of things and then from that I moved on to doing natural language development and dialogue systems and then on to situated dialogue systems and then on to doing sort of this trying to solve the system the problem of fusing the digital and the physical world in different ways that's that's sort of the interest for me here also how do you get this the physical world around this virtual or augmented world to make sense to whatever system is driving this world so anything that is augmented virtual or in some sense is a more immersive internet I guess it gets wider and wider of course but it's basically trying to get this information or this internet to be experienced in a way that is natural for us as persons that's sort of it if we experience it through our eyes or through our ears or whoever our hands then we're going towards this metaverse and you give me an example of a metaverse a concrete example of a metaverse well because up to now they must be thinking what is a metaverse yeah of course you have all of the the different facebook ones or this only one that was basically the same like 15 years earlier and just as nice looking actually but not as popular but what one that is actually working and and is not considered a metaverse is the pokemon communities not the game in itself the people who are around this game or any type of of computer game where people are actually playing with each other in there right thank you very much since he mentioned sony i think is renault is your turn okay um who are you yes i'm ronaldi francesco i happened to work for a company sony which is a sector member of the itu so thank you to the itu and thank you to the spanish presidency thank you to fundacion on say we are very honored to be part of this big move towards accessibility in general so i'd like to start with this my ceo sony is committed personally and company-wise to accessibility it makes my job easy we started in 2007 on accessibility under the portuguese presidency of the european union now this is the spanish presidency we stay in iberia so very good for this region of europe where accessibility was triggered and where accessibility is now caught up and there is fundacion on say with this european accessibility center now to be located here that's great now accessibility is a matter which will stay and in whatever we do and we uh at sony we can say um two things about uh the metaverse to be specific today so the metaverse question mark answer immersive experience beyond that it's difficult to say anything else well i'll give two examples i'll be very concrete and i'll stop there after those two examples one is the 3d rendering of onodio image when you listen to a concert in a concert room when you are next to interpreters of music singers musicians it's a 3d rendering and you are immersed in the music it's not flat it's immersive so we have devices today in the market which are providing you with a 3d rendering in your listening room which is your living room which is your kitchen wherever and how do we do that it's because technology has progress it's not linear it's not just 2d it's 3d we sense the room and we create a 3d field in the room at every point in the 3d space we can compute the audio and and and we can render it uh of course uh not analytically in every point but we give the impression that it's done everywhere around you the second one is also obvious and known to every one of you it's navigating a universe typically in gaming we have to recognize de facto there is a metaverse which is called gaming and actually it was taken up already as a use case of ultra reliable low latency communications sorry to use an acronym this is 3GPP 3GPP an ITU work together on mobile so it's it's not terra intognita for ITU this was a use case set as a goal for the fifth generation of communication which is being rolled out today and so 3GPP use case navigating a universe of gaming with a head mounted display and you you needed to do that in real time so audio gaming those are two cases present today i'll stop here thank you very much because actually we always think of the metaverse very much in the visual cues and not with the audio because it's not there so thank you for that example because i think it's fantastic iban do you want to absolutely so my name is iban rachon i'm the head of strategy and public affairs for addiction in spain and portugal and very happy to be here and i would like to agree with you because i think you made a very valid point when there is no lack of definitions when it comes to the metaverse right so i think at least from for me this is blending physical and virtual experiences when it comes to addiction we have maybe a more limited view because of our business and i will elaborate on that later we think that to provide these experiences we need virtual reality open reality mix reality and then talking about accessibility and you mentioned some some important components we think that connectivity is absolutely key right otherwise there is no accessibility even though obviously accessibility can have different angles during the previous presentation i had the chance just to have a view at the network performers here in this room and according to the test the download the speed is below 20 megabits per second upload the speed which is critical for augmented reality is less than 10 megabits per second and latency is unacceptable 100 milliseconds so the metaverse will be independently of the definition would be absolutely impossible here saying that examples from people in their 40s and 50s like me the metaverse could be second life i remember i create my avatar in second life maybe 15 years ago maybe he's still alive right another version maybe not that sophisticated is a pokemon pokemon go and and all these communities but also if