Project: “AACs for ALL”: _x000D_ Augmentative and Alternative Communications for ALL.

eAccessibility concerns the design of ICT products and services so that they can be used by people with disabilities, whether of a permanent or temporary nature, and by older people with age-related changes in functional capacities. For people with visual-hearing impairments and other disabilities, eAccessibility is a SINE QUA NON as ICT products and services become essential ingredients of everyday social and economic life. It is a crucial component of eInclusion and one that will become even more important as the European population ages. _x000D__x000D_Nowadays, there are a lot of ICT stand-alone and by-products in the market that can help to remove the eExclusion, enabling all people to utilise them independently of their functional and mental abilities, their health status, their age, their gender, their income and socio-economic status, the place where they live, or any other structural or personal characteristic that may hinder them in doing so. However, in many cases, they appear in front of users as an isolated and fragmented landscape and require a relatively high learning curve, raising new technical barriers to info-marginated people that jeopardise the real use and benefits of Information Society._x000D__x000D_The Technological goal of AACs for ALL is to tackle the eAccessibility challenge creating:_x000D_1) a broad Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for the INTEROPERABILITY and INTEGRATION of present and future emergent AACs by-products (properly transformed in eServices), in order to retain all the technological complexities “hidden” for ALL users and offering ONLY eServices (not products) in a USER-CENTRIC, INTUITIVE and FLEXIBLE ENOUGH way to accommodate everybody_x000D_2) and specific integration in this SOA of innovative speech technologies (intelligent software machines)_x000D__x000D_The Business goal is to make available to ALL a straightforward Provision Service on-demand (SaaS–Software as a Service) for deploying easily user-centric eAccessibility services. eAccessibility in AACs for ALL arises across the full spectrum of AACs products and services, including telecommunications services and equipment, TV services and equipment, websites, self-service terminals such as bank machines, consumer electronics and so on. Improvement of the accessibility of AACs can be beneficial to everyone, by making ICTs more usable in general as well as facilitating their usage in a wide variety of situations (e.g. hands-free usage, in noisy or poor lighting environments, and so on)._x000D__x000D_On the one side, IDI EIKON is leading the deployment of SENIORITY eService at European level. SENIORITY is an interoperable ICT Platform for creating, managing and distributing e-Care Services over fix, mobile and Interactive TV web-enabled devices, based on e-Preventions® platform built by IDI EIKON on top of open standards. Nowadays, e-Preventions can be seen as a SOA for inclusive eServices where collection and fusion of information (INTEROPERABILITY and INTEGRATION) coming from networked or isolated sources are the core strengths. However, IDI EIKON technology still lacks of an adequate integration of “communications by-products” that are “just plugged, but not integrated”. AACs for ALL will expand the accessibility capability of e-Preventions in the realm of Communications._x000D__x000D_On the other side, QUALIA is a spin-off of Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) with proven experience in AACs providing media monitoring services by exploiting state-of-the-art intelligent software machines for automatically recording, processing, retrieving, storing and streaming the multimedia data to the final user. This fusion resulted in the construction of a fully expandable Multimedia Processing Framework (MPF). QUALIA's technology is based on advanced multimedia content processing and analysis analytics and the backbone of the system is based on a multi-tier distributed software architecture. Designed in a service-oriented way (SOAP Web Services), the system offers the greatest level of flexibility and interoperability. However, QUALIA still lacks of a SOA that integrates AACs with other inclusive ICT. AACs for ALL will expand the accessibility capability of MPF in the realm of SOA._x000D__x000D_Joining efforts in AACs for ALL, IDI EIKON and QUALIA, both R+D performing SMEs, can reach very ambitious targets in the growing market of eAccessibility where the EC is fostering quick deployments in benefit of Independent Living (COly focusing in People who are Blind, People with Mobility Disabilities, People who are Deaf and can’t access Audio-Streaming or Multi-Media that are not Captioned), encompassing also social contacts to friends, relatives and neighbours and the wider environment - neighbourhood, city, region, including trans-border scenarios._x000D__x000D_IDI EIKON and QUALIA embrace Eureka EUROSTARS Programme in order to develop a very concrete SOA of AACs from Research to the Market, including an ambitious roadmap of next steps in R+D and a Market Validation of AACs for ALL results.

Acronym	AACs for ALL (Reference Number: 4342)
Duration	01/07/2008 - 03/06/2012
Project Topic	A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for the INTEROPERABILITY and INTEGRATION of “Augmentative and Alternative Communications”(AACs) by-products, hiding technological complexities from users and offering ONLY eServices (not products) in a “USER-CENTRIC, INTUITIVE and FLEXIBLE ENOUGH” way.
Project Results (after finalisation)	The CO result of the project is the development of tools and services for Qualia's Multimedia Processing Platform (MPF) that improve the platform by adding new features and enable it to connect to IDI EIKON's Seniority platform as a plug-in application. This plug-in will act as a content provider for IDI EIKON's platform, pushing to it information relevant to the end-users' needs. The IDI EIKON platform will, in turn, push the content to its end users through a variety of User Interfaces._x000D__x000D_For the implementation of the project, Qualia has developed a set of services and methodologies targeted at multimedia content analysis and indexing for the Greek and Spanish language. Qualia's distributed processing platform has been significantly improved and extended to interconnect these services and to allow dynamic scheduling and monitoring of processing tasks. The MPF has also been connected to IDI EIKON's own platform so that relevant information is transmitted and eventually viewed by IDI EIKON's users.
Network	Eurostars
Call	Eurostars Cut-Off 1

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
2	INVESTIGACIÓN Y DESARROLLO INFORMATICO EIKON, S.L.	Coordinator	Spain
2	QUALIA TECHNOLOGIES OF UNDERSTANDING S.A.	Partner	Greece