This article is published in the May 2016 issue.

Inclusive Access Workshop Report


Statistics Business Background

The organizing committee for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Promoting Strategic Research on Inclusive Access to Rich Online Content and Services has released their workshop report.

The workshop, held in September 2015, brought together almost 40 experts to address the challenges and future research opportunities about access to online content and services. They focused on six active research areas, automatic description of image and video content, online support for deaf people, access to textual content for people with language and learning disabilities, inclusive design of games and simulations, access to large quantitative datasets, maps and 3-D printing, and software architecture for configurability.

The participants found three main steps that need to be developed in order to achieve inclusive access to online content and services:

  • Draw on and trigger advances such as language technology and tactile displays,
  • Address emergent accessibility gaps like big data and interactive presentations,
  • And support inclusion thru programing and software architecture.

In order to achieve these goals the report suggests:

  • Using public-private partnerships in order to impact consumer products through research collaborations,
  • Establishing greater levels of cooperation between support assessment programs and technology research and development programs,
  • And creating benchmarks for researchers that address specific federal agency needs, such as delivery of health information, educational materials, published datasets and public alerts.

To learn more about the workshops recommendations, please read the full report.