you think carefully bitcoin is a metaverse because this is it has all the ingredients a persistent model blending physical and virtual words very limited also obviously to economic flows and making money and paying staff and all these things but this is a version of the metaverse thank you very much for this terrible news that connectivity is going to chris hughes uh you're next ah fabulous it's always difficult going after quite so many impressive people that have already got all the good ideas um but i'll certainly give it my best shot um so hi um i'm chris chris hughes i'm director of computer science and engineering at sulford university um but at heart i am a computer scientist and a technologist i like to build things so i'll put everything out there now and say i'm not an accessibility expert i'm not a standards expert i'm a computer scientist that's really good at kind of taking ideas that people have on paper and turning it into a working demo so we can actually try it um to me i i think this is a really interesting conversation already uh and i wanted to pick up on a few points that had already been mentioned the first thing that i thought was really interesting was when pillar was referring to it as a metaverse whereas generally in the world we tend to talk about the metaverse and fundamentally i think that's wrong because actually the metaverse is it's a great kind of pool of ideas and concepts but there's no kind of it's not a place you can go to it it doesn't really just kind of exist we can't go there we've just got different kind of implementations and different ideas about how we might be able to put these things together um and i also wanted to build on a few of the ideas that have kind of been mentioned already um so i think defining the metaverse is really difficult and i thought it was really interesting actually that the itu now have a definition that i hadn't actually come across um it's only from last week eh from last week um and like everyone last thursday yes yeah so i'm always a bit behind the times um but it does sound a little bit flawed um and to me i wanted to pick up on that some of the things that were important to me about what the metaverse means um firstly it's about collaboration for me and i'm not sure this has really been mentioned yet it's not about an individual experience it's about being able to interact with other people um and use whatever the technology is whatever the environment is to be able to collaborate work with other people interact socialize and those kind of things and my other real bug bear that i'm going to kind of put on the table at this point is if we're going to use the metaverse for something it has to be there has to be an advantage over being i r l if i'm down with the kids in the real world i mean it would be absolutely pointless i find myself at work sometimes when we're on uh teams zoom call meetings and i realize that each of us are sat in a different meeting room all on the same meeting just sat behind our laptops and you suddenly realize that this is fairly synonymous with the idea that actually let's all just sit in the same room in the real world is a better experience so whatever we're doing with the metaverse it has to provide an advantage over what we've already got to me um and obviously we can we can probably imagine that being able to be remote be able to collaborate engage with people from a distance um it adds a lot of value um i'm gonna wrap up this this little bit um with my idea of um what a metaverse might look like um and so being a technologist and a computer scientist i kind of come from the background of virtual reality and that's the world that i kind of live in um and going from virtual reality adding the collaboration adding the interaction is kind of where i feel like the metaverse came from it's kind of unfortunate someone's already mentioned second life because that was the example i was going to jump on to say that actually that was pretty good as a first implementation of this kind of thing but actually i can i can go one better and say well obviously that's been replaced by sanza now um which is still living and thriving but it's it's built for entertainment it was built for um kind of the next generation of the internet where instead of just being able to chat to people you could interact in some kind of um physical kind of um layout and location um and yeah to me that is quite a good example thank you Chris and uh Anna it's my turn i'm i'm Anna Matamala i'm the transmedia catalonia main researcher that's a research group at the autonomous university of Barcelona working on accessible communication and i'm also the director of the access cat network we are uh 15 research groups in catalonia uh working on accessibility to information and communication and uh we give support to the groups to transfer knowledge to society to transfer our research so uh i could say that everything has been said but i'm not a technologist i don't have a clue about technology well a little bit but i'm not an expert in that so when i imagine the metaverse i like to take a user perspective so when i imagine a metaverse or this virtual immersive world what i want and that's that's a vision it's a place where uh i can access easily please let's make it easier uh where i can personalize and customize my choices so this is the way i want to move to interact in this immersive experience a place where i can choose an avatar for instance and represent myself in the way i want with certain physical features with certain personal features i choose my representation um it's a place where i want to navigate freely and that means navigating in different ways where i want to interact and i repeat what chris was saying i want to interact i want to communicate in my language and in alternative