The Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII)
Gregg C. Vanderheiden, Jutta Treviranus, Amrish Chourasia · 2013 · Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) · doi:10.1145/2513383.2513395
Summary
This paper describes the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII), an ambitious international initiative to build a cloud-based infrastructure that can automatically personalize any device or technology to match an individual user's accessibility needs and preferences. The authors argue that despite growing recognition of the importance of ICT accessibility, the field is actually losing ground: technical proliferation across platforms breaks existing solutions, product churn disrupts what works, social resources to address accessibility are shrinking, and the cost of serving people with rare disabilities or combinations of disabilities remains prohibitively high. The GPII aims to address these challenges through three pillars: (1) tools for people to discover and store their accessibility needs and preferences in the cloud; (2) mechanisms to use those preferences to automatically configure accessibility features, assistive technologies, and services on any device, anywhere; and (3) developer tools and infrastructure to lower the cost of creating new accessibility solutions. The initiative is supported by two major EU-funded projects — Cloud4all (24 partners from 9 European countries plus Canada and the US) and Prosperity4All.
Key findings
The Cloud4all project focuses on building the core auto-personalization engine: infrastructure that allows software, hardware, and media to automatically change their interface or format to accommodate each individual user's needs. The vision is that any device a person approaches would instantly and automatically adapt to a form they can understand and use — based on preferences stored in the cloud or on a personal token. Prosperity4All complements this by building the economic ecosystem needed to make accessibility solutions viable at scale, using cross-platform development techniques, crowdsourcing, and gamification to lower development costs and enable new delivery strategies. The Global Access project (US Dept of Education funded) focuses on preference discovery and capture tools. Together, these projects aim to create a world where accessibility is not a per-device, per-platform problem but a universal infrastructure concern — analogous to how the internet itself provides universal connectivity.
Relevance
The GPII represents one of the most comprehensive attempts to address the systemic barriers to accessibility at an infrastructure level rather than through individual product fixes. The core insight — that accessibility solutions are losing ground because the ecosystem cannot scale to match the pace of technology change — remains highly relevant. The auto-personalization concept, where user preferences follow them across devices and platforms, anticipates trends in cloud computing and user profiles that have since become mainstream. For accessibility practitioners and organizations, the GPII framework offers a model for thinking about accessibility as infrastructure rather than as individual product features. While the full vision of universal auto-personalization has not yet been realized, the projects produced important components including the Morphic system. The paper is a brief poster overview, but the ambition and architectural thinking behind GPII continue to influence accessibility infrastructure discussions.
Tags: GPII · cloud accessibility · auto-personalization · assistive technology · digital divide · inclusive design · infrastructure