Previous research has demonstrated that social institutions – relatively enduring norms, values a... more Previous research has demonstrated that social institutions – relatively enduring norms, values and procedures important to a society – structure the behavior of policy actors. In addition, theorists have argued that interdependent networks of policy actors contribute to both institutional change – as policy entrepreneurs – and institutional stability – as advocacy coalitions. However, social scientists and legal scholars have yet to examine fully the processes by which policy entrepreneurs, embedded in networks of interdependent actors can contribute to institutional change. This chapter examines the social institutions that structure the behavior of policy actors involved in promoting the accessibility of information and communication technology for persons with disabilities in the European Union (EU), and asks, “How can policy networks provide an opportunity for policy entrepreneurs to contribute to institutional change?” Following the adoption of the United Nations (UN) Conventi...
Intersectional discrimination recognizes social disadvantages occurring at the nexus of multiple ... more Intersectional discrimination recognizes social disadvantages occurring at the nexus of multiple social identities. An intersectional perspective provides a powerful lens for examining states’ obligations to ensure access to information and communications technology (ICT) across disability, gender, and socioeconomic status. Intersectional barriers can include accessibility, cost and affordability, social exclusion and online aggression, and learning digital skills. Our findings have particular relevance for the Global South due to the close link between poverty and disability, growing general prevalence of poverty, and increasing income disparities between the Global South and Global North (Hickel, 2017; Moyo & Ferguson, 2009). Our findings also illustrate the complex relationships and the need for new policies and programs that take into account intersectionality when adopting ICT as a tool for sustainable development.
The development of information and communication technology (ICT) has had the unintended effect o... more The development of information and communication technology (ICT) has had the unintended effect of producing inequalities between people with disabilities, who experience barriers using ICT, and others. Despite the efforts of the United Nations, European Union and national governments, such as the United Kingdom (UK), Norway, and the United States (US), research shows that the web remains broadly and substantively inaccessible to many persons with disabilities. Despite a growing body of research dedicated to examining web accessibility, scholars have yet to examine fully the design and implementation of web accessibility policies from a national and crossnational perspective. This dissertation aims to fill this gap and other relevant gaps in the literature on social regulation by investigating the role of non-State actors in designing and implementing social regulations; the long-term interactions between social norms, values and procedures and the behaviours of State and non-State ...
Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019
The objective of this course is to provide an overview of legal issues in HCI. The course will fo... more The objective of this course is to provide an overview of legal issues in HCI. The course will focus on five different areas: accessibility, privacy, intellectual property, telecommunications, and requirements in using human participants in research.
This is a pre-printed version of the Comment on Article 22 and Its Intersection with Obligations ... more This is a pre-printed version of the Comment on Article 22 and Its Intersection with Obligations for Accessibility. The final version appeared in 'The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. A Commentary', Edited by Ilias Bantekas, Michael Ashley Stein, and Dimitris Anastasiou (Part of the Oxford Commentaries on International Law).
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2018
This chapter examines the legal and normative obligations of states under Article 22 of the Unite... more This chapter examines the legal and normative obligations of states under Article 22 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to protect individuals with disabilities against unlawful and arbitrary interference with their privacy, both in general and in particular with respect to their personal, health, and rehabilitation information. For persons with disabilities, the right to privacy plays a particularly important role in helping to guarantee rights such as the rights to equality, to freedom from discrimination, to employment, and to education, among others. This is because the right to privacy provides individuals with the right to control information about themselves, including information related to their disability status. The ability to control and limit discovery and disclosure of one’s disability status is essential in helping to protect the individual from discrimination and stigma.