formats and where i can interact in multiple tasks so i don't know if that's the metaverse but i would like the metaverse to be like like that and coming from an educational background i can imagine uh quite easily an educational metaverse a place for instance where i could go and i could learn languages that's an example where i can interact with people from other countries from other cultures uh in different ways so i would love to do that for instance so i don't know if that's what you were asking it's not a very technical definition but i think that's that's what i would like the metaverse to be thank you i hope more or less you understand what is the metaverse or where where are we going um a very strange example i'm working i'm leading the the accessibility in the metaverse uh at itu in the work group eight um and one of the things that we have to do there is to try to when they develop in work group two uh the use cases what i have what i am doing is going through all the use cases and add accessibility because to me accessibility is horizontal add to any use case um accessibility and the strangest use case that i had to accessibility in a metaverse was the air conditioning system the air conditioning system takes the heat from us and brings us back yeah the air the heat that we need according to our needs so i thought that it was very strange that air conditioning could be a metaverse but apparently it is because it is user centric it is it takes the body heat of not us but all of us together and it relates you know it adjusts itself according to our body heat and that is a metaverse as well so just to make it more complex or more confusing there is an example of what itu considers to be a metaverse an air conditioning system anyway um something interesting in europe now that we are in europe um is that they have a definition beyond the metaverse that is called the cityverse the cityverse is not to do with cities with uh cities but it should do with citizens so for europe the metaverse is user centric and for me because we live in europe uh one of the most uh i don't know uh definition of european is that we speak different languages and that we have different cultures and that is the unified you know we are unified in diversity as they they tell us so my first question is for nato because you are from a company a translation company and you are working with llm's llm's is large language models chat gpt do you think that's communication in a metaverse imagine that i am a human and i am uh represented by an avatar so me yes i'm talking to an avatar that could be you in a metaverse um so but i speak to myself and then my avatar would speak not to you but to your avatar okay there we go so can i speak in uh catalan to renaud who would speak in benvy good well that we've done it um do you think it would be possible to um have languages and languages and language modalities in in the metaverse in the future is that impossible definitely not um i mean if you asked me a year ago perhaps the pipeline that it actually got for translation for interpretation was just too long and difficult to get because we actually heard a speech we would actually have to transcribe the speech make a machine translation if we actually wanted a quality translation of that we would have to go a human revision and then from that we would actually have to take a web system to make synthetic voice that you would hear it on the destination language that's just too long it would take us too much time and that immersive perspective that we actually want to give we get lost in the way so a year ago that would be i would say impossible just difficult and not really cool and nice now um as i said before from last year basically a year ago we found this little thing that was chat tpt and all the large language models that actually came along and this process has been just reduced by i don't know maybe 80 percent the times are significantly lower because we actually not getting the full grasp of the machine translation neural network mods that we're working with but generative i will make quality content that would actually could replicate immediately it has the capacity to interpret what it's getting and it has the capacity to generate immediately what it gets from that so the pipeline has shortened like significantly and very low so yeah definitely to your question i would say communication in that scenario could actually be nice and easy now that's a short answer what's the challenge that we have we have in difficulties at the moment to actually get quality data to make simple machine translation models from spanish to english which is basically one of the combinations we encounter every single day one of the most common because it's two of the most spoken languages in the world we have difficulties getting quality data for that there's just too much data but it's not curated it hasn't been properly annotated now imagine when it gets to sign language for instance there's almost no data and if there is it's just not quality it's not good enough so the challenge and when we'll get to that situation where it's actually fluent nice and easy to have a communication in the metaverse between two people speaking different languages will be when we manage to get quality data how do we get that well first of all when demand unfortunately will set the way on that mainly but we need regulation because demand will not pose the significance of some combinations that we need to tackle given for example sign language to Spanish for instance so when we get to our point of course regulation will be key and yeah having the proper platforms to actually annotate the data that will give us those those quality models fantastic because that takes me to the in the previous panel there was this gentleman