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The UMAQ project interviews Alejandro Moledo (New Technologies & Innovation Officer, European Disability Forum). The UMAQ interviews on Media Accessibility Quality are part of the project “Understanding Media Accessibility Quality” carried out by Gian Maria Greco at the TransMedia Catalonia Research Group of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. The UMAQ project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship grant agreement No 752659. Media partners of the UMAQ project are FRED Film Radio and the Media Accessibility Platform.

Media Accessibility is the research area dealing with the “theories, practices, services, technologies and instruments that provide access to media products, services, and environments for people that cannot, or cannot properly, access that content in its original form” (Greco 2016). Media Accessibility is at the core of the most pressing priorities of the European Commission, such as the European Disability Strategy 2010-2020 and the Digital Single Market Strategy. For a long time, policies involving Media Accessibility have been concerned with quantity, that is, setting quotas for inducing the widespread adoption of media accessibility solutions, e.g. hours per year of subtitled TV programmes. Now that quotas are being met in many EU countries, attention is shifting over to quality. Standardisation is the very instrument through which quality requirements are implemented at a policy level. Unfortunately, accessibility standardisation at an EU level is subject to a fragmented situation due to a plethora of divergent rules. Difficulties in harmonising the various standards, beyond mere differences in terms of national systems, are mainly due to a lack of research: the absence of a theoretical framework for understanding quality in media accessibility. The overall aim of this project is indeed to carry out the first comprehensive analysis of the notion of quality in Media Accessibility and provide a unified theoretical framework for understanding it. Under the hypothesis that Media Accessibility groups a series of practices to manage, transform and transfer data and information, the project will draw on scholarship on data and information quality and investigate if and how it can help to successfully deal with Media Accessibility Quality. The project will boost a coordinated research programme at an international level and enable the creation of a set of recommendations aimed at strengthening EU policies, which will in turn benefit all the stakeholders in the accessibility value chain and facilitate the achievement of a Digital Single Market.

To discover more about the Project, click here.