Verbatim report of proceedings

Tuesday, 19 January 2016 - Strasbourg

Towards a Digital Single Market Act (debate)

  Indrek Tarand (Verts/ALE). – Mr President, as the President of the Estonian Union of Persons with Mobility Impairment and Vice-President of the Disability Intergroup in this Parliament, I am happy to see that some of the main concerns of persons with disabilities are addressed in this report. I am pleased to see that the report brings out accessibility and exclusion challenges faced by people with disabilities, as well as their integration into the labour market. Furthermore, the report rightly points out the deplorable fact that the Commission’s digital single market strategy for Europe takes no account of the need to ensure full, equal and unrestricted access for disabled people to all new digital technologies.

There is one small caveat: the accessibility and interoperability aspect should have been emphasised more. For example, we can have brilliant reading software for the blind and visually impaired, but its use can be severely limited if it is not interoperable with most devices, websites, content, etc. This is one of the reasons why free and open standards should be used across all domains of a digital single market.

Commissioner, this report has almost four and a half pages consisting solely of references to the former documents adopted by co-legislators, which might prove that successive Commissions do not use the full potential of those texts. Please try to make a difference this time.

(The speaker agreed to take a blue-card question under Rule 162(8))