(ELECTRONIC MUSIC)
Hello. My name is Pilar Orero.
I'm wearing a beautiful necklace
with lots of little beads with really nice colors
and I am in a big room because I am in the lockdown of COVID-19.
This is why I can't welcome you to our lab
and I have to tell you with this little movie
how accessibility is done
in the European project called HELIOS
So, HELIOS is a funded H2020 project.
It started over a year ago
and the ethos
or the research that we have on that project
is on a social media
and what we want to understand
is how could we establish a social media network
taking into consideration proximity.
The network has to be decentralized,
so it’s a peer-to-peer network
and that challenges isssues to do with trust,
with privacy,
That’s really what we are understanding
and are setting out to do.
Why accessibility or how accessibility interacts with HELIOS?
Well, because we are in Europe
and one of the defining features of Europe is diversity,
the wealth of diversity that we have in languages
and cultures and history.
But the other one is the search for equal opportunities.
I think that is one of the definers of Europe.
While the equal distribution eutopia is there,
there are many actions
that the European Commission or the European Parliament
have done towards the search for this equal opportunity of fairness
to our society and to everybody who lives in Europe.
For that, the European Parliament
in the council of the 5th of July of 2006
issued a directive.
It’s called the directive of 2006/54,
where there are provisions for individuals
for opportunities in education, training, employment,
career, language
and the idea is that there are no barriers
on the basis of sex, race, religion,
language or family situation.
So we have decided that
since we have to establish a social network within in europe,
we should take into consideration these equal opportunities,
this fairness, this equal distribution concept.
So we have integrated accessibility from the very start.
We have interrelated the idea of a born accessible concept,
so whatever we designed has to be accessible for everyone
and that in HELIOS is very much reflected in the idea of the app,
the interface that end users will be accessing.
Any network should be accessible for all.
If you want to know more about the HELIOS project,
you can go and consult the web page that you can find here.
I hope interesting for you.
Thank you very much.