 Welcome to the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2018 here in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today by Andrea Sacks who is the chair of the JCA AHF. Andrea, welcome to the studio. Thank you very, very much. Shall I explain to you what the JCA AHF is? Please do. It's the joint coordination activity, which is a bizarre way of referring to it, on accessibility and human factors. And it's been created to track all the accessibility and disability work through the actual union for all the sectors. Now, let's talk a little bit more generally, but we can work our way into the specifics. There's currently considerable attention being placed on harnessing the power of information and communication technologies as enablers for good, for development, for the benefit of people. Perhaps we can talk about that, families and communities and nations. And I wanted to find out what's your personal perspective on this? Well, it's probably personal perspective as I grew up in a home with deaf parents, which you already know. And they couldn't use the phone. Well, now we have so much technology, deaf people, persons who are deaf can be independent and use technology to have real-time communication with other people in other locations. And as technological advances occur, we have to make sure the engineers add that to the standards that we write at the ITU or go to different countries in regard like the D sector to explain that these standards exist and the technology exists and also make sure they don't leave it out. And talking about leaving out and putting things in, there's been a number of resolutions here that have been drawing attention to persons with disabilities? Yes, the original one, which was done a few years ago, which was PP175, which is... I can never remember the title, but it's Access for Telecommunications. That's okay, you can draw a picture. Where's my notes? Yeah, okay. Actually, I didn't write that down. But the thing is, it doesn't really matter. PP175 is Access to Telecommunications, but it also tells the union what to do and how to make it possible for persons with disabilities to actually participate in ITU. Because we have in the T sector an active group of people in Study Group 16, Question 26, who are persons with disabilities, who are actual members of the ITU now. So they tell us, no, we don't want that, we want this. So it's listening to the groups of people that want to be served. That's the real issue that we need to address. What about the fact that this plenipotentiary conference is the first since the world agreed on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals? Perhaps we could talk a little bit about examples of how ICTs are helping to drive sustainable development and in particular perhaps with regards to persons with disabilities. Well, actually there is in one of the resolutions the actual mention that we have to take into account persons with disabilities into the Sustainable Development Goals. Basically it means that all the work that we do, when we look at that, we have to take that into account. I could give you a huge list, but like for instance there's WISIS that work on that basis and we are working with WISIS. The World Summit for the Information Society. Thank you, dear. And also we have been given five workshops because, and that is the JCA coordinating and getting people to actually participate in many different subjects. And we also have a link with the IGF who has also been meeting this week and the person who is running that for the Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability, which is also on my card, is blind and he's doing a terrific job. So it's moving away from me and the beginnings that we did years ago and now people who actually have disabilities who are proving the point that access is making their lives freer and more independent. About half the world's people are connected to the internet, the other half isn't. I just wanted to find out, is enough being done do you think to get everyone connected? No, of course not. But people are doing what they can. The development sector in the ITU works very hard at trying to have persons with disabilities attend and also going to different countries to try and help them get access to accessibility. One of the biggest problems, of course, is education and that's for children with disabilities and ICTs are invaluable in that area. Finally, is there a message that you'd like to convey here to participants at the Planet Potential Conference, it's the last few days, so also to our wider audience as well? Well, for the manufacturers and people who represent businesses, make your business accessible, make your products accessible. For those of the people who make standards and work in the different areas, please make sure you add accessible features to your standards and if you don't know what that is, just give me a bell. Andrea Sacks, thank you very much. Thank you.