[LINK] Fwd: vip-l: UN Forum Examines Internet Accessibility

[Jan Whitaker]

>UN Forum Examines Internet Accessibility
>
>By K.C. Jones
>Information Week, November 03, 2006
>
>The first UN-backed conference on the Internet focused on access in
>developing countries, access for people with disabilities, the dominance of
>English, and government censorship online.
>
>The first United Nations Internet Governance Forum covered wide ground but
>access was a main and recurring theme.
>
>The four-day gathering was the first U.N.-backed conference to focus on
>Internet. A second meeting will take place next year in Brazil.
>
>Attendees focused largely on access in developing countries, access for
>people with disabilities, the dominance of English, and government
>censorship online.
>
>Representatives from Amnesty International urged participants to focus on
>the protection of free speech and using the Internet and blogs to battle
>censorship.
>
>Google VP and "Chief Internet Evangelist" Vinton Cerf, who has a hearing
>impairment, spoke about expanding the Internet's reach.
>
>"There are people in the world who do not have written languages or who are
>not able to read and write, and yet they have equal need for access to
>information," he said. "We also would like to preserve on the network their
>knowledge. I wonder if we could work harder to capture oral content on the
>network and find ways to index it so it could be discovered by others who
>are interested in it."
>
>Sylvia Caras, who serves as an information and communication technologies
>link for the International Disability Alliance, noted that few people with
>disabilities attended the forum.
>
>"Some 17 percent of people have a disability, and I've only seen here one
>man with a wheelchair and one woman with a cane," she said during a panel
>discussion. "The deaf have a culture. Signing is a language. Most Web sites
>are inaccessible to text readers used by those with reading-related
>disabilities, people with learning disabilities, cognitive disabilities,
>people who are blind. Disability cross-cuts the themes of this forum, but
>many people with disabilities are not part of the information society."
>
>Yoshinori Imai, of NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, said that there
>are more than 1 billion people who use the Internet but cannot read or write
>in English.
>
>"They use languages which do not come from Latin alphabet," Imai said. "Some
>90 percent of 6,000 languages used in the world today are not represented on
>the Internet. People in those countries could be left out in the desert of
>no information and no knowledge, without any means to acquire them.
>Knowledge and information are basic elements of well-being, social
>transformation, human development, and democracy."
>
>Imai said panelists should keep in mind the 5 billion people who do not have
>access to the Internet and the creation of internationalized domain names
>because current domain names cannot display characters outside of ASCII.
>
>Cerf warned that the connectedness of the Internet could be eroded if domain
>names break off and become inaccessible because of language variations.
>
>Saida Agrebi, a Tunisian legislator, Pan-African Parliament member and an
>advocate of Arab women's labor rights, said that more people could access
>the Internet if illiteracy and other language barriers are tackled.
>
>"We would like to raise the issue here of eradicating illiteracy, and see if
>we can also do it digitally," she said. "During the summit (World Summit on
>the Information Society) in Tunis, we used the conclusions we came to to
>organize this week's meeting, and everybody agreed that linguistic diversity
>is very important. We need, for example, a dictionary for technical terms
>and international terms, which are not translated from English into other
>languages I will make this request to the UNESCO and to all other
>institutions here, because we have to allow, for example, all those who are
>marginalized, women, people with special needs, to have access and be able
>to participate in lifelong learning through the Internet."
>
>Cert summed up the wide-ranging discussions when he suggested a new title
>for the forum.
>
>"It should be the Internet facilitation forum, because everything I am
>hearing is about how to make this thing work for everybody," he said. "And
>so maybe it's impossible to change the name because it's been branded into
>everybody's skulls. But the fact is that we really are all about trying to
>make this work for everyone."
>
>
>http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=0SARANZYUSU
>3WQSNDLRCKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=193501760&subSection=

Jan Whitaker
JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
personal: http://www.janwhitaker.com/personal/
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