who was talking about the avatar the avatar in sign language but then Morgan you are an expert in crazy things like for example the interaction of humans with objects the intention so I was thinking how would be the sign language interaction not of of of Renault and myself but of my avatar with Renault avatars avatar or with an avatar and an object is that possible how do you see this interaction not by language which we know that it can be done the language is easier okay with language we've done it how about the sign language okay not considering the solution of a lingua franca just sending me don't consider that because we believe in languages is small and large now okay well the interesting thing and then I go back to the previous speaker that was actually we have a we have a lack of data it's true but what's happened with all of these models is also that the transcription the quality transcription of data has been it's so much easier so much cheaper so you can do now you can do good transcription of of of sound data in maybe like a fiftieth of at the fiftieth of the cost I think it's even it's a bigger factor in in gesture data if you have some sort of a of a motion a motion lab and then you can and then you can add some stuff on top of that you can go from from producing like 10 hours in a month to producing hundreds of hours and then transcribing it really relatively cheaply so this is going to happen fast and you can also do it we're also working with with semi autonomous vehicles so we there are some some interesting things there as well what we're doing there also is is not all of the data is from real world situations a lot of the data is from simulated situations and you can do the same with these types of in these types of situations so it might not be there today but it's going to be there soon and I might have to eat these words but I'm saying like two or three years something like that then thank you Morgan but then that takes me so this is fantastic we have the language communication solved so the metaverse could be now accessible in languages no problem also in three years time by beyond yeah and the next thing is that is the industry the manufacturing industry going to catch up and develop what we need to interact and because clearly all this is the architecture but beyond the architecture you you would need the devices and now the device is going to be there um on the examples I I gave they are already there so the questions are more on the usability point of view and let me take you back to the era which some of you as old as me remember when we had the first generation of intelligent washing machines which were like 2001 a space odyssey you didn't know which button meant what it was too complex too many choices too many choices which make it not usable then there was a second phase where the exploration had led to a reduction of the essential functions and then people had only the buttons they needed so my question to you is what do you need you users european disability forum on say rnib or all these ngo's as as they are categorized but I would rather say user organizations what do you need for instance simple question subtitles in the metaverse in a 3d space where do I put the subtitles isn't there a risk that the subtitles are put behind an object and I can't see them or is my gaze followed to the point that maybe the the subtitle is positions where I need them to be I'm sorry pilar this is a question I asked to you and to Carlos in the past they remember immersive accessibility is not an easy problem we need to address it so what I said for positioning in space the subtitles it's the same for audio description you have a 3d audio isn't it confusing that I put the audio description far in your back or far in front or on the left or on the right it's for the users to tell us for that type of content imagine this is a story telling in the fashion of a game but you you move to a place and then you have a first story you move to a second place you get a second story so you might want to have a guidance from going to a to b how do you want your guidance to take place it's it's like today a flat thing which you have on your on your smartphone but now it's becoming something embedded in a 3d space which is a virtual space potentially but merging real and synthetic experience so it's for the users to tell us how they want to be guided from point a to point b and then do they want to have the audio in the back and where and uh and and this needs a huge experiment which is not huge in quantity but needs to involve users and that's why we welcome this location uh foundation uh on tape where you will have the uh accessibility center for europe that's great to have because we know where to look for when we need information about what will it mean to have an accessible metaverse and and back to the metaverse maybe they are already two facets of the metaverse which are real today one is the one i described which is coming from gaming another one is has not been mentioned yet it's the digital twin which is in in the industrial and b2b world where you create a new city uh new buildings in the city then you have a digital twin when you want to operate a transport network a telecom network and any other functions of the city verse from the smart city side then you have a digital twin and this is also something very active in standardization in isoac jtc one sc 41 to name you the exact standardization body but this is also a trend so for professionals and and customers interacting let's say in a telco world or in a telecom transport world uh metaverse you need to have the dialogue defined and and the accessibility defined also bearing in mind these specific needs of of these people so i'm sorry i've been i know it's i mean i agree with you completely