ICT for Societal Challenges - European Commission - Europa

digital preservation asking EU Member States to step up their efforts to make
European cultural heritage more widely available and to boost growth in Europe’s
creative industries.
To tackle the digital divide, the Digital Agenda for Europe set targets until 2015: halving
the proportion of population that has never used the internet (to 15%), increasing
regular internet use from 60% to 75% for the general population and from 41.5%
to 60% for disadvantaged people. This also requires that public sector websites are
fully accessible by 2015. Therefore at the end of 2012 the European Commission
adopted a proposal for a Directive on the accessibility of the public sector bodies’
websites and is now engaging with the European Parliament, the governments,
the industry and organisations to speed up the adoption and implementation of
the Directive. 80 million citizens with disabilities in addition to 87 million of those
above 65 would benefit once this proposal is adopted and implemented. For instance,
visually impaired people will be able to hear descriptions of images and the hearing
impaired will see written captions for audio files and all parts of a website could be
explored via keyboards as well as a computer mouse.
Last but not least, the digital economy is borderless by nature, but the European Digital
Single Market has remained fragmented and is characterised by different national
market practices. Europe could gain EUR 500 billion by fully developing the Digital
Single Market by 2020, increasing its GDP by an extra 4%. Eliminating the remaining
obstacles is in the core of the Digital Agenda for Europe, including proposals to reuse
of public sector information, electronic identification and e-signatures or on collective
rights management.
To achieve digital transformation in public services and make it available to all
Europeans, the Commission envisages deploying and rolling out digital services in key
areas of public interest and support cross border interoperability of eIDs, e-procurement,
e-Justice or electronic health records, just to give few concrete examples.
Cross-border public services for an easier life
In many European countries, citizens have identity cards
and use them when interacting with public authorities.
Electronic identification (eID) schemes can make these
interactions much simpler for citizens and more costeffective
for administrations.
38