Monday June 07, 2004

The CSUN Conference on Technology and Persons with Diabilities

Every year the Center on Disabilities at Cal State University Northridge hosts the Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities (though everybody just calls it the "CSUN conference"). What began 19 years ago as a small gathering of products for people with disabilities put on by the Center on Disabilities for the local community has become the premier North American conference on disability technology. I've been attending for the last 12 years, and while a lot of the people (and products) are the same year to year, there is always something new and interesting. And it's nice to see folks in person that you otherwise only get to connect with in phone and e-mail.

As we have for the last few years, much of the Sun Accessibility team was there, including fellow blogger Rich Burridge, Malte Timmermann (who works on StarOffice/OpenOffice.org accessibility), and Marc Mulcahy (from Sun's GNOME accessibility team) among others. This year we again occupied the Washington room, and in addition to normal booth stuff we also had a bunch of "hands on" sessions where folks who are blind, or have low-vision, or have significant mobility impairments could spend an hour on the GNOME 2.6 desktop and play with the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier or the GOK Dynamic On-Screen Keyboard. It was a lot of fun to show these apps to people who until now had only ever used a Windows box because there wasn't a UNIX or GUN/Linux option available. Last year when we did this with very early editions of the code, one of the blind participants left my "guided tour", launched the then only vaguely accessible Mozilla, went to the LA Times web site, and started reading an article about the U.S. invading Iraq.

This year the CSUN conference keynote speaker was Vint Cerf gave the keynote talk (the transcript and Vint's slides are both available). Starting with a discussion about Internet technology in general, he nicely sequed to the topic of assistive technology, using his wife Sigrid as an example of how people use these technologies - and perhaps more interestingly, how those technologies change them and affect those around them. He ended his talk emphasizing the importance of standards - in disability technology realm as well as the more mainstream Internet world. I managed to catch up with him, and point him to work by the Accessibility Working Group of the Free Standards Group, which is explicitly trying to develop free accessibility standards for use on UNIX, GNU/Linux, and other computing environments.

My personal conference highlight was getting all of our bazilians of presentation demos working. In particular during the Gnopernicus session we managed an IRC chat session with Bill Haneman in Ireland, Marc Mulcahy (using Gnopernicus in speech and Braille), and myself using a single switch input device and GOK. Marc and I took turns relaying questions from the audience about the weather to Bill, and his replies were projected on the screen behind me, and also spoken aloud by Marc's computer. We also had some fun in the StarOffice accessibility presentation, first installing StarOffice with Gnopernicus speaking the entire installation, and then launching Mozilla to find a Powerpoint slide set on the Microsoft web site, downloading it to automatically open in StarOffice, and finally reading it with speech, Braille, and magnification in Gnopernicus. Finally, it was very nice to have Oracle Corporation join us in the last presentation of the day, in which Mike Pedersen showed off JDevelper 10g working with Gnopernicus under GNOME - a combination he uses every day to do his software enginering job at Oracle.

There were a number of other noteworty events and presentations for me this year:

• Apple Computer announced the Apple "Spoken Interface", their concept of a screen reader, to be included in a future release of OS X. The gave demos for a day in one of the hotel suites. This is only the third screen reader based entirely on an Accessibility programming interface (in this case Apple's Accessibility API (for historical note, the first was an unreleased effort by IBM written entirely in the Java programming languages based on the Java Accessibility API and the second is the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier mentioned above.
• Adobe demonstrated their most recent work in PDF accessibility. Their newest PDF viewer, Acrobat 6, shows a ton of good accessibility work. Acrobat 6 Viewer will self-voice and self-enlarge, or alternately it supports a "screen access compatibility mode" for improved interoperability with Windows-based assistive technologies. The Adobe session was packed! This is clearly a hot topic for a lot of folks.
• Owasys demonstrated ther model 22c talking GSM phone for the blind. It is sold only in Europe (for now). It uses Babel InfoVox text-to-speech, and uses Linux as its core OS. A very cool development! The Owasys 22c was developed in close cooperation with O.N.C.E. - the Spanish National Association of the Blind. Suggested retail price is €400.
• Janina Sajka, chair of the Accessibility Working Group of the Free Standards Group gave a talk titled: Developing Accessibility Standards for Free and Open Platforms. I also joined in, and gave a few demos to underscore the points she was making. In summary: there is an effort within the Free Standards Group to develop and promultage a core set of accessibility standards - things that all operating systems/platforms should provide (with an eye toward UNIX and GNU/Linux systems, but by no means exclusive to them). As Janina pointed out in the talk, several years ago she was involved in the quiet, early efforts to develop another open standard for the accessibility community - the DAISY book format for accessible print media; now that is fast becomming the most popular way to disseminate accessible print media and so she has moved on to the next quiet, early effort to develop standards for the next thing that will fast become very popular.
• The wonderful folks at Freeom Machines showed a preview of their upcoming PBS Documentary on assistive technology and its impact on people. I highly recommend this film, which should be coming to a public television station near you sometime later this year.
• Microsoft sponsored an evening reception for Vint Cerf the night before the formal opening of the conference and his keynote. As the sponsor, Microsoft brazenly used the opportunity of a captive audience to promulgate its typical sugary and otherwise unhealthy message and alas as is all too often the case, people simply ate it up.

Finally I want to end this entry with a new phrase I learned: "majority world" (instead of "third world" or the slightly less condescending "developing world"). When you think about it, the most interesting and important aspect of this collection of countries isn't that they are collectively the third region of the world to pass to and through industrial revolution and on to other phases of development; rather the most interesting and important thing is that they represent the vast majority of the population of our planet. Kudos to the folks at CTCNet for turning me on to this one.

(2004-06-07 15:15:11.0) Permalink Comments [2]