M.W.A. Project

New labour regulations about flexible work and companies' need to adjust their organisation systems to the rules of ON Demand Business have changed the ways of work performing.

So arose the concept of Mobile Working, i.e. the setting-up of the working environment not only at home (home working, widely experienced) but basically in every place the worker happens to operate: by the customer, on travel, an so on.

Portable computer has been the first vehicle of this change, due to its ability to support a relevant share of the company applications required to perform the worker's job, connecting with the central information systems only to exchange data.

The ever increasing availability of wireless communication bandwidth at reasonable prices and of processing power in cellular phones and palm computers (these devices substantially converging) make now possible, for the best part of employees types, to replace personal computer with less costly and handier smart-phones.

IBM has followed this way for years and now feels the need, within its strategy of non discriminating disabled employees (seen as a resource to be exploited), to launch, together with ASPHI Foundation and co-operating with Nokia and Talks, a specific project named MOBILE WIRELESS ACCESSIBILITY and aimed to pursue everybody usability of the new operating procedures, in agreement with accessibility and design-for-all rules.

This implies primarily to make available solutions to increase everybody working quality, safeguarding effectiveness and ergonomics. For this reason Talks, synthetic voice and Voice IP have been chosen. These tools are the most effective for the dyslexic, the blind and the partially-sighted, and are in line with commercially available solutions for accessing smart-phone to read documents, e-mails or SMS in the mobile working environment of "normal" workers, willing to cut productivity slices on travelling (car, train) or in customer premises.

MOBILE WIRELESS ACCESSIBILITY is a further result achieved by ASPHI in its multi-year effort to charge a civil obligation into a company resource, through a complete integration of the disabled in the working environment: a new step now made possible by Nokia and Talks collaboration.

We are pleased to share our results with other Companies, trusting they can be useful in implementing organisation effectiveness and working integration strategies.