It’s the season to enjoy outdoor activities, feeling the cool breeze and taking walks along the forest. This weather is also perfect to visit popular restaurants with friends and family.
Nowadays, you’ll find kiosks placed wherever you go. It’s become such a vital piece of infrastructure that when it’s not there, you catch yourself looking for it.
Kiosks are touch-screen activated stand alone structures that provide information or offer self-service.
They are often installed in public places such as government facilities, banks, department stores, and exhibition halls to provide us with transportation information, route guidance, reservation services, administrative procedures, product information, and how to use facilities.
Although kiosks are great for contactless transactions and provide efficiency, there is a blind spot.
Care to take a guess?
Many people find it difficult to use kiosks because of their lack of touch sensitivity, their imperfect heights, and their difficulty of usage.
Source: MoneyToday /Inconveniences Felt Using Kiosks from the elderly (65 years old or more)
In order to increase the accessibility of stand alone information terminals and to find practical measures, Dot has worked with specialists in various fields for policy support and system improvement.
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Such specialists include the director of Korea Differently Abled Federation(KODAF), the secretary general of the Korea Federation of Organizations of Disabled, the director of the Korea Research Institute of Eco-Environmental Architecture, the Digital Inclusion Policy Team of the Ministry of Science and ICT(MSIT), and the Ministry of SMEs and Startups.
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Through the meeting, the Dot team discussed specifications from the "Notice for Improving Access and Convenience of Information for the Disabled and the Elderly" to follow when selecting the types of kiosk and to define specific details for proper convenience. In addition, Dot developed a plan, which includes urgent improvement issues, to install barrier-free kiosks in 2023 within public facilities.
For the next phase, Dot has expanded partnerships from the Gangnam-gu Office and Namwon City Hall to the Seoul Tourism Foundation.
So far, Dot is putting much effort to revise policies and regulations to create an inclusive digital infrastructure and to develop products using barrier-free technology.
Dot believes a true barrier-free society will be most effectively implemented with support from the country's policies. For this, we are providing a universal design and are shifting policy alongside these necessary changes.