EIAO-newsletter June 2006.
Project headlines
Welcome to the second EIAO-newsletter. The first release of the software has now been completed and is currently used to harvest accessibility information on the web. The project is now half way and the measurement results will be made available on the www.eiao.net web site in July. The next newsletter will include the first measurement results.
Recent Project development.
Consortium meeting in Manchester.
The project partners came together for a consortium meeting at the Manchester Metropolitan University 22-23. March. The meeting was used to prepare the second review and the next phase of the development. The outcomes included alignment of plans for the different workpackages, and three areas for exploitation beyond the project, namely teaching, benchmarking and consultancy.
Consortium changes
Since the previous newsletter, the project has carried out two changes in the consortium, including the withdrawal of the University of Tromsø and a change of role for the Warsaw University of Technology. This new role is focusing on review of the documents related to the user testing in the project.
Second review - all deliverables accepted
The second review of the project has now been carried out. All deliverables due in the period were submitted and are now accepted. All deliverables due for this review have also been approved. You find the deliverables on the project web site www.eiao.net.
The reviewers recommend the project to focus on the challenges related to the scalability of the machinery.
Observatory software development update
The components of the software for measurements are developed and tested. The development team is now focusing on three issues:
- develop a web user interface to present the measurement results
- improve the performance of the Observatory
- Carry out a crawl and evaluation of 145 sites (5 from each member state + the EFTA states)
Data produced by the first release of EIAO will be available in July. Some data will also be presented at the upcoming conferences where EIAO will be presented. The first release is based on UWEM 0.5 (see below) and WCAG 1.0. The system is however designed to support a migration to WCAG 2.0 and new versions of UWEM.
A Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM) to evaluate web accessibility
UWEM is the result of a collaboration among 24 organisations in three European research projects (including EIAO) in the area of e-Inclusion. The methodology should ensure that large scale monitoring and local evaluation are compatible and coherent among themselves and with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from W3C/WAI. The methodology will be synchronised with the foreseen migration from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0. Thus, UWEM will improve the support for evaluating, certifying, and benchmarking web content. You find more about the the methodology at the WAB-Cluster web site.>.Presentations given
The 20th Danish Database Workshop, Ballerup, Denmark 30.01.2006
C. Thomsen, T. B. Pedersen presented the paper "A Survey of Open Source Tools for Business Intelligence" [PDF].
Digitalk
The EIAO member Patrizia Bertini has been on the Italian TV channel DigiTalk for the second time. The previous show with Patrizia is available online at DigiTalk episode 21.Read more at the Digitalk
Open Source - Basis for synergies in the ICT education and research
Mikael Snaprud has participated at the WSIS official side event, Past, Present, and Future of Research in the Information Society, with a presentation on Open Source - Basis for synergies in the ICT education and research.
To Develop And Improve The E-Government Indicators -eGep (the eGovernment Economics Project)
Mikael Sanprud gave the presentation “Web Accessibility Benchmarking potential synergies with eGEP” on the eGEP Third Workshop "Getting full Impact of eGovernment - launching a European Measurement Framework" in Vienna February this year.
Independent Living - Oslo 2006
EIAO has been invited by IT Funk (the Norwegian research Council) to the national Norwegian fare on Independent living May 31th - June 2th 2006. Finn Aslaksen and Mikael Snaprud presented the project at this fare.
Read more at
IT Funk Web Site
Slides from presentations are available online at http://www.eiao.net/publications
Planned presentations
ICT Riga, 11-13 June 2006
Mikael Snaprud has been invited to represent the project at the ICT Riga, 11-13 June 2006. Read more about ICT Riga 2006.
ICCHP 2006 -10th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs – Linz July 2006
EIAO partners will present four papers:
- Modelling Accessibility Constraints (Terje Gjøsæter)
- A Proposed Architecture for Large Scale Web Accessibility Assessment (Mikael Snaprud)
- The Role of Benchmarking in Concerted Actions to Increase Accessibility (Finn Aslaksen)
- nterpreting Results from Large Scale Automatic Evaluation of Web Accessibility (Annika Nietzio)
United Nations Expert Group Meeting on E-Participation and E-Government, Budapest, 27-28. July 2006
United Nations Expert Group on E-Participation and E-Government Conference
e-Challenges 2006 – Barcelona October 2006
The paper “Automatic Benchmarking and Presentation of the First Results from the European Internet Accessibility Observatory” will be presented by Mikael Snaprud
