NIST CO-SPONSORS IT ACCESSIBILITY 2001 CONFERENCE.NIST (National Institute of Standards & Technology, Washington, DC, www.nist.gov) The standards-defining agency of the U.S. government, formerly the National Bureau of Standards. It is one of three agencies that fall under the Technology Administration (www.technology. , along with with a private company and the Information Technology Association of America See ITAA. , co-sponsored the IT Accessibility 2001 Conference in May 2001, at NIST. 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, representatives from accessibility centers, and federal and state agencies. 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 (1) (Global mobile Suppliers Association, Sawbridgeworth, U.K., www.gsacom.com) A membership organization of suppliers of GSM products and services. Its goal is to promote GSM as the worldwide mobile communications standard. See GSM Association and GSM. , the 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 websites. 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 See Internet appliance. (hardware) Information Appliance - (IA) A consumer device that performs only a few targeted tasks and is controlled by a simple touch-screen interface or push buttons on the device's enclosure. and services, including an accessible electronic voting Electronic voting (also known as e-voting) is a term encompassing several different types of voting, embracing both electronic means of casting a vote and electronic means of counting votes. machine, computer screen readers (which use speech synthesizers to "read" text and descriptions on a web page for visually impaired persons Noun 1. visually impaired person - someone who has inferior vision individual, mortal, person, somebody, someone, soul - a human being; "there was too much for one person to do" ), 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 webcast of the conference are available at http://www.nist.gov/ITaccess2001. |
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