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, 2019
This on-going research paper reports initial evidence gathered as part of the Democratic Urban De... more This on-going research paper reports initial evidence gathered as part of the Democratic Urban Development in the Digital Age (DEMUDIG) project, which aims to investigate citizens' use of the internet and new media as channels for participation in urban development processes, with a focus on city governments' efforts to promote and make use of citizen initiatives through such channels. This on-going research paper focuses specifically on the new media platforms used to establish interactive dialogues with local communities. Preliminary results show that Oslo, Melbourne, and Madrid have used new media platforms for engaging public participation in a variety of urban development processes. Local districts in Oslo have begun to experiment with using social networking sites in conjunction with more traditional forms of digital communication such as email and SMS. In contrast, Melbourne has adopted Your City Your Voice, where citizens can engage with local government through surveys. Finally, the Decide Madrid platform has allowed citizens to directly impact area-based initiatives in the city and local districts of Madrid. The results additionally indicate that Oslo has relied to a greater extent than Melbourne or Madrid on mainstream new media platforms - i.e., Facebook.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2018
This article explores how interest organizations, including non-profit and commercial service pro... more This article explores how interest organizations, including non-profit and commercial service providers, act as intermediaries to support the implementation of regulations for web accessibility. Web accessibility policies promote the usability of web content for persons with disabilities. Previous research on relational regulation has focused on the bidirectional relationship between regulators and private enterprises in managing compliance. However, this research has yet to examine the complex relationships that emerge when interest organizations act as intermediaries between private enterprises and regulators. Previous research demonstrates that intermediaries translate and adjust legal obligations in practice. This article demonstrates that interest organizations in the United Kingdom, United States and Norway translated and adjusted legislation and standards to demonstrate the commercial value of compliance. This article extends previous research by suggesting that interest orga...
For many students, the auditorium is the room that most embodies Higher Education. However, recen... more For many students, the auditorium is the room that most embodies Higher Education. However, recent studies and developments in teaching methodologies in higher education, such as blended learning and the flipped classroom, have challenged this conceptualization of the auditorium. Results from a recent case study on blended learning at Oslo and Akershus University College, showed how the auditorium as a room challenged the implementation of the course and influenced the students' choice in how they wanted the curricular material presented to them. The inflexibility of the auditorium became a structural challenge, which constrained the instructor’s ability to use teaching methods other than the classical lecture. Essentially, the room proved to be non-functional for implementing a blended learning course. This paper challenges the traditional layout of an auditorium as an answer to new educational paradigms in higher education. It provides recommendations for innovative reconceptu...
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities obligates States Parties... more The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities obligates States Parties to ensure access to information and communications technology and recognizes the right to enjoy cultural products in accessible formats. In 2013, the World Intellectual Property Organization adopted the Marrakesh Access Treaty (MAT), which obligated State Parties ensure the accessibility of cultural products by introducing an exception to copyright law. However, despite these efforts, cultural products remain largely inaccessible for persons with disabilities due to, among other things, copyright laws that limit the production and distribution of accessible books. Research demonstrates that examining policy implementation from a “top-down” perspective provides a useful basis for examining the implementation of the MAT. However, research has yet to examine the implementation of the MAT from a “bottom-up” perspective. This article examines the “bottom-up” mechanisms for ensuring access to...
Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to become as common as electricity (OECD 2016) and there is ... more Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to become as common as electricity (OECD 2016) and there is a high probability for connected homes to become central parts of critical societal. IoT technologies might access, manage and record sensitive data about citizens and, as they become more and more pervasive, unintended data breaches reports increase every week. However, most of the tools designed to protect users’ privacy and personal data on IoT devices fail to contemplate the experience of persons with disabilities, elderly and other vulnerable categories of people. As a consequence, they are forced to rely on the help of family members or other related persons with technical skills, as frequent technical problems turn out to be the rule rather than the exception. With humans traditionally considered to be the “weak link” in technological networks there is the need of a vast educational project to raise awareness on the subject. This ongoing research paper aims to fill the existing ga...
This chapter explores the landscape of universal design and child online protection. The United N... more This chapter explores the landscape of universal design and child online protection. The United Nations (UN) conceptualises child online protection as efforts to create a safe and empowering online experience for children through legal measures, technical and procedural measures, organisational structures, capacity building, and international cooperation. This chapter uses universal design as a point of departure for examining child online protection using a review of key literature and a critical analysis of select policy documents from the UN. This chapter approaches child online protection from a universal design perspective so that policymakers, information and communication technology (ICT) developers, advocates, and researchers can reframe their efforts. A universal design perspective suggests that ICT service providers must ensure that children have equal access to and use of ICT. This includes identifying and removing barriers that children experience accessing and using ICT...
Previous research has demonstrated that social institutions – relatively enduring norms, values a... more Previous research has demonstrated that social institutions – relatively enduring norms, values and procedures important to a society – structure the behavior of policy actors. In addition, theorists have argued that interdependent networks of policy actors contribute to both institutional change – as policy entrepreneurs – and institutional stability – as advocacy coalitions. However, social scientists and legal scholars have yet to examine fully the processes by which policy entrepreneurs, embedded in networks of interdependent actors can contribute to institutional change. This chapter examines the social institutions that structure the behavior of policy actors involved in promoting the accessibility of information and communication technology for persons with disabilities in the European Union (EU), and asks, “How can policy networks provide an opportunity for policy entrepreneurs to contribute to institutional change?” Following the adoption of the United Nations (UN) Conventi...
