Welcome!
The Swiss Innovation Agency (Innosuisse) has granted funding for a large four-year project (overall budget: 12.4 million CHF) entitled “Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies” (IICT), under its new flagship scheme. The goal of this flagship is to develop information and communication technologies (ICT) for persons with disabilities. In particular, the flagship targets five applications: text simplification, sign language translation, sign language assessment, audio description, and spoken subtitles. Each application constitutes its own subproject within the flagship, with tight connections between the subprojects through shared technologies such as artificial intelligence techniques. The user-centered approach of the flagship will lead to innovations that support persons with hearing, visual, and cognitive impairments but also hearing sign language learners, thereby emphasizing the notion of accessibility as a bidirectional concept. The flagship subscribes to a participatory approach by including persons with disabilities in all phases of the research and development cycles.
The flagship is led by the Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zürich and consists of four research partners overall, with subcontracting of an additional foreign research partner and six implementation partners. Together, the flagship partners are among the primary stakeholders in the field of inclusive ICTs in Switzerland.
Funding
The IICT flagship is supported by the Swiss Innovation Agency Innosuisse under grant agreement number PFFS-21-47.
Project duration
March 2022 to February 2026