News

Two key components of the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII), DeveloperSpace and Unified Listing, are now available online. Both were developed as part of the Prosperity4all project and launched at the 2017 AAATE Congress in Sheffield, UK. The Trace Center collaborated in this effort and is now leading the development and pilot testing of the third GPII component: Auto-Personalization.

One in seven people around the world experience difficulties interacting with information and communication technologies (ICT). These challenges stem from disabilities, language differences, low literacy, low digital literacy, and issues associated with aging. GPII’s ultimate goal is to ensure that everyone who faces such barriers can access and use the digital technologies they encounter – anytime, anywhere, any tech.

Trace Center Director, Gregg Vanderheiden, explains: “GPII has three pillars: Unified Listing – making it possible for people to find a solution to ICT access barriers, if one exists for them anywhere in the world; Auto-Personalization – changing the computer or other digital interface automatically into a form the individual can understand and use; and DeveloperSpace – making it easier, faster, and less expensive for new and existing developers to create new assistive technologies or mainstream products, and get them to market internationally.”

The Unified Listing is a global database, bringing together information from over a half dozen federated databases in Europe, the US, and Australia. It facilitates searching for assistive technology solutions for information and communication technologies, as well as mainstream ICT products that feature built-in accessibility features. The Trace Center has a long history of developing and supporting databases similar to the Unified Listing. Adding to that legacy in the summer and fall of 2017, Lidiya Zyskina, an HCIM student and graduate assistant at the Trace Center, led a team of University of Maryland students and other volunteers in final work to ready the Unified Listing database for launch. This was a great learning opportunity for the students, most of whom had been previously unaware of the accessibility features built into many standard products, and how these features, along with assistive software and hardware, are used by people with disabilities to access computers and other ICT.

Trace Center work on the Unified Listing and DeveloperSpace, as well as other contributions to GPII development on the Prosperity4all project was funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), part of the Administration for Community Living (ACL), U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services grant 90RE5027, RERC on Universal Interface and Information Technology Access. Ongoing work on Auto-Personalization is funded by the Rehabilitation Services Administration, U.S. Dept. of Education grant H421A150006, GPII-Automated Personalization Computing Project. (See Current Projects.)