Upcoming accessibility workshops: London, Belfast and Manchester

As you may already be aware the Vodafone Foundation has set up the Smart Accessibility Awards which Mobile Monday London is actively supporting. These awards are to celebrate apps that help people in four key areas: Social participation, independent living, mobility and well-being. They are free to enter and there is a prize fund of ?200,000. The awards are now open for entries until 15 October 2011 so you have a month to go.

As part of this initiative, we've teamed up with the ICT KTN and Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards to bring you a series of half-day workshop looking specifically at this area. The goal of the workshops is to inspire and enable app developers and entrepreneurs to create useful tools for people who have visual, aural, cognitive or other impairments by helping you understand and empathize what life is like for people in this situation. This empathy and understanding is created by bringing together app developers, entrepreneurs and accessibility advocates and people with impairments to exchange information, and allowing developers to experience simulations of being impaired.

App developers who have had the opportunity to experience as directly as possible, first or second-hand, what it means to live with specific impairments, and have been put in touch with the larger community around accessibility, create more effective apps to better the quality of life for everyone. The result not only helps people with major disabilities, but also people with minor or temporary impairments, for example due to ageing or illness.

The format of the workshops will be discussion based with different speakers and contributors to reflect the local scene. Plenty of time will be allowed for discussion and networking and refreshments will be provided. These are different in style to our usual sessions and are more informal and much smaller to allow us to go more in-depth into the topic area.

We ran a successful workshop in Edinburgh last Friday and you can read about it here. There you’ll also find some useful links to the speakers and further resources.

We have two workshops happening on Monday 26 September in the afternoon in London at The IET and Belfast at The Black Box. Free to sign up and still a few places left if you’d like to attend.

We also have a workshop happening in Manchester on 5 October and registration has just opened for that.

You can also follow and track all the events on lanyrd:

Edinburgh http://lanyrd.com/2011/mobile-monday-edinburgh-accessibility-workshop/

London http://lanyrd.com/2011/mobile-monday-london-accessibility-workshop/

Belfast  http://lanyrd.com/2011/mobile-monday-belfast-accessibility-workshop/

Manchester http://lanyrd.com/2011/mobile-monday-manchester-accessibility-workshop/

A big thank you to all our speakers and fellow Mobile Monday chapter organisers for their support. And of course a big thank you to Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards and ICT KTN for helping us make these workshops happen.

Accessibility Workshop in Edinburgh–Friday 16 September

Some of you who know me know that I’m putting together some accessibility workshops on behalf of Mobile Monday London, The Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards and ICT KTN. Well, the first one is this Friday in Edinburgh with our friends at Mobile Monday Edinburgh. And I’m really excited about it.

Accessibility really isn’t my area, although it’s becoming increasingly important to me and many of those around me. Both my parents are partially deaf and my mother’s eyesight is failing her. Despite their agility and good health bearing in mind their age, there are so many things I take for granted that I know in years to come, I just won’t be able to manage. In the same way my Mum is frustrated that she can’t thread a needle easily or manage to read a newspaper, I expect in the future I’ll be frustrated that I can’t type at speed, that I can’t manipulate a touchscreen or access my digital files to watch TV/listen to music/interact with the world. TV viewing is already a more complex operation than before and all the things I’m used to now may become just too difficult unless we start thinking about accessibility now.

The more I’ve looked into this area, the more I realise that accessibility issues have to enter the mainstream and have to be everyone’s area. This is not a niche consideration. Nor is it a nice to have any more.  This is certainly a business consideration. I think it’s 10% of the UK have some kind of disability and about 40% of the population are classified as elderly, that’s an awful lot of people that we may, unwittingly, be excluding. But it’s also a human consideration. We should be helping each other as best we can and surely technology is one of the ways to do that? I for one, am hoping to come away with some top tips and some inspiration of how this accessibility jigsaw puzzle fits together and how it can and needs to be applied day to day.

So, if you’re in Edinburgh on Friday, and fancy joining me and the Mobile Monday Edinburgh crew to chat with some other people about this area and how it relates to mobile apps and services, then come and join us. Registration is open here and it’s FREE to attend. The agenda is a good one with a mix of demos, discussion and presentations. We kick off at 3pm and we’ll finish around 6.30pm with drinks and networking afterwards.

The presenters will be:

* Jonathan Anderson of Vodafone will tell us about their Smart Accessibility Awards

* Ian Osborne of ICT KTN , @ianfosborne, will speak briefly about what ICT KTN is and how they can support businesses interested in this area.

* Kate Ho of Interface3, @kateho, will share some thoughts on how multi-user multi-touch interfaces can be used to help people with particular challenges.

* Dr Nava Tintarev on the How was School Today Project http://howwasschooltoday.computing.dundee.ac.uk/. Nava will describe the functionality of a (partially mobile-based) system which helps children who have severe cognitive impairments and have trouble speaking, talk about their day at school.  She will also highlight some of the challenges of developing this sort of system, and share her experiences of deployment in a special needs school.

* Gary McFarlane of Access4AllApps on the business case for accessibility. Assist Mi, their first app which launches next month, is the first mobile LBS services to offer comprehensive access to disability-related information and services for people on the move helping you find disabled parking spots and virtual booking capability. You can also request and book assistance and services from a wide range of places including restaurants, cafes, hotels, cinemas and more.

