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ITL’s Information Access Division, along with Oracle Corp. and the Information Technology Association of America, co-sponsored the IT Accessibility 2001 conference May 22-23, 2001 at NIST’s Gaithersburg campus. The conference drew attendees from industry, Federal and state government, advocacy groups, accessibility centers, and academia.

Speakers included accessibility experts, IT developers, research and standards experts, and representatives from accessibility centers and federal and state agencies. Speakers from industry included Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corp., and IT technology industry organizations. Presentations focused on current and future strategies for creating an environment with easy accessibility to information technology by people with disabilities. Government representatives for the U.S. Access Board, GSA, Department of Justice, and the Department of Education addressed the federal Section 508 regulations requiring accessibility of IT by government agencies. Several Web developers presented their experiences in designing accessible Web sites.

Exhibits and demonstrations supplemented the speaker program and helped provide attendees with an overview of available IT accessibility products and services. Exhibits covered a wide range of information appliances and services, including an accessible electronic voting machine, computer screen readers (which use speech synthesizers to "read" text and descriptions on a Web page for visually-impaired persons), and the NIST rotating Braille reader. A demonstration of near real-time closed-captioning of the Webcasting of the presentations was provided and shown via Webcast on a TV monitor in the conference Auditorium.

The NIST Program Chairs from the Information Access Division, Martin Herman, Leslie Collica, and Sharon Laskowski, developed the program with guidance from several accessibility experts from industry, academia, and government. The technical coordinator for the exhibits was John Roberts of the Convergent Information Systems Division.

Copies of the speakers’ slides and Webcast of the conference are available at the conference Web site: www.nist.gov/ITaccess2001.