Standardisation in support of accessibility for mobility users in Europe

Abstract

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) are playing an ever-increasing role in everyone's lives, specially thanks to vast range of ICT devices and services which create a lot of opportunities for end-users (access to huge amounts of information, fostered people interaction, …), thereby improving their quality of life. In this context, the role of mobility-related devices (e.g., smartphones) and their use with services (e.g., payment, public services) is key for enabling efficient and secure end-user interaction.Two approaches can support this goal, regarding terminology and language coverage. On the one hand, from the end-user point of view, discovering and understanding the services offered by ICT should not become a challenge, with different device manufacturers and service providers using a divergent set of terms to denominate identical devices and service features: a remedy for diverging denominations of features could be harmonized and user-centered ICT terminologies, facilitating feature recognition by all users, including those with cognitive impairments. On the other hand, harmonized terminologies should be able to support diverse languages, such as those spoken in European Union, in a consistent manner.ETSI, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute, is the home of global telecommunications standards such as 3G, LTE, 5G, and DECT, and its Technical Committee Human Factors is publishing standards documents that aim at increasing the usability and accessibility of ICT. ETSI has developed and published a consistent approach for such harmonized ICT terminologies materializing in a number of publicly and freely standardisation documents.Several ETSI Specifications (ES) have been developed over time. ETSI ES 202 076 is addressing a minimum set of spoken commands required to control the generic and common functions of ICT devices and services that use speaker-independent speech recognition. The related commands have been specified for all the official languages of the European Union (EU) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). A similar language range is available for the ETSI ES 202 130 which specifies the minimum repertoires and assignments of graphic (letter, digit and special) characters to standard 12-key telephone keypads and specifies their ordering for ICT devices with telephony functionality.Currently, ETSI is developing a harmonized terminology -- published as ETSI Guide EG 203 499 -- covering commonly used, basic ICT features of current and upcoming ICT devices (4 groups, e.g., telephony and photography), services and applications (12 groups, e.g., banking and navigation) focusing on mobile contexts of use. The result is a multilingual terminology supporting over 800 terms.The work has been undertaken in three steps by subsequent ETSI Specialist Tasks Forces with a broadening language support, from 5 languages in the first version up to a coverage of all the official languages of EU and EFTA in the last version to be published in May 2024. The proposed paper will outline the expected benefits of using standardisation in this end-user mobility context, present the methodologies applied and provide examples of the resulting terminologies. It will also discuss the adoption of these specifications and how they support their intended users, i.e., the industry actors (e.g., manufacturers, service providers).