 My name is Donal Rice and I'm a lecturer in the National University of Ireland Galway and I work with the National Disability Authority in Ireland. This video is a very brief background to the paper I will present at Accessible Europe on Standards and the Procurement of Accessible ICT Products and Services. The paper will cover the importance of public procurement and the use of accessible ICT standards in ensuring accessible ICTs are procured by public bodies and are widely available to everyone in society. Public procurement is a function of government that involves using public monies to obtain goods, works and services to meet the needs of the government as it carries out its responsibilities to the citizens. In terms of GDP, the world's trade organisation estimates that between 10 and 15 percent of a country's GDP is related to public procurement and in the European Union that is as high as 16 to 17 percent. Public procurement aims to do a number of things including delivering basic services such as health, infrastructure and energy to ensure good value for money through efficiency and integrity but it also aims to achieve innovative social and environmentally sound policy objectives and so public procurement is a very powerful means for governments to promote certain agendas such as accessibility for persons or disabilities. The paper will cover a number of updates and standards that support accessible ICT procurement. These standards include the web content accessibility guidelines version 2.1, the use of EN 301549 accessibility requirements for ICT products and services in Europe as part of the public procurement directives but also as part of the new web accessibility directive. The paper would provide an update on a new standard that was published in 2019 called EN 17161 designed for all accessibility following a designed for all approach in products, goods and services extending the range of users which provides a process for companies and public bodies to follow to incorporate accessibility at every stage of their work. It would also provide updates on ISO, IEC work on user interfaces and ITUT work. The paper will also look at trends and countries increasingly are providing and improving the accessibility provisions in their legislation and indeed introducing new pieces of legislation. The European Accessibility Act for example was finalised this year. The web accessibility directive is now required to be implemented across all EU member states and the new European electronic communication codes contain a lot of accessibility requirements that weren't there in the previous legislation and increasingly we're seeing harmonisation between the various accessibility standards such as WCAG 2.1, Section 508 and EN 301549 and this harmonisation is very important as we move towards having a unified approach to ICT accessibility at standards level worldwide and the trend is also towards producing new process-oriented standards such as EN 17161 which I mentioned previously. Fortunately there are a number of resources available and I've produced a number of these for the ITU Academy. There's three self-paced modules on ICT accessibility, the key to inclusive communication which provides a way to get certified in terms of training for ICT accessibility. I look forward to meeting you in Malta. Please read the background paper, please attend the session on accessibility procurement and standards and come and talk to me if you have any questions or would like to discuss any of the material in the paper or the presentations. Thank you and goodbye until Malta.