About

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in Bonn/Berlin is responsible for educational planning and research funding. The activities of the “Patents, New Companies, Inventor Support” unit at the Ministry encompass the promotion of innovation and technology transfer. Important responsibilities include the securing of property rights, better realisation of inventions, and the promotion of an inventory-friendly and patent-friendly climate in the public sphere.

Challenge

The BMBF planned to relaunch its information platform for the area of patents and inventions. The Web site www.patente.bmbf.de needed to provide investment support and contact information, and also needed to be restructured to reflect a more user-friendly environment. The new Web site needed to be accessible to all users, in accordance with the criteria of the “Accessible Information Technology Bylaw” (BITV) of the Equality for the Disabled Act (BGG, §11). Under this bylaw, which took effect in July 2002, all new digital information offerings from public institutions have to be readable for the vision-impaired and interpretable by speech synthesizers or Braille readers. The BMBF wanted to offer a standardized Web site for all visitors, instead of - as is so often the case - creating an additional site variant (”Text-only version”) for vision-impaired users. Thus the main requirement was an attractive screen design, but one that provided barrier-free access and ease of maintenance at the same time.

• Attractive information platform for all patent-related issues
• Unrestricted usability, even for the blind and vision-impaired
• Easy maintenance of content

Solution

“The patent server” was set up by informedia GmbH, a multimedia agency based in Stuttgart, in just seven weeks. The agency deployed Open Text Web Solutions as the editorial system. In addition to the easy-to-use SmartEdit interface in Open Text Web Solutions, another major advantage is the freely definable output formats, which means it does not modify the source coding. Accordingly, as long as the templates are designed in accordance with the accessibility guidelines, all Web pages produced under these guidelines are automatically accessible for citizen using assisting technologies such as screen readers to access the internet. The major objective of the Web site implementation was to enable the editors to create all pages in compliance with the new guidelines, without requiring them to have detailed knowledge of the BITV or even HTML scripting conventions. Open Text Web Solutions has been configured to prevent new pages from being published until they have been certified as accessible. The system makes sure, for example, that alternative description texts (ALT tags) have been entered for all graphics, and that all the necessary information for screen readers has been recorded. These auxiliary functions are especially useful when it comes to changing accustomed habits.

• Implementation time: 7 weeks
• Templates defined compliant with the guidelines ensure support for assisting Internet access technologies
• No additional effort required for editors

Results

“The patent server” has been online since July 2002. The Internet presence, which consists of some 100 individual pages, is maintained by two editors, who were able to start working with Open Text Web Solution’s simple, intuitive SmartEdit technology after just a brief introduction. The Web site.s barrier-free design is not only advantageous to the blind and vision-impaired; senior citizens - the fastest-growing group of new Internet users - also benefit from the absence of barriers, as low contrast, small fonts, blurred colours and minuscule interactive elements can make the digital world a hostile place. Ultimately, all users gain from re-sidual effects of the new design - such as improved usability, short loading times and compatibility with differ-ent browsers and output media. Moreover, the FMER as site operator has an additional benefit: because http://www.patente.bmbf.de/ is an accessible Web site, it can be more easily read and indexed by search engine bots and spiders.

• One uniform Web site for all users
• Editors can maintain content without needing detailed technical skills or knowledge of the BITV
• Improved usability and faster loading times.
• Search engine friendly HTML code

Facts & Figures

Costumer: Federal Ministry of Education and Research

URL: http://www.patente.bmbf.de/

Partner: informedia GmbH, Stuttgart (With Open Text Web Solutions, BMBF implemented accessible http://www.bafoeg.bmbf.de/ and http://www.berufsbildungsbericht.info/)

Project duration: April to July 2002

Site launched: July 2002

Time required: 35 person-days

Greatest challenge: “One Web site for all” - an attractive, accessible design

Site size: Approx. 100 pages

Editorial server: Open Text Web Solutions on Intel P4 1,4 GHz Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server

Live server: 2 x Intel P4 1,4 GHz Dual Processor, Debian Linux, Apache Web Server 1.3, fully redundant system with load balancer

Integrated components: External databases PHP4-based