Text on accessibility written for SPIN, edited by Lynda and then
edited by Zeljko.

8 May 2007

SPIN partners are especially interested in addressing accessibility
issues that the technologies proposed by the project may
introduce. Special care will be taken to avoid creating the barriers
that may limit the usage of new technologies. The project will tackle
this issue through both the research within the project and the
dissemination of the results.  The SPIN environment will support
semantic annotations of media and will exploit this annotation to
support personalization. Personalization, as one of the project
themes, is directly related to the accessibility issues as it
facilitates adaptation of content to user specific characteristics.
Personalization should not be seen in a limited view, as addressing
only the special needs of a small part of the population. We also
address personalization in a wider sense of providing novel interfaces
for“ordinary” users in "interface challenging" situations, i.e. in
situations that limit the user’s information perception, such as
driving a car ("visually impaired") or frequent interruptions from
children ("cognitively impaired").

From a dissemination perspective, the project will ensure that
non-specialist citizens can access the results produced by the technology
being developed. We plan to engage users in the early stage to determine
what is interesting and helpful for the user, taking into account users’
abilities, such as different literacy and language skills. In this way we
want to avoid creating complex solutions of limited usability that do not
address features that users really need. This aspect of the project can
have significant effect on the practical success of research and can have
potentially wide societal implications.
In addition to new research perspectives on creating and accessing
content, we will also rely on existing accessibility standards and
guidelines. Whenever new developments go beyond existing standards and
recommendations, SPIN will engage in providing solutions that overcome
novel problems, providing new guidelines, design recommendations and
dissemination of best practices. Special concerns will be made to make
this work in agreement with relevant standardisation bodies in order to
ensure that the results of the project have broader impact.