Inclusive innovative services: Planning today to avoid future failure

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have the potential to enhance the lives of most users. However, new user interaction technologies are often introduced without taking into account the requirements of elderly and/or disabled users, resulting in products and services that are hardly usable by those users. ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, has established a Specialist Task Force (STF) 377 which is developing a roadmap of forthcoming user-interaction technologies with a scope of ten years and which aims to identify relevant user requirements from an accessibility viewpoint as well as corresponding usability solutions. The results of investigations using this method allow stakeholders in different stages of the research and development lifecycle of e-Services to identify and avoid potential difficulties in the design of user interfaces which could cause elderly or disabled users to experience usability issues.