Intersectional discrimination recognizes social disadvantages occurring at the nexus of multiple ... more Intersectional discrimination recognizes social disadvantages occurring at the nexus of multiple social identities. An intersectional perspective provides a powerful lens for examining states’ obligations to ensure access to information and communications technology (ICT) across disability, gender, and socioeconomic status. Intersectional barriers can include accessibility, cost and affordability, social exclusion and online aggression, and learning digital skills. Our findings have particular relevance for the Global South due to the close link between poverty and disability, growing general prevalence of poverty, and increasing income disparities between the Global South and Global North (Hickel, 2017; Moyo & Ferguson, 2009). Our findings also illustrate the complex relationships and the need for new policies and programs that take into account intersectionality when adopting ICT as a tool for sustainable development.
The development of information and communication technology (ICT) has had the unintended effect o... more The development of information and communication technology (ICT) has had the unintended effect of producing inequalities between people with disabilities, who experience barriers using ICT, and others. Despite the efforts of the United Nations, European Union and national governments, such as the United Kingdom (UK), Norway, and the United States (US), research shows that the web remains broadly and substantively inaccessible to many persons with disabilities. Despite a growing body of research dedicated to examining web accessibility, scholars have yet to examine fully the design and implementation of web accessibility policies from a national and crossnational perspective. This dissertation aims to fill this gap and other relevant gaps in the literature on social regulation by investigating the role of non-State actors in designing and implementing social regulations; the long-term interactions between social norms, values and procedures and the behaviours of State and non-State ...
Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019
The objective of this course is to provide an overview of legal issues in HCI. The course will fo... more The objective of this course is to provide an overview of legal issues in HCI. The course will focus on five different areas: accessibility, privacy, intellectual property, telecommunications, and requirements in using human participants in research.
This is a pre-printed version of the Comment on Article 22 and Its Intersection with Obligations ... more This is a pre-printed version of the Comment on Article 22 and Its Intersection with Obligations for Accessibility. The final version appeared in 'The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. A Commentary', Edited by Ilias Bantekas, Michael Ashley Stein, and Dimitris Anastasiou (Part of the Oxford Commentaries on International Law).
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2018
This chapter examines the legal and normative obligations of states under Article 22 of the Unite... more This chapter examines the legal and normative obligations of states under Article 22 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to protect individuals with disabilities against unlawful and arbitrary interference with their privacy, both in general and in particular with respect to their personal, health, and rehabilitation information. For persons with disabilities, the right to privacy plays a particularly important role in helping to guarantee rights such as the rights to equality, to freedom from discrimination, to employment, and to education, among others. This is because the right to privacy provides individuals with the right to control information about themselves, including information related to their disability status. The ability to control and limit discovery and disclosure of one’s disability status is essential in helping to protect the individual from discrimination and stigma.
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, 2019
This on-going research paper reports initial evidence gathered as part of the Democratic Urban De... more This on-going research paper reports initial evidence gathered as part of the Democratic Urban Development in the Digital Age (DEMUDIG) project, which aims to investigate citizens' use of the internet and new media as channels for participation in urban development processes, with a focus on city governments' efforts to promote and make use of citizen initiatives through such channels. This on-going research paper focuses specifically on the new media platforms used to establish interactive dialogues with local communities. Preliminary results show that Oslo, Melbourne, and Madrid have used new media platforms for engaging public participation in a variety of urban development processes. Local districts in Oslo have begun to experiment with using social networking sites in conjunction with more traditional forms of digital communication such as email and SMS. In contrast, Melbourne has adopted Your City Your Voice, where citizens can engage with local government through surveys. Finally, the Decide Madrid platform has allowed citizens to directly impact area-based initiatives in the city and local districts of Madrid. The results additionally indicate that Oslo has relied to a greater extent than Melbourne or Madrid on mainstream new media platforms - i.e., Facebook.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2018
This article explores how interest organizations, including non-profit and commercial service pro... more This article explores how interest organizations, including non-profit and commercial service providers, act as intermediaries to support the implementation of regulations for web accessibility. Web accessibility policies promote the usability of web content for persons with disabilities. Previous research on relational regulation has focused on the bidirectional relationship between regulators and private enterprises in managing compliance. However, this research has yet to examine the complex relationships that emerge when interest organizations act as intermediaries between private enterprises and regulators. Previous research demonstrates that intermediaries translate and adjust legal obligations in practice. This article demonstrates that interest organizations in the United Kingdom, United States and Norway translated and adjusted legislation and standards to demonstrate the commercial value of compliance. This article extends previous research by suggesting that interest orga...
