Role of AI in Promoting European Accessibility Policy

Abstract

Following the wide-scope of adoption of digital transformation services, across every-day activities, there is a critical need to ensure all citizens are offered equal opportunities for interacting with such digital interfaces. To this end, the recently published European Accessibility Act (EAA) provides a regulatory framework, which formalises digital interface needs across several digital displays, such as computers, Automated Teller Machines (ATM), ticketing systems, and TV equipment, among others. On the other hand, the exponential growth of AI technologies has further facilitated launch of new products and systems in the market (such as Amazon Echo, Google Assistant and Apple Siri to name a few), which has offered the citizens new and improved ways of interacting with digital technologies. Addressing the changing landscape and paradigm shift, in this poster presentation, a systematic framework on the role of AI technologies in promoting EAA policy is presented. The proposed framework will establish a formal definition of digital content accessibility, that refers to the inclusive practice of making digital content usable and comprehensible by all citizens (for people with abilities and disabilities included). Within the current adoption of digital transformation strategies, the notion of accessibility has been widely addressed within the context of information being shared through Internet services. The relevant standards published from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) individuals’ formulated recommendations on creating accessible for all content published online. The recommendations on adopting universal design, that includes the triple synergy between Usability, Accessibility and Inclusion has been well addressed in the literature. Nevertheless, the lack of support for integrating such accessibility standards within individual organisations has been well documented, resulting in the information published from cultural heritage institutions and other Creative and Cultural Industry (CCI) stakeholders to become inaccessible. Extending beyond the scope of the W3C standards, the proposed framework will consider a broad scope of AI-powered technologies such as chatbots, question-answering systems, speech synthesis tools, computer vision technologies, gesture recognition algorithms, multimodal haptic device interfaces and others.