and in fact the the european commission has been paying a lot of money to create these big uh experiments with end users to understand how they like and where the subtitles are or how the subtitles but i think the person who is going to tell us about that is chris because you've been working well we've been working on that for the last five years yes and beyond that i guess before that i i'm going to start by being slightly controversial actually and just pick up on something that was said there we're in a spatial immersive environment so therefore if something we want to read is behind the person why don't we just look around that that builds the immersion and it replicates what the real world is yes you could be guided to a point where you have visibility or audio ability and you can be uh also that's something we we do in the real world where we can really put to zero the uh the audio sound around you uh to convince you that we can do that of course we have the noise cancellation technology it's known to everyone this is also uh an increased accessibility technology because noise cancellation your headphones uh which you use on a on a noise in a noisy environment when you have the washing machine i use them when i vacuum clean in my home i use them on on on an airplane this is something which gives me a better uh intelligibility of everything happening around me and within the noise cancellation happens a 3d processing with a lot of artificial intelligence if we want to call it that way and and it's already there so the question is how do we combine the different pieces which we have and that's what makes it very interesting because it's not yet done absolutely and i i know we strayed away from the question but this is quite interesting as well so we will come back to the subtitles but i you see to me this is what the metaverse is kind of about if you're going to be immersed you have to feel like you're there however if we're going to completely replicate the real world we also then find we bring all the the accessibility problems of the real world in if you don't have the mobility to look around for example we have to find other ways to do that so maybe by being controversial i was finding a point that that is slightly more challenging than that um but the reality is we are trying to create this environment where we can interact with objects look around we can understand what's in there and by being spatially aware of what's around but i guess it gives us then the ability to add additional accessibility layers i guess about mobility and how you move around in that space that maybe wouldn't be possible in the real world um i'll jump back to the actual question i guess um which was about subtitles so i mean my um my introduction to the world of accessibility i guess comes in in the world of subtitling um before i joined soulford university i was working for the bbc and we were playing with virtual reality and 360 video and as technologists we were kind of saying there's so many cool things we can do we could put the caption in the bottom of the screen or we could tie it to part of the screen or we could do something creative with it so it becomes part of the scene um and i must admit when we started playing with all these things it was very much done from the technologists perspective of well this is possible and so it must be cool because we think it's cool um and i very quickly learned in this world that actually you have to move into a user centric world and it's about the users and um it was a real awakening when i i kind of joined soulford university and we started talking further about well we built this but maybe people don't actually like what we've built and so we'd better do some user testing and i'll put my hands up i was naive once and i'm still on that journey of learning about how this this kind of user testing world works um but i was very fortunate that we managed to take a lot of those ideas and actually bring them into an environment where we could start testing them um and i know we're short of time so i'll probably just give you the highlights that we've basically been through several projects several iterations now um where at the at the very beginning we were kind of doing had a web based um 360 video where you could put captions in different places to see what people liked um and we kind of it's evolved from there that in our research we've got to the point where we've now been using kind of eye tracking to understand how easily people find subtitles in different positions and the real contention seems to be whether or not you should fix the subtitle within the scene so that it follows the actor or the performer or where the avatar is within your metaverse or whether it should always be in your display at the bottom um and it's it's pretty much true that every study we've now done we tend to find that everyone is saying actually if we put the captions within the scene it's difficult to find where that caption is it might be occluded it might be difficult to get to um i don't necessarily know where it is because the person speaking could be behind me and pretty much all of the studies are suggesting it should be put at the bottom of the screen um anecdotally you then start to look at this and you start to think about some of the audiences we're looking at so traditional subtitles are two lines of text 30 characters at the bottom of your screen and that is what the majority of subtitle users seem to be familiar with um and again we've learned a lot of lessons through doing a lot of these user studies um for example if you put a head mounted display on someone and ask them to comment on the subtitles generally speaking if someone's not used a head mounted display before it's it's disorientating or they're more interested in the