For many students, the auditorium is the room that most embodies Higher Education. However, recen... more For many students, the auditorium is the room that most embodies Higher Education. However, recent studies and developments in teaching methodologies in higher education, such as blended learning and the flipped classroom, have challenged this conceptualization of the auditorium. Results from a recent case study on blended learning at Oslo and Akershus University College, showed how the auditorium as a room challenged the implementation of the course and influenced the students' choice in how they wanted the curricular material presented to them. The inflexibility of the auditorium became a structural challenge, which constrained the instructor’s ability to use teaching methods other than the classical lecture. Essentially, the room proved to be non-functional for implementing a blended learning course. This paper challenges the traditional layout of an auditorium as an answer to new educational paradigms in higher education. It provides recommendations for innovative reconceptu...
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities obligates States Parties... more The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities obligates States Parties to ensure access to information and communications technology and recognizes the right to enjoy cultural products in accessible formats. In 2013, the World Intellectual Property Organization adopted the Marrakesh Access Treaty (MAT), which obligated State Parties ensure the accessibility of cultural products by introducing an exception to copyright law. However, despite these efforts, cultural products remain largely inaccessible for persons with disabilities due to, among other things, copyright laws that limit the production and distribution of accessible books. Research demonstrates that examining policy implementation from a “top-down” perspective provides a useful basis for examining the implementation of the MAT. However, research has yet to examine the implementation of the MAT from a “bottom-up” perspective. This article examines the “bottom-up” mechanisms for ensuring access to...
Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to become as common as electricity (OECD 2016) and there is ... more Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to become as common as electricity (OECD 2016) and there is a high probability for connected homes to become central parts of critical societal. IoT technologies might access, manage and record sensitive data about citizens and, as they become more and more pervasive, unintended data breaches reports increase every week. However, most of the tools designed to protect users’ privacy and personal data on IoT devices fail to contemplate the experience of persons with disabilities, elderly and other vulnerable categories of people. As a consequence, they are forced to rely on the help of family members or other related persons with technical skills, as frequent technical problems turn out to be the rule rather than the exception. With humans traditionally considered to be the “weak link” in technological networks there is the need of a vast educational project to raise awareness on the subject. This ongoing research paper aims to fill the existing ga...
This chapter explores the landscape of universal design and child online protection. The United N... more This chapter explores the landscape of universal design and child online protection. The United Nations (UN) conceptualises child online protection as efforts to create a safe and empowering online experience for children through legal measures, technical and procedural measures, organisational structures, capacity building, and international cooperation. This chapter uses universal design as a point of departure for examining child online protection using a review of key literature and a critical analysis of select policy documents from the UN. This chapter approaches child online protection from a universal design perspective so that policymakers, information and communication technology (ICT) developers, advocates, and researchers can reframe their efforts. A universal design perspective suggests that ICT service providers must ensure that children have equal access to and use of ICT. This includes identifying and removing barriers that children experience accessing and using ICT...
Proceedings of the AHFE 2017 International Conference on Design for Inclusion, 2017
Self-driving cars are already being tested in our roads, and several benefits to society are expe... more Self-driving cars are already being tested in our roads, and several benefits to society are expected with their mainstream use. They also present an opportunity to increase independent mobility for people with disabilities and the elderly. To achieve this, however, the in-car interaction should be redesigned to be suitable for these groups of previously excluded car users. An investigation of existing literature helped us identify two main challenges that could impact the adoption of self-driving cars by such users, namely, their acceptance and multi-modal in-car interaction. To mitigate such challenges, we propose in this paper a model that frames the process of universally designing the in-car interactions to increase usability for everyone, while maintaining safety. We argue that integrating universal design early in the development of in-car interaction will ensure their accessibility and usability by all people.
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Papers by G. Giannoumis