 Mr. Axel, thank you so much for your time, for giving us these useful insights, and first we'd like to know what is your definition of such pro terms as accessibility and disability. So please tell us about it. Absolutely. Well, first of all, disability is now very well defined in the Convention on the Right of Person with Disabilities, and disability is defined as the result of the interaction between type of impairment that you may have, be it sensorial, physical, or sometimes cognitive disability or cognitive impairment, and the inability of your environment to actually cope with it in other terms, the inability of the environment you live in to actually bring you the solution for you to actually operate as anybody else. So the disability as defined by the Convention is really the result of an impairment, but also the responsibility of society. So practically, what does that mean? You have persons with disabilities who may actually be very visible to you. For example, someone in a wheelchair with physical impairments or limitations for mobility limitations. You may have persons who have a hard time to move their hands or have some kind of very obvious type of limitations, but on the other hand, you have lots of impairments which are not visible and sometimes are not even known by the people. For example, two main categories that are most likely to be non-identified even in schools are hard of hearing impairments and cognitive disabilities such as learning disabilities or inability to speech at a normal pace or inability to comprehend text or dyslexia or any of those impairments. So disabilities include a lot of different conditions and different situations and a lot of different interactions between individuals and their environment. We count today about 10% of the world population as the population that lives lifelong disabilities. If you actually, when you do the census, ask the right question, you find actually many more people than what you think. So in other terms, if you ask someone who has a macular degeneration, who has lost his central vision, for example, are you blind? No, I am not blind. I can get around. I can go on the street. I can go shopping with some difficulties, but I'm okay. But technically, that person cannot use a phone or a computer because of the lack of central vision. So the way you ask the question when you do the census about trying to identify how many persons live with disabilities is crucial. If you ask a person, are you disabled? The likelihood person is going to say, no, I am not disabled unless they are really very visibly disabled. So if you ask the question that way, you actually lose 75% of the population in terms of identification. So what does accessibility mean? If we defined already disability, how can we define accessibility? Well, accessibility is a very important concept in that it means that as an individual living with a certain type of impairment, you have full access to your environment on an equal basis with other people. So for example, in traditional terms, accessibility to the physical environment was the ability for someone in a wheelchair to access a building with a ramp, possibly having a door that's large enough to accommodate the wheelchair, and have any type of rooms or equipment or doorways or toilets in the building to be compatible with the wheelchair. The same would apply, for example, for transportation, where accessible transportation would mean that you have the means for a person with disabilities to actually access a car, a van, a train or a plane. Now in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the notion of accessibility has been expanded dramatically by defining accessibility as access to the physical environment, to the transportation and to information technology and new media. That means today it is as important from a legal standpoint, an ethical standpoint, a human rights standpoint, to actually design an accessible website and it is to design a building with a ramp and accessible features, same level of obligation. So what that means for all persons living with disabilities is the ability to live a normal life without any disadvantage versus other persons and reach their full potential in their personal development, professional career, education, political activities, leisure, any kind of human and social activity. I'm interested to know more about the G3ICT, please tell us in detail what it means and what does it do, that would be interesting. Well back in 2006 when the Convention was about to be adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, persons close to UN, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, were very much aware of the fact that the Convention, at least a draft of it at the time, contained a lot of very innovative dispositions for information and connection technologies. And it became very apparent that there were so, so numerous and so complex that unless we could push, you know, to make people aware of those dispositions, including industry, governments, disabled persons organizations, education and so on and so forth. Those dispositions may actually not be applied, so the UN wanted an advocacy initiative to be launched with multiple stakeholders and so that's what we did. We launched an initiative back in December 2006 with industry, with disabled persons organizations, with government, international organizations to actually promote those digital accessibility agenda components of the Convention. So that's what G3ICT does, it's a global initiative for inclusive information and connections technologies. Okay, one of the most important points in the session was the role of government. Yes. How can you think governments can put policies that address different aspects of accessibility? Well, first of all, governments in most cases have a very keen interest in making sure that disabled persons and also the elderly population actually benefits from an environment that's large, which allows them to have, you know, as good a life as possible. So I do not find any country today that is not interested