Abstract
This chapter explores the landscape of universal design and child online protection. The United Nations (UN) conceptualises child online protection as efforts to create a safe and empowering online experience for children through legal measures, technical and procedural measures, organisational structures, capacity building, and international cooperation. This chapter uses universal design as a point of departure for examining child online protection using a review of key literature and a critical analysis of select policy documents from the UN. This chapter approaches child online protection from a universal design perspective so that policymakers, information and communication technology (ICT) developers, advocates, and researchers can reframe their efforts. A universal design perspective suggests that ICT service providers must ensure that children have equal access to and use of ICT. This includes identifying and removing barriers that children experience accessing and using ICT due to, for example, their age or disability. Age-related barriers include the risks and vulnerabilities that children experience online such as exposure to harmful or dangerous content. Disability-related barriers could include, for example, the design of technical and procedural measures, such as content rating systems, that are inaccessible or unusable for children with physical, sensory, cognitive, or psychosocial disabilities.
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Giannoumis, G.A., Paupini, C. (2020). Universal Design and Child Online Protection. In: Langdon, P., Lazar, J., Heylighen, A., Dong, H. (eds) Designing for Inclusion. CWUAAT 2020. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43865-4_2
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