Open standards define how products and services are designed. For many years, we have been participating in the SIP and SIPPING working groups of the Internet Engineering Task Force to create more accessible Internet telephony and multimedia services.
For many years, We have been actively participating in the SIP and SIPPING communities of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet.
Standardisation work is absolutely key if we are to, over time, make technology based products and services more accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people. This in turn is essential in order to break down the barriers to opportunity and fulfilment that are created when certain groups of citizens face barriers in using them, or are even entirely excluded. This technical exclusion all too often leads to social and economic exclusion.
SIP is rapidly becoming the dominant protocol for Internet based real-time communications, including for VOIP applications. By working with the rest of the technical community, we try to make SIP based products and services more inclusive, so that deaf and hard of hearing people will eventually be able to communicate as seamlessly and at the same cost with anyone else in society, at any time, in any place.
TalkByText Overview is a great demonstration of the power of standardisation. Not only does it use open industry standards to bring real-time text into the mainstream, it also demonstrates how deaf and hard of hearing people can be at the forefront of bridging the digital divide.
These are some of the recent work strands that we have been involved in:
For a more complete overview of IETF (and other) standards that are of immediate relevance to the topic of deaf and hard of hearing people and ICT, see Standards and Guidelines.