A Study on Promoting Mobile Accessibility Compliance to Regulations and Guidelines for Persons with Disability

장애인의 모바일 접근성 강화를 위한 법제도적 개선 방안 연구

이 용 직(Yong-Jick LEE)**

Accessibility refers to the design of products or services that ensures ability to access for everyone, including people with disabilities. The concept of accessibility is to guarantee direct access to services and products, or, alternatively, to guarantee indirect access that utilizes assistive technology. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which is an international human rights treaty of the United Nations creates the first universal framework addressing the accessibility of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and assistive technologies. Discrimination acts in many countries, such as South Korea, U.S., Australia, U.K., Japan, and Hong Kong, focus on creating an environment in which persons with disability can experience equality with non-disabled people. Under such a philosophy, information and telecommunication accessibility for persons with disability is regulated. Organizations from around the world establish standards for the Internet.
Korea has enacted the Disability Discrimination Act of 2007 and other regulations ensuring the accessibility of persons with disability to Internet, information, and communication technologies. Under this law, the Korea Ministry of Public Administration and Security promulgated the Mobile Applications Accessibility Guidelines in 2011, which included seven required items and eight advisory items.
In this paper, I address motivating factors that drive firms to adopt accessibility features to their mobile applications — i.e. corporate social responsibility, government regulations and civil certification programs. Moreover, I review Korea’s mobile accessibility guidelines. The Republic of Korea devoted many efforts to establish mobile application accessibility guidelines since 2011. Currently, these guidelines are a national Korea Standards (KS). First, I review the original version of mobile application accessibility guideline announced in 2011. Second, I introduce the recently updated version 2.0 and compare and contrast it with the previous versions. I also briefly review three options how a person with disabilities file a protest when a recognizes discrimination due to the insufficient accessibility of a mobile application with mini-cases. I also briefly review Korea’s certification programs for mobile accessibility assessment. Finally, I reviewed some issues related to current standards and certification processes.
This paper aims to help industry practitioners and decision makers understand what mobile accessibility is, why it is so important, and what the common technical mistakes are. Strategic decision makers may find this paper useful in understanding mobile accessibility regulations and the current industry status.