NEWSLETTER SEPTEMBER - NOVEMBER '05 (editorial)

In this newsletter we will pay special attention to the position of people with special needs in the working environment. Recent figures have pointed out that e.g. in the UK, 13% of the UK workforce are disabled, 6,8 million people of the working age (or nearly 20% of the working age population) have a disability, of which approximately 3 million are actually working. Fact is that people with special needs also have the eager to work, and be productive in a working environment.

In this respect, e-ISOTIS has a strong commitment to employ also in its staff people with special needs, whether in research activities, or in the provision of educational training. Furthermore, e-ISOTIS embarked in two very interesting projects. MOTRASUP was already addressed in the previous newsletter, while Career without Barriers (CWB) project has just started. This is addressed in our current activities. In both projects, the aim is to stimulate people with special needs to embark in professional life by either becoming an attendant supporter (MOTRASUP), or by becoming a usability tester (CWB).
Also, also our associate member Marie Curie Association is active in the field of employability of people with disabilities as is depicted in an article on page 11. Their initiative aims at establishing a European Quality Management for Professional working with Persons with Disability in the framework of the EQM-PD project.
Furthermore, we also present the successful ASK-IT workshop which took place on 13 October 2005 at the University of Stuttgart, in which also our associate member Sonokids participated. In this respect also, we have highlighted the extremely useful tools Sonokids has developed for the creation of websites, as well as an e-learning platform, fully accustomed for usage by people with vision impairments.
Furthermore, e-ISOTIS has been active in standardisation issues of the Special Working Group on Accessibility (SWG-A), as well as contributed to the Public Consultation for the Greek Digital Strategy (2006-2013), conducted by the Information Society SA. All this and other news can be found in this newsletter.
Finally, we again also have a look at the way technology can go hand in hand with disability. It is worth noting here that IBM again has made quite some effort in this direction, resulting in 13 very useful papers. In the article on this, we have indicated where these papers can be downloaded.

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