technology they aren't immersed they aren't used to it it's not something they've lived with so at the moment we're we're finding that there's a big pull to put subtitles at the bottom but then if we then start looking at whether the computer games industry is going uh i mean if we look at games like the last one of us two which um i'm not a computer game player but i had to buy the game to experiment with it and look at it and it is amazing but they have made the subtitles part of the game they've made it part of the action they're creative they manipulate um as the characters move and things like that and i i genuinely believe we're kind of moving that we've got a kind of generational gap now where we've got the older consumers who are used to two lines of text but we're now going to start seeing the gaming generation of of kids these days who are basically at home with head mounted displays playing VR games and they're much more familiar with being immersed they know much more about that space and so i think it's going to be interesting watching where this goes so we know some results or where to put the subtitles on how to get there basically what i'm getting at is that accessibility in the metaverse is already there you know we don't have to we can start already with an accessible metaverse or not even because to me if everything is yes yes yes yes and then the connectivity yeah but uh i was listening carefully because we are talking a lot about uh visual uh experiences uh sound experiences and then uh for example at Eriksson we talk about the internet of things because uh sorry the internet of senses right because we can also and we are already experimenting with uh there are three other uh senses touch odor and smell and we are already experimenting to enrich these experiences and to better blend the digital and physical work uh but then obviously uh connectivity plays a key role during the preparation of this panel i was maybe a little bit too too vocal or or even sometimes aggressive because without connectivity the semiconductor right and and the reality today is that uh when we are talking about another example of a metaverse a simple one my son Ugo in 10 minutes he will try to play uh with uh for night right he goes out of school and he will try to play and this is by the way a simple definition of a metaverse by the way he somatizes the experiences because he will become angry if he loses so this is a nice way to to mix the physical and digital work and he blames connectivity because wifi might not be the best connectivity solution at home and then uh we are uh seeing a very different situation across geographies uh some leading countries like south korea they have a great example of a metaverse called ifland launched by south korea telecom china is already a leader in in in 5g connectivity india in just one year they have deployed more 5g uh radio stations and i do not want to become too technical than europe in four years and then the the us and then so we have uh not africa or that we could suspect they might not have the best connectivity but also europe we are lagging well behind and connectivity is not just having the possibility to to make a call is as i tried to explain at the beginning to have proper you know performance of the network in terms of download speed upload speed latency because otherwise all these fantastic uh uh possibilities won't happen and this is uh uh true concern uh for us and then if just i can elaborate a little bit further looking at the logo of gobera de españa we are working closely with them uh they realize that we need to close the digital device so that we can bring these kind of experiences to people in rural areas and then for example the spanish government allocated more than 540 million euros to to deploy what we call step change 5g connectivity in rural areas so everybody will benefit of these possibilities and we can bring uh the best um public services for example education immersive experiences uh telemedicine uh also to people who might not have the possibility to reach or to access uh these services so basically is now down to the spanish government to provide a good robust 5g 6g well they they will provide the funds and then is for the whole ecosystem telecooperators uh companies like ericsson our competitors as well obviously uh more important than sometimes telecooperators and companies like ericsson our startups who know you know what people might need uh we spend a significant amount of time also to understand the the direct expectations and and experiences and to make this happen yeah this is very interesting so we do for all that to happen we do need standards i think right at the beginning you said that we need standards uh and we need standards to to really start accessibility and to start so what is it to you doing for standards of accessibility in the metaverse and for that anna matamala has already written one so i'll i'll i'll explain that very briefly because i saw uh that times yes uh so in one year ago actually on the 16th of december so into the days it will be the first anniversary the focus group on on the metaverse uh started to work at itu uh we are different experts from different fields working on analyzing the technical requirements for the for the metaverse so it's a collaboration platform we collaborate we make contributions and we approach it from different perspectives which are translated into different working groups so we have people working on applications and services on architectural infrastructure virtual and real-world integration interoperability uh security ethics economics regulatory aspects but we also have work accessibility sustainability and inclusion and that's very important to have a dedicated working group chaired uh court chaired by pilar oreiro