ITL Hosts Committee on IT Access Interfaces

On September 30 – October 4, 2002, the Information Access Division (IAD) hosted the 9^th Plenary of the INCITS Technical Committee on Information Technology Access Interfaces, V2. V2, a committee of industry, government, academia, and other stakeholder organizations, is designing the “electronic curb-cuts” that will ensure access for people with disabilities and make the products of tomorrow easier to use for everyone. The first project of the V2 Committee is to develop standards for an Alternative Interface Access Protocol (AIAP). At this plenary, a proposed redesign of the current specification for a universal remote console (URC) was approved. The new design will offer more flexibility in accessing information technology housed in the rich media environment.

Part of the meeting focused on metadata and how to incorporate metadata into the standards effort. Presentations were made by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) accessibility initiatives, and by the INCITS Technical Committee on Metadata. The Dublin Core initiatives were agreed as an initial starting point

Fernando Podio (ITL’s Convergent Information Systems Division) provided an overview of recent developments in the National (INCITS M1) and International Biometric Standardization efforts. Vince Stanford (IAD) discussed research developments using the NIST Smart Flow System. The research work in IAD’s Smart Space Laboratory are found to be on a similar development path as the V2 standards efforts. It was agreed that the IAD Smart Space Lab could provide a good supporting prototype environment for the V2 standards effort.

The next step is to flesh-out specifications for the proposed new architecture of the AIAP-URC. This involves clarifying the scope of the work, modifying the current document to reflect a newly proposed architecture which allows an all “human comprehensible text” interface, and providing specifications that will allow interfacing via rich media, streaming, semantic tagging, and other future interfacing features.

CONTACT: Charles Sheppard, ext. 3269