 Andreas Hacks, Chairman, Joint Coordination Activity on Accessibility and Human Factors. Could you please give our viewers an introduction to the importance of ICT accessibility? Well, if you don't have accessibility for persons with disabilities to ICTs, you are going to lose a tremendously talented workforce. You will have a situation where you're going to be paying money to keep them in some kind of existence and they could be earning their own. It also is a much more fulfilling life if you can participate fully in society and it's technically possible, so there's no reason why we can't include them. How should we best understand the concept of mainstreaming ICT accessibility? Okay, there's several ways of explaining mainstreaming. When we do standards, we don't want to just do accessibility standards, though sometimes that is applicable. We want to put accessibility features in regular standards so that we can have accessibility in everyday life. Mainstreaming also means we include them in the process of when we do make standards. We don't just do it out of our minds, we have access to the people who want to be able to tell us what they want and what they need. How should we best understand the concept of mainstreaming ICT accessibility? Well, as I just mentioned, the thing is about putting accessibility features in, but more importantly in the standardization process, people have to implement them. Standards are voluntary and a manufacturer or a service provider can choose not to implement all of the standard. So we want to encourage people who implement standards from ITU to implement not only the regular stuff that they want to do anyway, but accessibility features to make it accessible to everyone. What role has ITU played in improving ICT accessibility? Quite a big one. They actually were the first UN agency to provide captioning. They were the first UN agency to tolerate me. The Halen Zahl was director of the ITUT when I first met him, and he was the first person to give me sign language interpretation at the First International Accessibility Workshop, which was done at Telecom in Palazzo in Switzerland. He has been a rock, and subsequently so is Malcolm Johnson, and subsequently so is Chesa Blee. But all through the ITU, people have got it. They've understood the concept and they are trying in their own ways to implement the different techniques we need to include persons with disabilities. Harvard, any recent ITU achievements in that arena that you would like to highlight? Yes. And also, we have had just a discussion on IPTV, accessibility that's included in IPTV. We have the accessibility vocabulary, accessible terms and vocabulary document, which means we'll be speaking the same language, and this has been passed by persons with accessibility, so we don't say terms that are not acceptable, and we use the same terminology. We have accessible meetings which allow us to include persons with disabilities, and we have accessible remote participation standards, which allow persons remotely to be able to participate. And this could be an engineer who works for IBM who can't hear to participate in the standardization process at a distance. Can you please say a few words about the Accessibility Trust Fund? Yes. We need countries to contribute to that. Only two countries have, in fact, budgets are difficult in the ITU, and to pay for fellowships, to pay for sign language and captioning, it's expensive, and we want these people to come. So we really need countries to say, okay, I can give a few thousand to this fund so we can bring in people from all over the world who want to contribute to standardization who are persons with disabilities.