to discuss it, really. Any kind of region and situation, you find government to be very interested by this topic. Governors have a lot of ways to actually influence accessibility and assistive technologies. First of all, within governments, most of the time you have, like you have, for example, in Qatar with ICT Qatar, an authority which controls telecommunications, broadcasting, and technology in general. That puts the government in a very strong position to influence a couple of things. So if you think about what's out there in the country, for example, you know, you have a lot of cell phones, you have a lot of television, so just those two things which are under direct supervision of the regulator can be tremendously improved for persons with disabilities. So for cell phones, it means accessible cell phones which have, you know, better ergonomic features, text-to-speech, voice recognition, all kind of services and better use of the phone and so on. For persons with disabilities, for television, it means like you have an Al Jazeera sign language in Arabic, you have captioning for different type of languages, and those things are extremely important because they are day-to-day devices which people use anyway. And in fact, in some cases, cell phones can actually be used in many different innovative ways to actually expand the reach of assistive technologies to new populations. For example, in Japan, one of the major service providers offers e-books on the phone. So they have like 17,000 Japanese books from Japanese literature which can be actually listened to by persons with low vision or blind. All persons with this lecture, all persons who actually are, you know, unable to read but can actually, you know, listen to a book. So now think about the developing nations and how many cell phones are out there and how much the schools could actually benefit from having those type of digital book distribution. So it's just an amazing potential. Now to come back to your question on government policies, there is also the potential to really influence the accessibility of e-government services. Right now, I see a lot of government committed to accessibility, however, their websites for their own government services aren't accessible. And of course, that causes an issue because if you launch new services on e-government websites, and those services are not only accessible to those persons who can actually read them, that's a real problem. It's an ethical problem, it's a legal problem, it's all kind of big issues. So making sure that within the government, all websites are accessible is very important. I would say I would cite two countries which have actually done a great job at it. One is Korea, which has actually a very stringent, you know, government plan to make sure that all websites are accessible. They have independent testing on all their websites for central government and local government, and they report on it on a periodic fashion. So there is peer pressure among government agencies to comply with the rule. Another country which is very interesting, which is Tunisia, actually made a decision two years ago to have all their e-government websites accessible. In their case, they did not have the money to do it, so they applied for a grant from the World Bank to do it, which they received. So that's another path, you know, to hire the proper means to address your accessibility. Yeah, go ahead. So then, one thing I wanted to mention is, which is really important, is an area of government where you can actually do a lot of good stuff is education. Because when it comes to sophisticated assistive technologies such as, you know, ways to use the computer with your eye movement or your head movement, or with alternative input devices, text-to-speech, speech-recognition type of input-output interfaces, it is very hard to use those assistive technologies without some training, especially for example if you are blind from birth or you have not ever used the computer, it is very hard. So it is possible, but it requires a lot of training and support and assistance to make it work. And in my short experience with that topic, talking to many different governments, I can see that those places where you have comprehensive school programs are the best way to get disabled persons from a young age to actually adjust to technology, use assistive technologies and then go to work with those same assistive technologies. We have one of our partner organizations which is Politico de Milan, where they have done such program for 15 years, and among the graduates engineers, they have virtually no unemployment among the alumni, among disabled alumni, and that is because they tailor solutions to them when they are at the school, at the university, they then offer them to keep the package when they leave, hardware and software, and they offer one year of free support service to the first employer of the newly graduated students. And they go at least once a quarter to meet with the employer and the former students to check that everything is going smoothly in terms of integrating the technology in the work environment. And the demonstration is there, when you do it effectively, it works. So you take out people from unemployment to employment, from meaningless lives to very meaningful lives, from being a burden for society to being actually a contributor to society. Yeah. Just a quick statistics in the United States, which is, you know, a fairly evolved nation from an economic and social standpoint, 70%, 70% of blind persons, adult blind persons are unemployed. So from all aspects, and it's probably the same in most countries, from all aspects that you can look at it, human standpoint, the right standpoint, and also an economic and fiscal standpoint, this is not an acceptable situation, especially when you know the solution exists to put those persons to work with an appropriate set of support and contribution of technology. Yeah. I'm interested to know about the very interesting Japanese story, success story that you mentioned which attracted the viewers