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Phase 1 of the European Mandate on Public Procurement of Accessible ICT Concluded

24 June 2009 Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Work on the first phase of the European mandate on public procurement of accessible information and communications technologies (ICT) concluded last April. This mandate is designed to define accessibility requirements for products and services procured by the public administrations, as well as a toolkit for use by public administration procurers.

People with disabilities come up against similar barriers in the field of ICT to what they encounter in other walks of life, like steps instead of ramps, unsuitable signposting for blind people, audiovisual media without subtitles for deaf people, etc. The European Commission considers that one strategy for achieving the production of more accessible ICT goods and services is to make it so that the public administrations can only procure goods and services that conform to accessibility standards. If public administrations, as major ICT consumers, require compliance with accessibility standards, the accessibility level of all products should improve. This strategy is being successfully applied in other countries like the United States and Canada. The European Union is in the process of deploying similar mechanisms. In 2005, the European Commission published Mandate M/376 to the European standardization bodies (CEN, CENELEC and ETSI) in support of European accessibility requirements for public procurement of products and services in the ICT domain.

This mandate is to be carried out in two phases:
• Phase 1: Inventory of European and international accessibility requirements and analysis of applicable conformity assessment schemes
• Phase 2: Standardization activities and toolkit generation.

Mandate M/376 Phase 1

The technical activity of Mandate Phase 1 started in September 2007 and ended in October 2008. This was followed by a formal acceptance process of the results. This process was completed in April 2009. The European Commission is now negotiating with CEN, CENELEC and ETSI the specific terms for the development of Phase 2.

Phase 1 output two reports:

• The first report (generated by ETSI) contains an inventory of ICT products and services that are procured by public administrations; a list of European and worldwide functional accessibility requirements; an analysis of points not covered and suggestions for defining new requirements; a list of national, European and international standards on ICT accessibility; a proposal of a work programme for developing European accessibility requirements for public ICT procurement.

• The second report (generated by CEN and CENELEC) contains an analysis of conformity assessment schemes that can be applied in the accessible ICT domain; a study of the requirements to be set in terms of accessibility-related supplier capacities and abilities.

This work has been developed with a very significant Spanish participation. From the institutional viewpoint, CEAPAT-IMSERSO (National Reference Centre for Personal Autonomy) chaired the CEN group, the Electrical Material Manufacturers Association (AFME) presided over the CENELEC Group, and AENOR (Spanish Standardization and Certification Association) acted as secretary of both groups.

Additionally, two Spanish experts -Enrique Varela Couceiro, of the ONCE Foundation, and Loïc Martínez Normand, of the CETTICO Research Group, based at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's School of Computing - led the development of the second report.

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