A free guide to creating digital content accessible for persons with disabilities.

Barcelona, may of 2011- University research group GRIHO (interaction person computer and data integration research group) of the University of Lleida has presented yesterday in Barcelona, during the II Jornada Unidiscat, the guide of accessible Digital content, which is intended to put within reach of the whole society the knowledge necessary and basic to build documents and content accessible on the network.

According to Toni Granollers, director of GRIHO, with the Web 2.0 dynamics in continuous movement, and the proliferation of social networks, we find that anyone can become producer and publisher of content, why not enough with that website has the minimum criteria of accessibility ”. If, for example, the developer of a website meets accessibility requirements but another person hangs a PDF with images or graphics that do not have explanatory texts, this website or its contents will be inaccessible to users with vision problems ”, explains Granollers.

In the case of the administration or the education system, this problem is particularly relevant, because are talking about public services must be accessible to the entire population, and increasingly use digital ”. According to a study at UNED, there are some 12,000 people with disabilities today pursuing university studies, half of whom do so at a distance. More are becoming teachers themselves who made available to the digital content students, hence the need to take into account these accessibility requirements ”.

GRIHO has developed, in collaboration with the unit UdLxTothom (University for all) of the University of Lleida and Unidiscat, a simple guide that explains, step by step, how to write and structure a document with digital content to make it accessible, how to transform documents to PDF so that they continue to maintain its accessibility properties and how take into account this aspect by introducing a web content. The Guide, available from the website of GRIHO, has released under a Creative Commons license, which allows reproduction, distribution and free communication but must be credited to the author and do not perform commercial purposes. Toni Granollers clarifies that the guide aims to provide a tool to society as a whole so anyone can generate accessible content on the Internet; with this license, any company or institution that wants to introduce among employees can print it and use it to edit your digital content ”.

Our aim is that those nearly 4 million people with disabilities that exist in Spain, according to data from the National Institute of statistics (INE), have the same opportunities of access to the digital society than the rest of the population; are making a great effort to remove architectural barriers, but we’re forgetting the digital barriers ”, adds Granollers. According to the age 2008 study on disability of the INE, only 0.4% of disabled residents in centres sailing by Internet in his spare time, percentage which only amounted to 1.3 per cent if we had in mind the age group of 6 at the age of 64. Persons with disabilities are not comfortable with this new technology, they are continually barriers; If we take into account that the future of the Internet lies in collaboration, socialization and open content production, we find that barriers, rather than removed, it will widen, if we do not begin to take into account these small criteria we propose in the Guide ”, concludes Granollers.

GRIHO is a research group assigned to the Department of computer science and Industrial Engineering of the University of Lleida, and is a member of TECNIO network, driven by ACC1Ó that brings together the main actors experts in applied research and transfer of technology of Catalonia. The GRIHO research group is an interdisciplinary and interdepartmental group which has as main objectives the teaching, research and technology transfer in the field of the discipline of human-computer interaction (IPO).