Able to Include is an international project which is part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) of the European Union, and is coordinated by the Spanish company Ariadna Servicios Informáticos, a company in which UPF is a shareholder, the Natural Language Processing research group of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF, and European partners located in Belgium, Spain, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Romania.

According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, disability results from the interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinders their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others. The European Commission believes that given the importance of ICTs, lack of access to or use of ICTs is an increasingly important form of social and economic exclusion.

The main target users for the Able to Include project are people with intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD), people with significant limitations in their intellectual function, in adaptive behaviour, social skills and daily habits, and those with disabilities that may affect their cognitive abilities or physical functioning.

In Europe, it is estimated that there are between 1.5 and 2 million people with severe IDD and between 3 to 3.7 million people with mild IDD, who are one of the most disadvantaged social groups in European countries, with very high levels of support needs, often throughout their lives. ICT tools can help to give them greater autonomy.

Information and communication technologies can improve these people's lives in various ways, such as providing them with access to employment or helping them to stay in touch with friends and loved ones. However, the existing software is not sufficiently adapted and cannot be accessed by people with intellectual or developmental disabilities.

The partners in the European project Able to Include want to break down these barriers and foster access and participation by disabled people in the information society, and promote the social inclusion of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

A truly innovative project because of its social projection

In order to carry it out, Able to Include, aims to create an open source and accessible technology that can be integrated with existing ICT tools, such as mobile applications, so that people with intellectual disabilities can interact better with IT software.

The objective of the services they are developing as part of the project is for normally written language to be accessible to people with intellectual disabilities. To that end, they are working on text simplifiers, on the creation of pictograms, on translators and converters from text to the spoken word.

Another aspect of the project aims to enable people with intellectual disabilities to have greater access to society by means of communication.  In this respect, Able to Include is working on the conversion of written language to a pictographic language and on producing an open source software kit that will enable any software application to be displayed in layers, making accessibility easier for people with disabilities.

For the software developers, creating applications aimed at the inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities is an approach that is both morally responsible and a rational undertaking from a financial point of view.