”Select ALL” e-Accessibility Assessment Report for South Eastern Europe
the first report on the impact of this initiative will be available in the course of 2012. One problem is that awareness among the general public on the various possibilities of using the universal service is very low. Serbia is committed to making a set of defined services accessible and affordable through imposing universal service obligation on operators. Such services include fixed telephony and Internet (to an unspecified speed), and affordability is generally interpreted as a discount on monthly subscriptions and usage bills. In the past, some telecom operators have taken initiatives as part of their corporate social responsibility commitments or as marketing efforts, such as providing older people with larger, adapted phones, or an ‘alert service’ in the form of a pendant button. A register has been developed of households entitled to support, comprising those in which any individual receives one of a set of defined social programme supports targeted at poor and marginalized people. These include: •
low-income benefit recipients;
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families with children below the poverty line;
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people with disability;
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families with adopted children.
In total, this covers about 300,000 households, of which perhaps 60,000 to 70,000 comprise households of people with disabilities. The four main operators are obliged to participate in the scheme, offering these households affordable access. The intention is that after a period, any operator deemed to be unfairly burdened with universal service obligations will receive a payment in compensation, though the details are not yet fully worked through. There also appears to be very limited awareness of the scheme among those who might be entitled to the benefits. While this covers access and affordability, there is no support available at present for people with disabilities in terms of assistive technologies for telephony or Internet use in their homes. There is a regulation to ensure the public phone boxes are made accessible, including lowering phone boxes, Braille keypads, and wired interfaces. In practice, some public phone boxes have been adjusted for people with disabilities, but many still are not. Due to the common EU trend of replacing booths with specialized mobile telephone devices for persons with disabilities, RATEL will decide whether to adopt this new trend or proceed with mass customization of the existing booths. Another area relevant to e-Accessibility is television, covered under EU legislation with the 71 Television Without Frontiers Directive, relating to such aspects as subtitles and signing. A media strategy for Serbia has been approved by the government, after consultations. 71 See http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/audiovisual_and_media/l24101_en.htm.
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