This Special Session wants to share knowledge on cloud and ATs and the experiences of Cloud4all/GPII. The way to create an infrastructure to enable users to declare requirements in functional terms (whether or not they fill into traditional disability categories) and new systems that will allow users to access and use solutions not just on a single computer, but on all of the different ICT that they must use.
The goal of the session is to show how to take advantage of the cloud for the challenge of handling user settings across devices, applications, platforms and ATs. By substantially improving accessibility, over the next ten years these technologies will open up access to, and improve the use of, ICT products and services in general (whether eCommerce, eGovernment, eHealth, eCulture, or Internet banking) and make opportunities available for older people and for people with disabilities (i.e. to make online job applications, use job-matching platforms or eLearning applications).
The special session will let researches discuss the importance of knowledge engineering, context modeling, user-centred design methodologies, database federation, machine learning and ruled-based systems to ensure a better access to health and public services, improve employability and productivity or increase embeddedness for people in social relations and networks.
This Special Session should describe a framework to provide accessibility for anyone, at anytime, anywhere and at any device. It should answer questions like:
• How to create a highly loosely coupled architecture to integrate and launch AT
• How to allow most architecture components to be present locally and in the Cloud, even simultaneously.
• How to find suitable settings for equivalent ATs in different platforms, OS or devices
• What happens if the connection is down? Can lite versions of different modules may be present locally in order to perform simpler, common-use transformations?
Papers in this Special Session address the general overview of such an architecture, the description of the components and the main challenges to overcome.