He core of confrontation posed by the emerging Information Society is the theory of universal service; and how the freedom of information and right to communicate would further evolve. According to UN Charter 1947 Article 19 of ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948’; which states that everyone has a right to, “hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”.
The future of today’s information age largely depends on the liberty of opportunities inhabitants have to access ICTs and their ability to employ them. Apart from its increasing importance in bringing the world close ICTs have cemented a new way for the challenged people—physically or mentally—to enhance their life experiences.
According to World Health Organization “An impairment is any loss or abnormality of psychological or anatomical structure or function; a disability is any restriction or lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being; a handicap is a disadvantage for a given individual, resulting from an impairment or a disability, that prevents the fulfillment of a role that is considered normal (depending on age, sex and social and cultural factors) for that individual”. According to global statistics presently around 10 per cent of the total world’s population, or roughly 650 million people, live with a disability.
The major issues confronted by disabled people with respect to ICTs are “accessibility” and “ease of use”. People with different disabilities may not be capable of accessing and utilizing ICTs such as a blind person may not be able to use mobile phone with no text-to-speech capability, a deaf person may not communicate with the emergency services requiring spoken conversation, a physical disable person may not respond to a website using mouse-clicks, online videos may not be usable by blind and deaf people and people with cognitive disabilities may not view an different pages of a website properly.
n order to facilitate ICTs accessibility to disabled people, various economies and International institutes have introduced special e-accessibility projects along with special guidelines. United States passed an exclusive ‘Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol’ adopted on 13 December 2006 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York signed by 82 signatories.
(January 29, 2011)
