The four winning apps in the inaugural Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility awards have been announced, with their developers each receiving €50k for their efforts in improving the lives of older people and people with disabilities.
Help Talk, by 1000 Empresas, won the Wellbeing category. The app uses a screen of icons to represent key phrases, which can be read out using text-to-speech technology. Users can also send an emergency text message – with their location – to a pre-defined contact.
The Mobility prize was won by Sozialhelden's Wheelmap, a crowdsourced database that shows the wheelchair accessibility of public places. People can use the app to rate locations they visit and to browse nearby places when deciding where to go next.
232 Studios' Zoom Plus Magnifier, which offers many of the features of expensive, commercial video magnifiers in a free app, won the Independent Living category. It allows people to zoom in on text on documents and signs, and also changes the colour and contrast of the text and background for people who have dyslexia, colour blindness or other visual impairments.
Finally, BIG Launcher won the Social Participation prize. It's an alternative homescreen for Android smartphones, optimised for elderly users and those with impaired sight. It uses big, colourful buttons for the key features of the phone, including an SOS button to call for help if needed.
The prizes were presented at an event in Brussels attended by the European Commission's digital agenda commissioner, Neelie Kroes, and Vodafone chief executive Vittorio Colao.
"Why promote the development of applications? Because it is improving the lives of those with disabilities and people who are older, to help them get more actively involved in society," said Kroes. "This is in the interest of all of us, not just if you are a member of one of those categories."
Kroes stressed the need for innovative entrepreneurs to tackle problems of accessibility in technology. "It is digitisation that is at stake," she said. "In most cases, we can learn more from the disabled and the ageing population than the other way around."
"The issue of accessibility has become very important and core to everything we try to do," added Colao. "Vodafone has worked on the problems of access before, but we always hit the problem that you needed a special device. The great thing now is that you don't necessarily need a special device – and now we have application stores, you can reach everybody at exactly the same cost."
Colao said Vodafone intends to continue working with partners on its Smart Accessibility initiative. "We want to reward developers who make an app with high accessibility," he said. "Accessibility has to be part of everything we do. We really want to make it a key ingredient of every product."
Supporters of the awards include AGE Platform Europe and the European Disability Forum (EDF), with AGE director Anne-Sophie Parent and EDF secretary Rodolfo Cattani also speaking at the event.
"For us, it was crucial that Vodafone would be playing some kind of leading role, not waiting for legislation to come from Europe making it compulsory to be more accessible," said Parent.
"This concept of 'design for all' from the inception phase means people can develop apps that are much more useful for the whole population and which are inclusive of an increasingly large percentage of the population: the over-50s are already one third of the population. They may start to have visual impairments, not hear so well or have problems moving around, but they need to be part of our future."
Cattani noted there are more than 80 million people with disabilities across the EU and said the awards represent a way of raising awareness of the need for mobile technology and apps to be inclusive.
"The digital divide has become the most treacherous ground of discrimination in the knowledge society," he said. "EDF strongly supports all initiatives aimed at overcoming the communication barriers that are created when goods and services are developed without considering accessibility and usability principles."
Cattani also suggested other developers should take the awards as a sign that making accessible apps is not about being charitable.
"This should help persuade the industry that producing accessible and usable goods and services is a business case, not a good deed," he said. "This initiative of the Vodafone Foundation is a great stimulus."
