Speakers

Bill Corrigan

Corrigan is Director of Distance Learning Design at University of Washington Educational Outreach. He has focused his career on making the best use of technology in Higher Education, adapting to the constant changes in delivering quality programs through distance learning methodologies and helping faculty to utilize technology in their courses. He started by putting engineering courses on cable TV at the University of Washington for nine years. He then developed a technical infrastructure for delivering nursing programs through a compressed video network at the University of Kansas Medical Center. After that, he worked at the Center for Advanced Technology in Education at the University of Oregon, where he was involved in training teachers to use technology in the classroom, developed a hypertext literacy support program for hearing impaired children and created a model database-driven World Wide Web site for use in standards-based curricula. Currently, he directs the efforts of UW Extension in the development and delivery of certificate programs and courses via web technologies and other appropriate means.

Doug Geoffray

Geoffray is co-owner of GW Micro, Inc. and leads the software development and product support groups. Doug has been developing assistive technology for more than 25 years. Doug first started as lead developer for Computer Aids Corporation, a pioneer in assistive technology. Doug has self authored many major accessibility projects ranging from dedicated self talking applications for the Apple 2 in the early 80's to software for the first portable accessible computer, synthesized text to speech and the leading DOS screen reader Vocal-Eyes. Doug now overseas a team at GW Micro focusing mainly on Window-Eyes which is a leader in Windows screen readers.

Cheryl Hammond

Cheryl Hammond has served as a lead technical analyst and developer for electronic research administration systems at the University of Washington for more than five years, and has been a project resource in the areas of web standards adherence, browser compatibility and accessibility compliance. She oversaw testing and modification of the University's web-based approval and routing engine for staff using the JAWS screenreader. Before coming to UW, Cheryl worked as a consultant specializing in cross-browser web implementation.

Todd Kloots

An early member of the Yahoo! web development team, Todd Kloots is an advocate for standards-based development and accessibility. Todd is currently a member of the Yahoo! Presentation Platform Engineering team and is one of the engineers responsible for development and maintenance of the YUI library, a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications.

T.V. Raman

Raman is one of the world's leading experts on auditory interfaces, scripting languages, Internet technologies such as Webserver applications, and Web standards. Raman earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Cornell, and has applied for more than 25 patents during his years of work in advanced technology development. He is the developer of Emacspeak ("the complete audio desktop"); and has worked with IBM Research, Adobe Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel Corporation, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and is currently a research scientist for Google.

Bob Regan

Bob Regan is a solutions architect for vertical markets at Adobe Systems, Inc. In that role, he serves as the technical lead and customer advocate for the Education, Government, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Telecommunications and Life Science markets. It is his responsibility to connect with the specific needs, challenges and successes of customers working to create digital content and applications. Bob works with each team to help them collect customer experiences and communicate them into the product organization and assemble solutions based on these requirements.

Rich Schwerdtfeger

Schwerdtfeger is a Distinguished Engineer in the IBM Emerging Technologies Group responsible for accessibility strategy and architecture. Rich chairs the IBM Accessibility Architecture Review Board (AARB) and is an IBM Master Inventor. Rich has broad responsibilities spanning all business units within IBM and is a working member in W3C WAI and HTML working groups as well as the OASIS ODF Accessibility sub team. Rich led Java accessibility development at IBM including the IBM/Sun accessibility collaboration. Rich is leading the DHTML accessibility effort in the W3C and runs an architecture team within IBM responsible for accessibility for the Web, Eclipse, UNIX, Windows, and Java platforms.

Weizhong Wang

Weizhong Wang has worked as a consultant for the Division of Information Technology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison for over 10 years. He has recently developed and manages a web knowledgebase system for the organization. He also serves as the "web doctor" on the Division's Web Accessibility Committee. For the last five years, Wei-zhong has evaluated many campus web applications for compliance with the university's web accessibility policy and provided developers with accessibility suggestions and recommendations.