and nevin uh death gift and in this working group we have been very active we have already 10 deliverables approved among those uh for instance we had one deliverable on on access requirements for accessible products and services in the metaverse from the system perspective and then we had one uh which i had the honor of co-editing focusing on the user perspective and we also have for instance another one linking sustainability and accessibility so since time is up i would invite all of you to check the website of the focus group uh on the metaverse the itu where all the deliverables are published um i think i could talk a lot but i think that that would be no this is it basically we were offered or we we love it for itu to give us a work group on accessibility they did it straight away and then what we've been doing there both egypt and and ourselves and myself is to make sure that we have very fast um very concrete information on how to make an accessible metaverse because only when you have very clear instructions on how to make a metaverse from the scratch we will avoid what carlos duarte was saying is that the internet was born not accessible and now it's just an orthopedic you know patches and and and it just creates a nightmare so to me yes industries are always saying well if we don't have a standard we don't know what to do now you have a standard and we've created the standards to make an accessible metaverse from by design which is how it should be can i recommend liaison with ictc 100 multimedia which is moving into the metaverse i will if you have any questions the time is up because the other session ate this session um so i'm sorry about that um i we have to be short and sweet if you have any questions i don't know or if not thank you i'm sorry that we are so short but um um i think the metaverse can be accessible by design today and perhaps nobody would access to it because of connectivity but but the but uh everybody should be aware that we must build a metaverse accessible by design and and there is no but it has to be that way well to support our colleagues who are doing the hard work of infrastructure i i already mentioned this but 5g was made to serve use cases among those who use cases was one with which was head mounted display gaming using uh you know a metaverse to metaverse it was a first sketch and and 5g normally uh allows for a first cut of the metaverse so you deliver 5g well safe very much hello everyone i hope you enjoyed all of our sessions now i have a small announcement to make so uh first we will have be having we will be having the closing session and then we will invite you for a quick coffee next room so um i would like to start by inviting our closing session speakers to the stage so as we approach the conclusion of this enlightening fifth edition of accessible europe i believe that our shared dedication to digital accessibility has never be more evident let's say now it is with great honor that i introduced our uh introduce our esteemed closing speakers first i invite me's valentina stanis from itu europe office and we have me's roksana with mary liescu the senior coordinator for digital inclusion at itu and uh we also have me's isis hernandez as you know the accessibility and innovation director on say so ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for being with us today as we conclude the fifth edition of the accessible europe i'm honored to represent the itf for europe in expressing our heartfelt appreciation to the government of spain for their unwavering support and the foundation on say for their exceptional hosting of this event we also express our heartfelt thanks to the european commission for their continuous partnership and dedication to discuss this forum has once again proven to be a pivotal platform for advancing digital accessibility across the europe yet it wouldn't be possible without our amazing speakers great pictures all of you of course and our wonderful translators so thanks to everyone the it office for europe we center our work around the regional agenda and one of our regional priorities is the regional initiative three on digital inclusion and skills development we collaborate directly with the 46 member states in the europe region and their governments but also partner organizations to address their unique challenges and opportunities that they have in present and in the context of the european landscape as we've been working to build accessibility ecosystem in the past and the innovation alliance comes to support us in our work and the alliance has been launched this year by the ability director dr kosma zava zava and will amplify the previous efforts of the regional offices in the sense using the ecosystem approach the network of centers innovation centers will seek to identify ways to build capabilities using the ecosystem approach and as we close this edition of accessible europe let us carry the ecosystem approach in mind the idea of building the capabilities and the collaboration innovation and determination that has been highlighted and streamlined across all of the interventions of our amazing speakers so today i would i'm proud to say that we have 400 stakeholders that joined us at the accessible europe and they were coming from 50 countries which is an amazing result i would say and the accessible europe provided a very rich content created by 60 amazing speakers and last but not least an important element we had a very gender balanced presence throughout the whole event so without further ado and saying this i would like to pass the floor to my colleague roksana who will provide us with the highlight of the whole event thank you so much thank you very much ladies and gentlemen colleagues participants as we draw the curtains of the fifth edition are you hearing me