* Alison Smith of Pesky People, @peskypeople & @alisonvsmith, will tell us about her personal experience with disability and digital and share with us the background, research and insight that went into building Go Genie.

* Anthony Ashbrook of Mobile Acuity, @anthonyashbrook, will show a brief demo of their "What Can Is That?" prototype - helping visually impaired people to shop and cook independently.

* Matthew Aylett of Cereproc will show off some of their mobile voice generation technology, and talk about the work they have done in recreating the voices of people who have lost them due to illness - in particular Roger Ebert.

The event is being held at Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB. There is wheelchair access and we will have a BSL sign interpreter available for some of the sessions.

Further workshops will be happening this month in London and Belfast (26 September) and Manchester (tbc).

Accessibility Workshops ahoy! Speakers and contributors wanted!

As you may already be aware, the lovely people at Vodafone Foundation have set up the Smart Accessibility Awards http://developer.vodafone.com/smartaccess2011/ which Mobile Monday London is actively supporting. To remind you quickly, these awards are to celebrate apps that help people in four key areas: Social participation, independent living, mobility and well-being.

As part of this initiative, we've teamed up with the ICT KTN http://www.ictktn.org.uk and Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards to bring you 4 half-day workshops looking at this area specifically which will run in September. We'll be running workshops with our sister Mobile Monday chapters in London (date tbc), Manchester (w/c 19 September), Edinburgh (16 September) and Belfast (26 September). There will also be workshops in Amsterdam, Madrid and Berlin in September. And we need your help please.

The goal of the workshops is to inspire and enable application developers to create useful tools for people who have visual, aural, cognitive or other impairments by helping them understand and empathize what life is like for people in this situation. This empathy and understanding is created by bringing together developers and accessibility advocates and people with impairments to exchange information, and allowing developers to experience simulations of being impaired.

App developers who have had the opportunity to experience as directly as possible, first or second-hand, what it means to live with specific impairments, and have been put in touch with the larger community around accessibility, create more effective apps to better the quality of life for everyone. The result not only helps people with major disabilities, but also people with minor or temporary impairments, for example due to ageing or illness.

The format of the workshops will be discussion based and there will be technical people on hand to answer specific questions related to Android, but there will be different speakers and contributors to reflect the local scene. That means we're on the hunt for speakers and contributors who have something to share in this topic area. Perhaps you have an impairment yourself and can tell us what the implications are for your mobile and digital life? Or maybe you've done research in this area? Perhaps you have a mobile product or service and you can share that case study? Perhaps you understand the commercial opportunity that this represents? Or perhaps you work in a relevant third sector organisation and can bring some insight? Or maybe you're an Android expert who really understands this accessibility question?

If you'd like to contribute, or can recommend someone you think would be a great contributor, please get in touch with Helen Keegan.

Thanks in advance

Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards–now open for entries until midday 15 October 2011

Mobile Monday London is very pleased to be supporting the very first Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards. This is a new global contest to promote the development of IT applications designed to improve the lives of those with disabilities and people that are older, to help them get more actively involved in society.

The programme is supported and co-organized by AGE Platform Europe, the European network of around 160 organisations of and for people aged 50+, and the European Disability Forum (EDF), the NGO that represents the interests of 80 million Europeans with disabilities.

Launched in Brussels, the competition will award the best smartphone application in four areas:

• Social participation: refers to applications which help users to become more involved in today's society and help them benefit from using new technologies, whatever their age and/or capacity.   The aim is to help everyone to access the web and social media through smartphones.
• Independent living: refers to applications which help users with everyday tasks such as washing or opening a door easily and safely so that they can live more independently
• Mobility: refers to applications which enable users to travel freely and safely whatever kind of transport system they would like to use. It also refers to the use of GPS and locations apps which can help guide people in unfamiliar places.
• Wellbeing: refers to applications which improve the users' health and overall feeling of wellbeing.

Entrants can compete for a share of the €200k prize fund until 15 October 2011 by submitting your entries on the site http://developer.vodafone.com/smartaccess2011/submit/

Entries will be judged on four things within each category –

1. Effectiveness
2. Availability and affordability
3. User-friendliness, usability and accessibility
4. Design for all

More about the selection criteria and process is here http://developer.vodafone.com/smartaccess2011/selection-process/ 

It is also worth noting that Vodafone recognises that confidentiality plays a huge part in any organisation. This is why Vodafone will ensure your entry is kept confidential and will not seek to own any IP (intellectual property) from your entry – which means that’s a no-strings cash prize.

• All entries are confidential and will not be distributed outside of this competition.
• Vodafone does not seek to own any  intellectual property in relation to entries for the Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards.
• Any applications submitted as part of the competition can be used by Vodafone for distribution, advertising and promotion in relation to the Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards.
• A working Android 2.2+ APK application file must be submitted.

Please do check the terms and conditions too http://developer.vodafone.com/smartaccess2011/legal/

So get those thinking caps on. Dust off your apps and get your entries in. All finalists will benefit from positive publicity as well as having a shot at the main prizes.

Also watch this space for some workshops and talks coming in August and September covering accessibility and design for mobile with impairment and disability in mind. We’ll also be adding more resources to the awards website over time and will be sharing things on twitter and Facebook too. A few likes on our Facebook page would be lovely too. 

And if you would like someone from Vodafone or one of the awards partners to come and speak on this topic at an event you’re running in the UK, Spain, The Netherlands or Germany, please get in touch.  

Good luck!