Brussels, 25/09/2001 (Agence Europe) - On the initiative of Commissioner Erkki Liikanen, the Commission has adopted a Communication "on improving the accessibility of public websites and their content", giving the disabled and elderly special training in how to access modern technology so they will not be excluded from this brave new world. At a press conference, the President of the European Disability Forum, Yannis Vardakastanis, welcomed the document, saying that the Commission's Communication was a tool to ensure that the disabled can access new technology. He went on to explain that there are 37 million disabled people in the EU who risk social exclusion if they do not receive training or help in using information technology. He pointed out that not all disabled people came from wealthy backgrounds and are therefore unable to afford the most high performance IT equipment. Since they are often in a precarious financial situation, social measures are needed to enable them to make the most of the information society, he added.
Commissioner Erkki Liikanen said that the EU wanted an inclusive society, noting that access to the web for disabled people was covered by the guidelines created by the World Wide Web Consortium/Web Accessibility Initiative or W3C/WAI which benchmarked practice in Europe and elsewhere. Mr Liikanen observed that by adopting these guidelines, the Commission aims to make websites more accessible to people with disabilities and older people. The Communication is therefore an integral part of the eEUROPE 2002 Action Plan endorsed by the Feira Summit in June 2000, one of whose objectives is to ensure that the disabled are able to make full advantage of new technologies and the internet. He remarked that Member States and European institutions would endorse the guidelines for all public websites by the end of this year, and had agreed to benchmark progress. Summing up, Erkki Liikanen stressed that the Communication was one step in a process that would be regularly monitored, and hoped that the private sector would follow suit. He said an assessment would be published in 2003. For further information, see http: //europa.eu.int/information society/accessibility/