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Making Standardisation Meetings Accessible

The ETSI Accessibility Policy (proposed by TC HF) has been endorsed by ETSI’s General Assembly #81. Its implementation relies on four project proposals developed by the Technical Committee Human Factors (TC HF).

The objectives of these projects are to:
  1. Review the accessibility of ETSI infrastructure (buildings, facilities); Define baseline requirements and guidelines.
  2. Make ETSI published deliverables accessible, including improvement of their development process.
  3. Make ETSI meetings accessible on demand, including online and hybrid meetings.
  4. Make IT processes and tools accessible, possibly starting with an audit and recommendations for the future.
The work to be done to addresses the third project above with the objective to provide guidance on how to make ETSI meetings accessible (including the meeting registration process), both for internally and externally hosted meetings requires the setup of a specific project that is handled by the ETSI Specialist Task Force (STF) 680.

The ETSI Specialist Task Force on Accessibility of ETSI Meetings (STF 680)

Addressing multiple improvement points

Currently, hosts of ETSI meetings on ETSI premises or those of ETSI members cannot ensure that the meeting will meet the accessibility requirements of potential participants. So far, there is no mechanism for allowing participants to register individual accessibility-related requirements and informing the host thereof. In addition, hosts need guidance on how to address those requirements.

To address this issues, ETSI has launched the STF(Specialist Task Force) 680, with the participation of CommLedge (Emmanuel Darmois) as Expert.

The STF proposes measures that aim at improving the accessibility of ETSI meetings by:
  • adapting the registration process to ETSI meetings so that participants can indicate individual access needs;
  • providing an online resource collection for speech-to-text tools & services (captioning) and sign language interpreters;
  • analysing online meeting tools and providing guidance on the accessibility of these tools;
  • providing guidance on accessible online collaboration tools, particularly important for joint editing of documents in hybrid meetings; and
  • providing recommendations on improving the necessary ICT equipment in ETSI meeting rooms.

Main result

The final result will be an ETSI Guide
EG 204 076
that will serve as a basis for further improvements of accessibility in ETSI.

Coming soon