now yeah as we draw the curtains of the fifth edition of accessible europe i city for all i'm filled with a profound sense of gratitude and inspiration over the course of this event we have witnesses an extraordinary tapestry of insights and contribution for all diverse stakeholders that join us in this effort to achieve the overarching goal of leaving no one behind in the digital world all the shared experience innovative projects and impactful achievements have not only in reach our understanding but also intensified all commitment to mainstream digital accessibility at the universal design of technology throughout all sector as icts are present in all socioeconomic sectors and within the development of ict products services and application from design we can make this happen this event has been an immense and highlighting journey together we have strengthened our collective knowledge on the critical topic of accessibility in general and digital accessibility in particular it has been a unifying experience bringing us closer to a common language of speaking accessibility a language that transcends barriers and ensure equal and equitable participation of all people including person with disabilities and person in vulnerable situation in our digital society economy and environment europe swiss concerned efforts continues to be a role model in this domain for other regions and spain an exemplary standard for other countries in the region and beyond in a world where technology is no longer an option by a fundamental and integral aspect of our daily life it's imperative to ensure that each and every individual being powered by the technology I repeat equally and equitably to be an active participant in the digital world so europe roles model is more crucial than ever but each of us play an important role changing our mindset is a first step in recognizing that accessibility it's a responsibility we all share where accessibility enable independent living for person with disabilities is also facilitates everyone's life in the digital space those each of us can play a crucial role in raising awareness on the topic around us and within our networks accelerating its implementation beginning with our own usage of accessible formats in our digital communication so let's make a commitment to care that from this point forward we will all make a concerned effort to learn and apply principle of accessibility in our daily digital interactions let's join forces committing ourselves to become not only promoters but champions of ICT accessibility and together we can create a world of inclusive digital communication where every individual has the opportunity to connect engage and achieve their life aspiration as we conclude this edition of accessible Europe ICT for all let us carry forward the insights and inspiration we have gathered here let us continue to work collaboratively leveraging our shared knowledge and experience to build a more inclusive and accessible digital future for all of us present and future generation I cannot conclude without echoing my colleague words of thanks and extend my heart-feeling thanks to each and every of you both those present on site and those who join us online your engagement and contribution have been the engine of this event moreover I cannot overlook the significant contribution of our partners from the European Commission and the incredible efforts made by our host the government of Spain and foundation foundation on se so I extend a special thanks to Blanca to Jesus to Sonia to Almo and Almudena for your invaluable support and tireless work alongside with my colleagues in ICT Europe Yaroslav Katrin Akmel and Ram Valentina and many others all your efforts both in front and behind the scene for many months have been instrumental a big thanks to all of you for your dedication and hard work over these months you have been truly the backbone of the success of this event also my heartfelt thanks to all speakers contributors and participants in this event for sharing your experience your activities your work dedication and passion for digital accessibility related topics and for your invaluable contribution you are change makers playing a pivotal role in shaping our world digital future thank you all once again for making this event a remarkable success I eagerly look forward to continue this journey with you as we strive towards creating an accessible Europe and ultimately a digitally accessible world for all thank you after these beautiful words I can't say anything Rosanna just some some ideas I would like to remark the importance of the institutional collaboration Rosanna and I have been talking about Coloreit during the last five years and after this event we start Coloreit very very close we have a lot of things to do to do together between Infundacion Onze accessible your center and I to the other idea is the importance to connect stakeholders and here we have universities public administration industry organization of people with disabilities and connect working all together the best and the unique way to generate a more inclusive society to promote the entrepreneurs and the startups yesterday I really like the pitching was very interesting all the projects all the startups the companies that they are developing these interesting projects to promote to do a better life for people with disabilities and to finish I think we have a tight wind on accessibility we have legislation we have professionals we have institutions so let's go for a more inclusive Europe and the world thank you very much to all the team that have been working behind this event because without their job it never happened so thank you very much this event is close thank you very much if you want to have coffee we have coffee and some snacks next door thank you