The ISO celebrates the standards that make the world accessible.
Today (October 14) is World Standards Day. The ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, along with the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), is taking the opportunity to pay tribute to the thousands of experts worldwide who contribute to developing voluntary international standards that facilitate trade, spread knowledge and disseminate technological ad
vances.
The theme of this, the 41st, World Standards Day is “Standards make the world accessible for all.”
As the three leading international standards-setting organizations point out, with at least 650 million people globally affected by some kind of disability, combined with the rising numbers of older people in the world’s population – one quarter of all citizens are 60 or older – the issue of accessibility to products and services has become more important than ever.
Accessibility is the degree to which a product, device, service, environment or facility is usable by as many people as possible, including – but by no means limited to – persons with disabilities. After all, a well-designed wheelchair ramp also benefits the able-bodied when they are pushing strollers or pulling suitcases on rollers. Say the standards setters, “international standards facilitate everybody’s access to products, structures and services. They include safety considerations, ergonomics and harmonized test methods all geared to increase accessibility. Standards also provide a platform for the dissemination of technological innovations both in developed and developing countries. They help markets to grow faster and increase global trade.”
Datamyne embraces the principles of international standards. The U.S. representative to the ISO, ANSI (American National Standard Institute), puts it well: buyers and sellers can proceed with confidence when they have the means to assess compliance with agreed-upon standards – trust but verify.
Indeed, we’re pleased to be able to assure our customers that our data center in Montevideo, Uruguay, the heart of our data collection and processing operations, and the key to our record of reliability (less than 5 hours’ system downtime in total over the last 10 years), is certified compliant with ISO 9001:2008 standards of quality management systems and processes for development, marketing and after sales care information tools for trade and foreign trade. [Registration 506/01; certification by LSQA – LATU+QualityAustria.]