You're at: W4A - 2007 Conference - Keynotes
Keynotes
Michael Cooper (Accessibility Specialist - WAI - W3C)
Michael joined the W3C in June 2006 as a Web Michael is the Team Contact for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, which develops authoring guidelines and techniques to create accessible content; and for the Protocols and Formats Working Group, which supports the W3C to make new Web technologies accessible and develops accessibility practices.Prior to joining W3C, Michael worked at Watchfire as Accessibility Product Manager, responsible for automated and tool-assisted manual accessibility evaluation software. He focused on supporting harmonized international standards via this software and supported customers to achieve those standards. Previously Michael was the product manager at CAST for Bobby, an early accessibility evaluation tool which was purchased by Watchfire in 2002. At CAST he also worked on technical approaches to providing self-adaptive learning materials for students with disabilities. Before entering the field of Web accessibility, Michael worked in the disability services office at the University of Denver, providing academic accommodations and technical training for students with disabilities.Becky Gibson (Accessibility Architecture - Emerging Technologies Group - IBM, USA)
Becky Gibson is a Web Accessibility Architect in IBM's Emerging Internet Technologies group. Her current focus is promoting DHTML Accessibility technologies in order to bring full accessibility to the Web. In addition, she is working to promote the accessible use of AJAX technologies in Rich Internet Applications. Becky is an IBM representative to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) working group. She has worked at IBM for 20+ years as a developer on Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Notes and Domino, and IBM Workplace Messaging.
Ian Horrocks (Professor - School of Computer Science - University of Manchester, UK)
Is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and is jointly responsible for the development of both the OIL and DAML+OIL semantic web ontology languages, was a member of the W3C WebOntology working group that developed the OWL language (now a W3C recommendation), and is an author of the SWRL Semantic Web Rules Language proposal. He also designed and implemented the FaCT system, and has been involved in the development of other ontology tools and infrastructure, including the OilEd ontology editor, the FaCT++ reasoner and the OWL Instance Store.
Mary Zajicek (Leader - Advanced User Interfaces Group - Oxford Brookes University, UK)
Dr. Mary Zajicek is leader of the Advanced User Interfaces Group and Oxford Brookes University. Principal Investigator for the EU F6 IST STREP Project Atgentive. Expert on the design and evaluation of speech systems especially for older people. She works closely with colleagues at Age Concern Oxfordshire and has performed extensive studies exploring how older adults learn how to use the Web. BrookesTalk a voice Web browser, which won a medal in the British Computer Society Awards for Innovation together with awards from Microsoft and ONCE the Spanish Association For the Blind. BrookesTalk has been made accessible to older adults by incorporating voice help which in effect talks them through their interaction.
Endorsed by the IW3C2
