NIST HOSTS NCITS STANDARDS COMMITTEE ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT) ACCOMMODATION.

NIST hosted a December meeting of the V2 Technical Committee in the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS), which is developing standards for IT accommodation for people with disabilities. NCITS develops national standards and its technical experts participate on behalf of the United States in the international standards activities of ISO/IEC JTC 1 in Information Technology. The new NCITS committee will develop standards for the use of IT to support people with disabilities, including the development of protocols and specifications to support the implementation of intelligent, self-adjusting interfaces between accommodation devices and the human-computer interfaces (i.e., the keyboard, mouse, and display ports) and criteria and methods for the development of "best practice" guidelines.

At the meeting, the committee began identifying the scope and requirements for the first standard for an Alternative Interface Access Protocol (AIAP) communication protocol, which will complement and build on industry activity in home networking, wireless networking, and metadata registries for discovery and interoperation of intelligent devices. The AIAP will provide for access to a local system (intelligent device) or to one or more systems (intelligent devices) located on a network. AIAP may optionally be used to convey information about user interface system functionality, user preferences, and capabilities between a user interface system and another system with which the user intends to interact, so that alternative interfaces can be accommodated or constructed to provide fundamental access to computing services and information regardless of any limitation of the user.