Global Standards
Challenges
Nasser Kettani
Regional Standards Officer
Microsoft Corporation
Innovation, Choice, Competition, and Opportunity
• Accessibility: a fundamental pillar of ”Bridging The
Digital Divide”
• Must approach Accessibility issues at a large
• Accessibility is unfortunately an ”after the
thoughts” feature in market products
• Standardization should occur soon, it is already
taking place at some places (see ISO 9241-171:2008)
• As a company, we are committed to
• Contribute Technology
• Participate openly in the process
• Build infrastructure & products that provide built-in
Accessibility
• Joint effort across the various Standards
Organizations (ITU, ISO, …), to minimize costs,
redundancy, achieve results faster
• Accessibility and Assistive Technologies should
not be a subject of competition in the industry,
• Consensus and collaborative approaches should be
preferred
• Interoperability standards should be developed to
foster innovation
• Regulation should not take place at the detailed
technology level; rather the Regulator should
require that Govt must provide built in Accessibility
in their citizen services
Global Influence for Local Benefit
Focus : Define national technology priorities
Set priorities as functional requirements, not technical or business model solutions
Security – Localisation – Specific relevant Industries …
Allow local/trans-local vendor teams to propose solutions
Look for Regional Structures to optimize resources and infrastructure
Build a National Standards Body
Range of relevant stakeholders, open participation, and transparent processes
Allow a marketplace for standardization itself: encourage/allow both formal and informal SDOs (consortia)
to flourish
NSB provides input and oversight
Choose rules that provide incentives to both innovate and contribute new
technologies to standardization
Balanced IPR policies
Allow for all business models to compete on level playing field
Leverage technology to build effective and efficient participation
Work to increase the effectiveness of consortia-based, NSB,
and international standards processes on a world-wide basis
Support a consensus-based approach that provides
alternatives for a dynamic ICT marketplace
Provide technology and governance expertise and best-
practices to developing NSBs
Provide collaboration technology to make it easier and
cheaper to build strong, transparent standards processes with
broad engagement
Slide 9
SK4 Wording for "Objective" and "Applicable to all" has been incoprorated into the graphic description.
Sean Kirk, 10/3/2008