The Vodafone Foundation has set up the Smart Accessibility Awards to celebrate apps that help people in four key areas: Social participation, independent living, mobility and well-being.

The awards are free to enter until 15 October 2011 and there's a prize fund of €200,000.

As part of this initiative, alongside our friends at MobileMonday London, we've teamed up with the ICT KTN and the Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards to bring you in Belfast a half-day workshop (start at 3pm) looking specifically at this area.

The goal of the workshop is to inspire and enable app developers and entrepreneurs like you to create useful tools for people who have visual, aural, cognitive or other impairments by helping you understand and empathize what life is like for people in this situation. This empathy and understanding is created by bringing together app developers, entrepreneurs and accessibility advocates and people with impairments to exchange information, and allowing developers to experience simulations of being impaired.

Philip Strain from Ecliptic Labs will be introducing us to the topic and sharing some of his key insights from his research in this area. Philip Hargrave from ICT KTN will be talking about how ICT KTN helps companies looking to capitalise on this area. And the highlight of the sessions is that we will also have Accessibility expert, Kath Moonan from Vodafone, explaining how to tackle accessibility in your own app.

App developers who have had the opportunity to experience as directly as possible, first or second-hand, what it means to live with specific impairments, and have been put in touch with the larger community around accessibility, create more effective apps to better the quality of life for everyone. The result not only helps people with major disabilities, but also people with minor or temporary impairments, for example due to ageing or illness.

The format of the workshop will be discussion-based and there will be technical people on hand to answer specific questions related to Android, but there will be different speakers and contributors to reflect the local scene. Plenty of time will be allowed for discussion and networking and

Please note that, as an exception to our MoMoBelfast privacy rule, the attendee list will this time be shared with the two supporting organisations ICTKTN and Vodafone.

About our workshop partners

These are new global awards to celebrate apps that help people in four key areas: Social participation, independent living, mobility and well-being.

They are free to enter and there is a prize fund of €200,000. The awards are now open for entries until 15 October 2011.

The ICT Knowledge Transfer Network has been established by an industry-led group of leading players, with funding from the Technology Strategy Board. We seek to bring competitive advantage to the UK by promoting collaboration and knowledge sharing between the users and providers of Information and Communications Technologies, and helping to drive innovation in the sector. It's free to join the network.

MoMoLo was the first MobileMonday chapter founded in the UK, then came Belfast (2008), Edinburgh (2010), and only recently Manchester and Birmingham (2011). MoMoLo is powered by Helen “Technokitten” Keegan and Jo Rabin.