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Abstract
This article seeks to examine how public procurement policies for information and communication technology (ICT), aimed at improving the accessibility of ICT for persons with disabilities, have converged internationally. Convergence, in this instance, refers to the international harmonisation or acceptance of common standards and norms. Distinguishing itself from the predominant authorship in the area, this article seeks to explore convergence from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective, by examining the influence of networks of public and private actors on the design of public procurement standards for accessible ICT. Specifically, it will seek to answer how these actors and networks (varying in their level of coordination) have contributed to policy design in a unique area, public procurement of ICT goods and services. The influence of these networks will be discussed through the use of policy documents and semi-structured interviews, to provide empirical support for examining this ‘bottom-up’ analysis and distinguish it from the standard ‘top-down’ model usually employed in this field. This article also focuses on the role of policy actors in the United States and European Union that participated in the harmonisation of public procurement policy and the legal norms and instruments that give these policies their legal effect.
Conflict of interest disclosure
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme ([FP7-SSH-2012-2]) under grant number 320079.
Notes
1. Web accessibility refers to the design of web content to be usable by persons with disabilities. According to Blanck (Citation2014) web content refers to ‘digital information derived from human and machine operations and transferred to users by various means’.
2. Web accessibility differs from ICT accessibility because the web provides a narrower policy objective. While ICT accessibility includes a range of consumer and business electronic hardware, systems, applications and services, the web includes only web-based applications and content. While the article acknowledges the influence of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) in adopting WCAG as an ISO standard, ISO has adopted WCAG only as a web accessibility. This article argues that while contributing to international harmonisation, the ISO standard has not influenced the design of public procurement policies to the same extent as WCAG. However, recent technological trends, such as the ‘Internet of Things’, may blur the lines between accessible web content and ICT, and the W3C has initiated new efforts to anticipate the accessibility barriers that may result from this trend (W3C Citation2015).
3. While researchers continue to debate the meaning of governance, Bevir (Citation2010, 1) conceptualises governance as a ‘pluralistic pattern of rule … less focused on state institutions, and more focused on the processes and interactions that tie the state to civil society'. Research on governance in the US and EU further posits that governance ‘signals a shift away from the monopoly of traditional politico-legal institutions, and implies either the involvement of actors other than classically governmental actors, or indeed the absence of any traditional framework of government’ Bevir (Citation2010, 2).
4. Mattli (Citation2001) quotes the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade stating ‘where technical regulations are required and relevant international standards exist or their completion is imminent, Members shall use them, or the relevant parts of them, as a basis for their technical regulations’.
5. Levi-Faur (Citation2005) draws his conceptualisation of institutions from previous research by North (Citation1990) and considers political, social and economic institutions as formal and informal constraints that structure and guide human interactions.
6. Case study methods provide a useful basis for conducting an in-depth exploration of a contemporary phenomenon in context. Case studies provide detailed explanations of the processes that cause a particular phenomenon (Boix and Stokes Citation2007). By detailing causal processes, case studies can identify new variables and hypotheses (George and Bennett Citation2005; Mitchell Citation1983). The results of case studies allow investigators to expand and generalise theories (Yin Citation2013). Thus, rather than generalising statistically by ‘enumerating frequencies’, case studies generalise to ‘theoretical propositions’ (Yin Citation2013).
7. The interview guide focused on accessibility as a technological, social and political phenomenon and included questions related to the role of ICT Accessibility in the public and private sectors; the relationships among policy actors; and the role of standards in achieving accessibility.
8. The ESO consists of three standards organisations, the European Committee for Standardization (CEN), European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). CEN and CENELEC consist of the national standards bodies in Europe and maintain responsibility for investigating the procedural aspects of public procurement policy. ETSI consists of both the national standards bodies in Europe and market actors.
9. According to the European Commission (Citation2011a), the Europe 2020 targets include, among other things, ‘at least 20 million fewer people in or at risk of poverty and social exclusion’.
