CEN/CENELEC Guide 6: Guidelines for standards developers to address the needs of older persons and persons with disabilities is a document for participants in standardisation activities at CEN and CENELEC that contains guidance for the creation and the revision of standards to ensure greater accessibility of products and services. The document is a "Guide", in other words, not a European Standard (EN). The guide is identical to ISO/IEC Guide 71 and was adopted by both the CEN Technical Board and the CENELEC Technical Board, and published in January 2002. The adoption of CEN/CENELEC Guide 6 resulted from a European mandate to the European standardisation organisations, and the European Commission is funding projects to promote the use of the Guide.
A revised version was published in December 2014; it is identical to ISO/IEC Guide 71:2014.
Background
In 2000 ISO and IEC published the policy statement: "Addressing the needs of older persons and people with disabilities in standardization work". This policy statement recognised the need to include the requirements of older persons and persons with disabilities during the development and revision of standards. The document stated that this could be achieved by following the basic principles of:
The policy statement also recommended using ISO/IEC Guide 71, which would become available in 2001. ISO/IEC Guide 71:2001: Guidelines for standardization to address the needs of older persons and people with disabilities was published in 2001 and has been widely accepted: it has been used in Japan and was adopted by CEN and CENELEC as CEN/CENELEC Guide 6 (see below). ISO/IEC Guide 71 was also made available in Braille and was the first ISO publication that was made available in this format.
CEN and CENELEC adopted ISO/IEC Guide 71 as CEN/CENELEC Guide 6 as a result of Mandate M/283, which the European Commission gave to the three official European standardisation bodies, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI on 24 June 1999. The text of the mandate pointed out that special needs were addressed in standards related to assistive technology, but that
Guide 6 is part of a wider framework that standardisation organisations can use to support the need for more accessible products and services. The ISO/IEC Policy Statement 2000 "Addressing the Needs of Older Persons and People with Disabilities in Standardization Work" already provided principles and considerations for ensuring that the needs of older persons and persons with disabilities are addressed in the standardisation process.
ETSI, the third European standardisation body to which Mandate M/283 was addressed, did not adopt CEN/CENELEC Guide 6 but continued using ISO/IEC Guide 71 as a reference document. Since 2008 ISO/IEC Guide 71 has a supporting document: ISO/TR 22411:2008: Ergonomics data and guidelines for the application of ISO/IEC Guide 71 to products and services to address the needs of older persons and persons with disabilities.
In December 2014 CEN and CENELEC adopted the revised ISO/IEC Guide 71: 2014 as CEN-CENELEC Guide 6:2014. This new version of Guide 6 is freely available on the website of CEN and CENELEC.
Content
CEN/CENELEC Guide 6 is a document for participants in CEN technical bodies: Technical Committees or TCs, Working Groups or WGs, Task Forces, Workshops etcetera. These technical bodies are responsible for addressing the needs of persons with disabilities and older people in the standards, specifications, reports or other documents that they produce.
CEN/CENELEC Guide 6 has three goals: to inform how human abilities (and disabilities) affect the usability of products, services and the built environment, to describe how requirements in standards relate to accessibility and usability of products and services, to raise awareness about the benefits of accessible design.
The Guide consists of a few introductory sections followed by 10 other chapters which are called "clauses". The most important chapters are described in the list below. Clause 6 briefly describes a process that allows technical committees to consider the needs of older persons and persons with disabilities. It divides the standardisation process into five steps; for each step, the Guide lists one or more issues that need to be addressed. Clause 7 and 8 provide tables that relate several types of clauses in a standard (for example, on packaging, the user interface and the built environment) to factors that need to be considered when addressing disabilities. Clause 9 provides descriptions of body functions or disabilities and their implications when using products and services. The last chapter is a bibliography that provides a list of resources for more specific guidance.