“Empowering consumers, including more vulnerable consumers with special needs or disabilities, setting rights and accessibility standards, and protecting them against risks and threats that they cannot tackle as individuals is a central goal of the consumer policy strategy.”
Source: “A single market for 21st century Europe”: Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. COM 724 final.
Guide 6
CEN/CENELEC Guide 6 is a document developed to provide guidelines for standards developers to address the needs of older persons and persons with disabilities. The STAND4ALL training included its practical use during new standards developments and standards revisions.
More background info:
http://www.stand4all.eu/links.html
What is STAND4ALL?
The STAND4ALL project provided standardisation training to almost one hundred end-users and standardisation committee members from across Europe.
The training programme covered:
- the importance of the end-user involvement in standardization work. End-user training was based on the USEM concept (http://www.usem-net.eu);
- raising knowledge on standardisation, procedures, meetings and outcomes. Especially the use of “Guide 6” in standardisation work was promoted;
- building capacity to participate in real standardisation work through practical exercises, questions and answers and role-play activities;
- providing a framework to continue the exchange of information through a web-based network for trainees;
Furthermore a STAND4ALL website was developed providing background information on the project and links to ongoing and planned standardisation actions both in Europe (CEN, CENELEC, ETSI) and internationally (ISO, IEC, ITU).
An e-Learning module was also set up.
Training
The European STAND4ALL project delivered training to:
- persons with disabilities to increase their effective participation in the standardisation process and
- experts in standardisation to increase their awareness and knowledge of accessibility issues faced by persons with disabilities and elderly.
The long term aim of STAND4ALL is to ensure that accessibility requirements and disability issues as well as the needs of elderly persons, preferably in a Design for All approach, are included in standardisation deliverables for relevant products and services.
The project was a response to Call for tenders VT/2008/002 by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. STAND4ALL was delivered between January 2009 and March 2010.
The call was placed under the wider framework of the EU Disability Strategy, which supports the implementation of the objectives from the European Union&rquo;s Social Agenda.
How can you profit from STAND4ALL results?
Get the training material for free!
The material used within the STAND4ALL trainings is will be available in the public domain. That means that any national, European or international organisation intending to organise or to provide trainings in standardisation aspects for users and for specialists can now utilise training materials on:
- European standardisation
- User involvement in standardisation work
- the use of “Guide 6” in standards development
- practical tasks including the role-play exercise (developed in collaboration with ANEC - © ANEC 2009)
This information is now made available for an extended period with support of TU Dortmund University as an e-Learning platform that can be reached via:
http://www.stand4all.eu/e-learning
Note: the material is not intended for individual training but to support face-to-face training sessions.
Those wishing to involve STAND4ALL trainers in their own activities, should contact Charlotte Mosies from NEN for more details (charlotte.mosies@nen.nl)
Consortium
- Co-ordinating partner: Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut (NEN), the Netherlands
- Asociación Española de Normalización y Certificación (AENOR), Spain
- British Standards Institution (BSI), United Kingdom
- Vilans, the Netherlands
- BAG Selbsthilfe, Germany
- Forschungsinstitut Technologie und Behinderung (FTB), Germany
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Contact person:
Charlotte Mosies (charlotte.mosies@nen.nl)