10. See the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), 42 U.S.C. §§ 12101–12213 (2000) and the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, 47 U.S.C. § 613) in the US and a review of European legislation on accessibility by the Academic Network of European Disability Experts (ANED) published at http://disability-europe.net/content/aned/media/ANED%202012%20-%20Task%204%20-%20accessibility%20report%20final.doc
11. Interview with a US private sector accessibility expert (Participant ID 06).
12. ‘If the government's not leading by example, nobody is going to do it’, interview with a US private sector accessibility expert (Participant ID 06). The participant argues that public procurement acts as a persuasive example for market actors.
13. Interview with a US public sector accessibility expert (Participant ID 08)
14. An interview with an EU private sector accessibility expert (Participant ID 07) confirms the regulatory approach of Section 508 stating, ‘In Section 508, they said, “We're not going to buy it unless it does this.”’
15. Interview with a US public sector accessibility expert (Participant ID 08).
16. Interview with a US standards expert (Participant ID 05).
17. Directive 2014/24/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 February 2014 on public procurement and repealing Directive 2004/18/EC.
18. In this respect,
[M] 376 is all about procurement and only about procurement, it's basically saying this is what people procuring contracts which fall under European contract procurement laws need to do. So it's about making sure that things happen at the inception of contract provision. (Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 02))
19. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 04).
20. Interview with an EU private sector accessibility expert (Participant ID 07).
21. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 04).
22. ‘ … the EU is afraid of producing a new law because of protests from the member states. They instead make a Mandate and they send it to the standardization bodies, and say “OK make a standard on this and this, and then we will refer to it and say that it is good when they confirm it”. This will open the way for new legislation. So my good bet is that [M 376] is the start of an EU legislation on accessible ICT’, interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 11).
23. ‘The US changed to say let's apply WCAG to everything’, interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
24. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 03).
25. ‘The commission was very keen for us to put everything, more or less to reproduce WCAG. They wanted a one-stop shop, and we tried as much as was feasible. Therefore, they would have liked to see the whole of WCAG in [the M 376 standard]’, interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
26. ‘The commission asked the ESOs to have an open process. So they asked … to provide public trust you need to provide [documents] on the web so anyone can get them so anyone can comment on them. And [the EC] were even asking metrics of how many drafts you've made, how many comments you've received, how many replies you've provided and things like that. So the [European] Commission really asked for a truly open process that was open to anyone, even outside the standards organizations’, interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 03).
27. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
28. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 03).
29. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
30. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
31. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 03).
32. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
33. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 03).
34. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
35. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 04).
36. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
37. According to an interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10), the WCAG2ICT Task Force included, ‘ … quite a broad range of people … expert consultants, a lot of people involved in the development of WCAG itself were involved and that included industry people … we had bodies representing end user communities’.
38. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 03).
39. Interview with an EU private sector accessibility expert (Participant ID 09).
40. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
41. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 11).
42. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 04).
43. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
44. An analysis of the M 376 standard, the WCAG2ICT Working Group Note and the WCAG 2.0 reveals that Sections 9.2, 10.2 and 11.2, related to web content requirements, non-web document success criteria, and non-web software success criteria echo the success criteria provided in the Working Group Note, which was based directly on WCAG 2.0 success criteria for levels A and AA.
45. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
46. The interview participant's assertion, that the Section 508 refresh will utilise the WCAG2ICT Working Group Note is supported by documentary evidence. While the Section 508 refresh has yet to be concluded, according to the US Access Board ‘the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), is incorporated into the [proposed] rule and applied to web-based content as well as to offline documents and software’ (US Access Board Citation2015a, Citation2015c).
47. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
48. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
49. Interview with a US standards expert (Participant ID 01).
50. Interview with a US standards expert (Participant ID 01).
51. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 10).
52. Interview with an EU standards expert (Participant ID 04).
53. Previous research has demonstrated that co-regulation or concertation involves cooperation among State and non-State actors in policy design (Levi-Faur Citation2011; Ornston and Schulze-Cleven Citation2014).