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The Project

When speaking of the future of the disability and its inclusion in a society without barriers, it is necessary to remember that the future is associated to the scientist-technical development, the technological advances and the new perspectives of the “information society”.

This association is done thinking about two approaches of the technological change; the impact in the quality of life of the people with disabilities and their closer people and the incidence and relevance of the new tools for the integration of the disabled people.

Agreeing with this climate and those two approaches:

  • improvement of the quality of life and integration, arose the objective of VODIS project. To eliminate barriers and to obtain the greater degree of autonomy possible, for people with disabilities when exerting a fundamental right in our society.
  • the citizen participation in the election of the governors and in the decisions that affect the citizenship.

It is important for the Public Administrations to assure that the relevant systems and services can be used by all the citizens, including people with any type of disability and in case of necessity, to provide the access to alternative ways of participation.

The voters and civil electoral employees who use voting systems or citizen participation represent an ample number of population, and include people with disabilities that may have difficulties when using the traditional voting systems. The implementation of these functionalities, nevertheless, will not totally eliminate the necessity of some voters with disabilities of adapting the human machine interface.

Because the increasing importance of the necessity, in the Rec(2004)11 Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers of the States members on legal, operational and technical standards for e-vote (adopted by the Committee of Ministers the 30 of September 2004 in 898 meeting of Ministers), there is a specific observation referring to this subject and it recommends that the "the user facilities will comply as much as possible with the guidelines needed in the Initiative of the Web Accessibility (WAI)" (point 63.)

It is foreseen that these advances will result in greater possibilities of social, labor and cultural integration, so that they improve the systems for the freedom of movements, the transport, the communications and the adaptation of new services.

The accessibility in its ample sense is not limited to physical or cognitives disabilities like:

  • They may not be able to easily read, to hear, to move or to process certain types of information.
  • To have difficulty when reading or understanding the text.
  • They may not have or not to be able to use a keyboard or a mouse.
  • They may not speak or not understand the language of the text fluidly.
  • They may be in a situation where their eyes, ears or hands are occupied or interfered It is also due to technological limitations like:
    • They may have a single text screen, a small screen, or a slow connection to Internet.
    • They may have an old version of the navigator, or a totally different navigator, a voice navigator, or a different operating system.

These different situations are being considered during the design of the pages.

Each accessible design option benefits, generally to several groups of disabilities simultaneously and the web community in its totality.

VODIS (VOting systems DISabled people), aims to incorporate to the electronic systems of citizen participation in the life of the Community, the necessary facilities to turn them in systems without barriers for the all the society, allowing the total access to this right for all the people, independently of they suffer a disability or not.

In order to reach this final aim, the necessary work can be summarized in:

  • To evaluate and to diagnose the actual state of the systems with the suitable tools.
  • To identify the main barriers for the accessibility of the people with disabilities.
  • To correct and to improve the systems, whenever it is possible with the actual state-of-the-art of the technology.
  • To make a new revision and the evaluation of the Systems to assure that the identified barriers have been resolved in a suitable way. The validation will be made simulating real situations of interaction between the user and the system.

The accessibility standards that are going to be used in the project, as requirements to review the products Internet Vote and OPINA are:

  • W3C: World Wide Web Consortium.
  • W.A.I. Initiative of Accessibility in the Web.
  • WCAG 1.0: Directives of Accessibility of the Content Web 1,0.
  • Point of verification: Each of the different items that must be satisfied, to cover a requirement with the accessibility guidelines.
  • Priority: Each point of verification has a level of priority assigned by the W.A.I. and based on its impact in the accessibility.
  • Level of Accessibility: Three levels of fitting to this document are defined:
    • Fitting of level A (A): all the points of verification with priority 1 are satisfied.
    • Fitting of level Double A (AA):all the points of verification with priority 1 and 2 are satisfied.
    • Fitting of level Triple A (AAA):all the points of verification with priority 1, 2 and 3 are satisfied.

The test over the definition of the web site will be done with TAW (Test of Web Accessibility): a tool for the validation of accessibility in Spanish. It has web support and it allows the analysis of not published web pages. (Tracking contents and functions).

The evaluation of the accessibility will be made from the point of view of the client with the Navigator evaluated on windows operating systems with JAWS - IE 6 and Opera, which supposes to cover the 92 % of the normal users, later other navigators will be analyzed: Netscape and Mozilla, which supposes to cover the 98% of the population with respect to accesses with different config and browsers.

When all the mentioned tests have been executed, a document will be written for each system with the objective of reflecting the level of accessibility of the web system Web by people with a certain type of disability, detailing for each point of verification, all the detected conditioners and the alternative ways to solve them, so that it allows to improve this accessibility,finally recommendations to the development equipment will be given and the conclusions will be published.

Next the necessary developments/modifications will be done in both Systems to eliminate the obstacles whenever it is possible, they will consist of:

  • Improvements in drop-down lists.
  • Labelled of images.
  • Use of tables.
  • To use more structure and less presentation in the definition of contents.
  • Management of sources (size) and colours of contrast.
  • Improvement in the definition of the Web sites (Codification according to formal grammar, structured content, use of style sheets and attributes).
  • Improvement of the access from the technological point of view (to incorporate new navigators with compatible configuration with the product and to reduce, as far as possible, all the logic that is executed in client, whenever it will not arise a conflict with the requirements of security applied to the Internet Vote).
  • Improvement of the access of people with physical disabilities (specially, visual). Review of the descriptive contents, labels and attributes, tables, lists, links, use of emergent windows, colours and sizes of letter. For it, it will count with the knowledge and the collaboration of the ONCE foundation, for the cooperation and social integration of people with blind disabilities, with which Indra has signed the “INSERTA" agreement, dated on 26/01/2005.

During the period of development, automatic revisions will be made on the tools recommended by W3C.

Deployment, demonstration and evaluation

Once implemented the actions on the products, it will be verified that they fulfil the persecuted result, to facilitate the access and use of the systems by different groups of users (disabled or not).

In doing that, the work will be done with different groups and from different perspectives:

  • By the team of experts from Indra S.A.
  • By the Group of Internet Accessibility of the Centre of Tiflotécnica Research, Development and Application (CIDAT) from the national organization of blinds from Spain (ONCE).
  • By the team of specialists from the consortium partners.
  • By the deployment of the systems in real situations, making an e-vote pilot and a citizen participation pilot.