Standardisation in support of accessibility for mobility users in Europe
Authors: Darmois Emmanuel , Boecker Martin 
Published: July 2023

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) are playing an
ever-increasing role in everyone's lives, specially thanks to vast range of
ICT devices and services which create a lot of opportunities for end-users
(access to huge amounts of information, fostered people interaction, …),
thereby improving their quality of life. In this context, the role of
mobility-related devices (e.g., smartphones) and their use with services
(e.g., payment, public services) is key for enabling efficient and secure
end-user interaction.Two approaches can support this goal, regarding
terminology and language coverage. On the one hand, from the end-user point
of view, discovering and understanding the services offered by ICT should
not become a challenge, with different device manufacturers and service
providers using a divergent set of terms to denominate identical devices and
service features: a remedy for diverging denominations of features could be
harmonized and user-centered ICT terminologies, facilitating feature
recognition by all users, including those with cognitive impairments. On the
other hand, harmonized terminologies should be able to support diverse
languages, such as those spoken in European Union, in a consistent
manner.ETSI, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute, is the home
of global telecommunications standards such as 3G, LTE, 5G, and DECT, and
its Technical Committee Human Factors is publishing standards documents that
aim at increasing the usability and accessibility of ICT. ETSI has developed
and published a consistent approach for such harmonized ICT terminologies
materializing in a number of publicly and freely standardisation
documents.Several ETSI Specifications (ES) have been developed over time.
ETSI ES 202 076 is addressing a minimum set of spoken commands required to
control the generic and common functions of ICT devices and services that
use speaker-independent speech recognition. The related commands have been
specified for all the official languages of the European Union (EU) and the
European Free Trade Association (EFTA). A similar language range is
available for the ETSI ES 202 130 which specifies the minimum repertoires
and assignments of graphic (letter, digit and special) characters to
standard 12-key telephone keypads and specifies their ordering for ICT
devices with telephony functionality.Currently, ETSI is developing a
harmonized terminology -- published as ETSI Guide EG 203 499 -- covering
commonly used, basic ICT features of current and upcoming ICT devices (4
groups, e.g., telephony and photography), services and applications (12
groups, e.g., banking and navigation) focusing on mobile contexts of use.
The result is a multilingual terminology supporting over 800 terms.The work
has been undertaken in three steps by subsequent ETSI Specialist Tasks
Forces with a broadening language support, from 5 languages in the first
version up to a coverage of all the official languages of EU and EFTA in the
last version to be published in May 2024. The proposed paper will outline
the expected benefits of using standardisation in this end-user mobility
context, present the methodologies applied and provide examples of the
resulting terminologies. It will also discuss the adoption of these
specifications and how they support their intended users, i.e., the industry
actors (e.g., manufacturers, service providers).