and people's attention today. Yes. So please tell us about it. It will interest our readers. Well, it's a story of a major manufacturer in Japan, not manufacturer but service provider, wireless service providers, actually the largest one in Japan. And they realized that the Japanese market being saturated, you know, it was very hard to grow their revenues. So they were looking at specific demographics. They realized that the more you go up into age brackets, the least people were likely to use a cell phone. So they started to study that very carefully. And they realized that they probably should actually rethink entirely the way they designed their phones and adopted universal design principles to redesign a new product line and new set of services and new set of distribution methods for persons with disabilities and the elderly. So the result of that was that they introduced a new product line called the Raku Raku phone and that product line became so successful that as of now, after a few years, they have sold 15 million units of those phones. And they have gained 80% of the market share of elderly people in Japan. Also one of the things you wanted to ask yourself was which applications of assistive technology can benefit the most people with the least expense and we know that cost can be a barrier to adopting technology. So please highlight on this also. Right. Well, there are a number of, someone mentioned today that there are a lot of open source solutions which are quite good, you know, so that's one avenue. You want to make sure when you opt for an open source solution that it is sustainable long term, that it will not disappear. So that's a question to be asked anytime you choose an open source solution. But I would say in general, open source solutions are going to be a component, a very important component of assistive technologies. You have all kind of technologies today that are out there, you know, screen readers and text to speech and all those kind of things that you can find at no cost or very little cost. Now from a more global standpoint, personally, I see standardization as a key to lowering the cost of technology. If you have standards implemented everywhere, then you have mass production, more competition, lowering of the cost and better prices for the end user. So standards are extremely important. One industry that has been highly standardized, which could easily adopt new standards for accessibility, is the wireless phones industry. Because it is the largest install base of any ICC device in the world with over four billion units today. So it's two human beings out of six, or four, sorry, of three. Two out of three human beings have a cell phone. They are very widespread in developing nations. And the technology exists today to make those cell phones tremendously helpful platform for assistive technologies. You can today with a cell phone, speak to your cell phone and take notes, send messages that you speak. You can listen through text to speech technology to messages you receive or documents you retrieve. You can read a book aloud with the light Daisy Browser on your cell phone. Some cell phones come with a scanner at the bottom of the cell phone, which allows you to swipe the phone on the text and hear the text on your phone. You can actually have a GPS positioning system on your phone, or a triangulation system that allows you to know exactly where you are. And for certain type of impairment, it's extremely important. You also have phones with very good ergonomic features. Big keyboards, big screen, adjusted contrast. All kind of stuff that are really barriers today if they are not implemented. I think the cell phone also is becoming closer and closer to the small notebook. So you can see now some cell phone manufacturers getting into the notebook business and notebook manufacturers getting involved into cell phone services. So that small thing in the future, whatever is the name, a PDA, a cell phone or a notebook, an Evolve notebook, is going to be a tremendous platform for disabled persons. And standardization of equipment, of software, operating system and software, and application programming interfaces for persons with disabilities is the key to success. And I think it's going to happen. It's going to happen. That's my view. Final question. I know it took a lot of your time. It was the announcement of Mr. Samuel Bashi from ITUD about the accessibility toolkit. So I'd like to know more about that. Correct. So what we did there with the ITUD, we decided to go ahead and do a joint effort to assemble on a single website every single possible reference that could be helpful to policy makers dealing with ICT accessibility. So from legal analysis of the convention, method to evaluate your population of disabled person and what type of impairments are most prevalent to defining basics of accessibility. And then to looking at every single category of technology and look at what were the existing technologies that can be used, the standards, case studies, example of legislation regulation in each of those categories, as well as covering product development issues, assistive technologies strategies, international cooperation strategies, specific areas of local government application, and then finally focus on how to actually develop policy at the national level. So that toolkit is going to be an online resource for all policy makers. We hope that actually everyone who uses it will contribute to it as well. So we are starting to get case studies that will over time enrich the whole thing. So it's going to develop, I hope, a new community of experts, policy makers and their constituents that are implementing those very complex rules and programs. And so we hope to be the nucleus of that kind of global team that's at it, if you will. Yeah. Thank you so much for this lovely interview and all these insights. I appreciate that very much. Thank you very much and congratulations to ICT Qatar for your various initiatives. It's terrific to see what type of focus you have there. Thank you so much. Thank you.