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The technological and social evolution in the field of electronic information is extremely fast and deep and is going to heavily modifying the way we generate and enjoy information. Moreover Internet is changing its nature from provider of contents to repositories of interactive applications and from the social point of view, the users are no more clearly distinct from producer of information. From a theoretical point of view all these changes can be faced by WAI Guidelines, but the focus is in accomplishing a personalized and optimized experience. For a strong and concrete impact on users new perspectives must be introduced at industrial level. A support in this innovative process can come from standard organizations, such as ISO, which are improving its effort to address at least accessibility in their standards. Lastly the technical evolution can lead to cope with accessibility problem from the wider perspective of Design for All but at present these approaches seem too difficult to be integrated in the mainstream developing process. In the short term different solutions coming from social phenomena can be evaluated. The fast growth of Web 2.0 if correctly used could be an important resource in cooperating a personalized and optimized user experience.

Within the context of Web, the word intelligence is often connected with the visions of Semantic Web and Web 2.0. One of the main characteristic of Semantic Web lies in the fact that information is annotated with metadata and this gives the opportunity of organizing knowledge, extracting new knowledge and performing some basic operations like query answering or inference reasoning. Following this argument, the advent of the Semantic Web is often claimed to bring about substantial progress in Web accessibility (which is part of the e-Inclusion concept). Web 2.0 sites, favoring massive information sharing, could as well be of great importance for e-Inclusion, enabling new forms of social interaction, collective intelligence and new patterns of interpersonal communication. Benefits could be substantial also for people with activity limitations. The paper tries to highlight the possible roles and convergence of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web in favoring e-Inclusion. It highlights the fact that examples of applications of these concepts to the e-Inclusion domain are few and limited to the e-Accessibility field.

A vast number of guidelines have been set up to regulate accessibility and conformance to standards of web pages. However, it is a fact that the percentage of fully accessible web sites is still low. When designing accessible web portals, knowledge of technologies and a good familiarity with interpreting guidelines are certainly required, but other factors have to be considered. This paper describes the process of implementation of the web site of the e-Inclusion Lab research group, using an Open Source Web Content Management System, and constitutes an example of good practice in how accessibility can be made mainstream in a research portal. The experience revealed that key factors for mainstreaming accessibility also include the acceptance of the overall solution by content authors and the system administrators.

An Information Society described by the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm is emerging, due to the ongoing technological developments. The paper aims to show that a designed for all AmI environment can have a positive impact on people with activity limitations in the long term and that the technology made available for the implementation of the AmI concepts can offer new integration possibilities for them in the short/medium term, reintroducing innovation in Assistive Technology.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is considered a likely future embodiment of the information society, according to development scenarios proposed worldwide. With reference to the scenarios developed in Europe by the Information Society Technology Advisory Group (ISTAG), this position paper maintains that, up to now, the attention has been more on the smart objects that are supposed to populate the environment and their interfaces than on the “intelligence” of the entire system. The latter is of paramount importance if users are to be served according to the specifications of the AmI environments. Correspondingly, the current notion of Design for All needs to be revised in order to take into account the additional complexity of the emerging information society. Examples of the main points to be considered are offered in order to elicit discussion.

The following report represents an attempt to go further the usual way of dealing with user typologies in the field of Information and Communication Technology. Our attempt started as we recognized the value of the new International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), proposed by the World Heart Organization, which, as described in the second chapter, approaches the problem of defining user health status and capabilities in a more integrated and complete way. The innovative philosophy and methodology of the above mentioned classification leaded us to hypothesize the possibility of using it as a basis to define user needs, finding important positive aspects and potentialities in the mentioned approach, as described in chapter 3, "ICF potentiality for user needs representation". To be able to encompass the whole filed of user capability in the context of technology mediated communication in the most extended and complete way, we describe user needs in the usual way in chapter 4, "Traditional definition of user needs". Starting from such background we propose an "Hypothesis on using the ICF coding to model user needs" in chapter 5, defining an extension of the MAIS conceptual model that takes into account the proposed hypothesis. Two more chapters, not directly related to user typologies, follow as a proposal of discussion to the whole consortium. Chapter 6 proposes an "Hypothesis on applying ICF coding to devices capability", following our idea of defining comparable classification of user needs and device capabilities in order to facilitate matching between user possibility of communication and capability of a state device, thus obtaining a range of possible way of communicating and interacting with the service, among which the user can exert his/her preferences. Finally the seventh chapter "User profile model and quality of service" presents some interesting hints on service quality and its correlation with user needs and existing requirements.

Access to electronic information and services for people who cannot see is achieved at present through the use of screen reader or other transduction technologies. Applications are commonly equipped with a reference interface, which is generally graphical, that has to be translated into a form that can be perceived by means of different sensorial channels, so that users with forms of access limitations are able to interact with them. In view of emerging technological scenarios. this approach could reveal limitations and systems could be designed in such a way that an application core capable of performing elaborations on certain information contents can be accessed by different modalities that can be easily plugged to form a flexible multimodal interface that enables interaction for all people.

The number and the diffusion of non traditional devices able to provide every-where and any time access to the Web is increasing day by day. These devices include not only cellular phones, PDAs, and terminals for disabled people, but also new kind of devices, possibly embedded into tools such as household appliances, or vehicle dashboards. The characteristics of the various devices are so different that the issues related to the delivering of information and services on the Web do not involve only the presentation aspects, but structural and navigational aspects as well. As an example consider a cellular phone: its limited computing capabilities require that information is filtered and organized as a collection of atomic units whose dimensions depend closely on specific features of the device. It turns out that a novel and fundamental requirement in this scenario is the ability of the system to adapt and personalize content delivery according to the context of the client (a human being or an application). There is no accepted definition of context, but the term is a usually adopted to indicate “a set of attributes that characterizes the capabilities of the access mechanism, the preferences of the user and other aspects of the context into which a Web page is to be delivered”. These may include the access device (even in presence of strong heterogeneity of devices), the network QoS, the user preferences, the location, the time, the language, and so on. Therefore adaptiveness usually concerns several independent coordinates. In this chapter we present models, methods and techniques for the design and the development of Web-based information systems, which are adaptive with respect to context information.