OSA Attendance Toronto

Alison Benjamin

ATRC, FLUID

I currently am involved with the Fluid project, especially around usability & accessibility of Fluid Infusion. I'm also a Master of Information candidate at the University of Toronto. My research asks how designers and developers taking nonconventional approaches to Web accessibility, adaptability, and inclusion online adopt and deviate from conventional Web standards and guidelines.

Anastasia Cheetham

ATRC, FLUID

I'm a developer with the Fluid Project (http://fluidproject.org/) at the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre. I've been working in the area of technologies for people with disabilities for over fifteen years, including work with the Bloorview MacMillan Centre, the CNIB, and Ryerson University's PEBBLES project. My current focus is on the development of usable, accessible web interfaces, including technologies to support the customization of the interface to meet individual needs. I'm also involved in the development of international standards and specifications supporting accessible learning technologies.

Antonio Gamba-Bari

ATRC, SNOW

Antonio is a Master of Information Candidate at the University of Toronto. His work at the ATRC includes the development of tools for conversion of captions and descriptive video formats, skinning themes and integration modules for ATutor and CMS Made Simple .Antonio is interested in educational technologies, captioning, and e-learning environments. His current research looks at how accessibility is conceptualized as a requirement for design and the accessibility issues that arise during Implementation and Customization.

Armin Krauss

ATRC, FLUID

I'm a Master's student at the iSchool at UofT and I started working for the ATRC over the summer. My interests are the usage of technology to enable wide participation of people in society and to give all people access to the digital world. This includes accessibility and usability issues, the inclusion of marginalized communities, and open access to information.

Ben Caldwell

Trace Research and Development Center

Ben Caldwell, Web Accessibility Specialist at the Trace Center, has been working primarily on WCAG 2.0 in recent years and is now shifting focus to the Raising the Floor Initiative.

Cathy Leung

Seneca College

Chris Hofstader

Colin Clark

ATRC, FLUID

I'm the technical lead for the Fluid Project at the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre. The Fluid Project works with open source communities to address the often-neglected values of usability and accessibility in their products. Currently, I help the Fluid community build inclusive Open Web architectures for cultural institutions and higher education using the Infusion framework. I've been involved in accessibility work for over a decade.

Dan Shire

IBM

Dan Shire is a user experience specialist with IBM Canada, where he has spent the last 20 years working on developing usable and productive business solutions for IBM clients. Since he became interested in accessibility in 2004, Dan has worked as an extended team member of IBM's Human Ability and Accessibility Centre - a Research and Services organization dedicated to providing accessibility techniques, technology and solutions to our customers around the world. Dan was a member of the Ontario provincial AODA Information and Communications Standards Development Committee, and has enjoyed the opportunity to work with a range of clients on accessibility projects.

David Bolter

Mozilla Corporation

David has been creating accessibility software infrastructure for at least a thousand years but most recently in the Firefox browser.

Dawn Mercer

Seneca College

Dawn is part of the Centre for the Development of Open Technologies (CDOT) at Seneca College. She will represent the work of CDOT with Mozilla, Red Hat - Fedora, SUN Open Officeand IBM -Eclipse. Her own interests are focused on accessibility and usability for resuable learning activities and accessibility for use of technology with the elderly.

Greg Fields

Research In Motion

Greg Fields is the Accessibility Product Manager at Research In Motion (RIM), and responsible for ensuring BlackBerry products can be accessed and operated by customers with disabilities (see BlackBerry Accessibility microsite for more). Greg spends most of his days creating new requirements for accessibility features, driving features through to commercial release, providing pre and post sales support to carrier and end user customers, collaborating with research organizations, working with advocacy organizations, reviewing applicable legislation and more. Beyond what can be done by RIM, Greg's interests include improving the availability and applicability of third party access solutions for mobile phones from commercial and open source third party partners. Greg has spent more than 10 years in the Telecommunications and Embedded Communications industry with RIM, QNX Software Systems and Nortel Networks, studied Psychology at the University of Ottawa, is a Certified Usability Analyst, is a proud father of a teenage son, and soon-to-be doting husband.

Greg Gay

ATRC (ATutor,AChecker)

Greg Gay has been with the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto since 1996, and has played a variety of roles in managing accessibility related projects. He leads the ATutor project, which has developed an open source Learning Management System, the first to conform with international accessibility standards. He also leads the AChecker project, which has created an open source Web accessibility evaluation tool that allows Web developers and Web content authors to assess the accessibility of the information they post to the Web. Greg also runs the ATRC Websavvy services, which provide accessibility evalaution and design services, as well as being involved in a variety of activities associated with the development W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Gregg Vanderheiden

Trace R&D Center; Raising the Floor

Professor of Ind & Biomed Engr and direct the Trace R&D Center at the U of Wisconsin-Madison. Worked in the field of technology and disability for just under 40 years. Started out in Augmentative Communication (a term from my chapter in 1975); first portable user programmable communication aid and first 'portable' text to speech synthesizer. Moved to computer access in 1979: access features from Trace Center (StickyKeys, MouseKeys, etc) are built into MAC, Windows, Linux, X-Windows. Xdis access features in Amtrak Ticketing machines, ATMs, Voting machines, WWII Memorial, and Automated Postal Systems across the US. Lots of work in standards and guidelines: wrote the first computer access guidelines in 1985, consumer products guidelines in 1992, and first Web Access Guidelines after www2 in 1994 Co-chair the WCAG working group. Latest effort is 'Raising the Floor'

Jacob Farber

ATRC, FLUID

Jacob is an Interface Developer with the Fluid Project. He has been developing web application interfaces for 10 years, beginning with real-time 3D medical applications. At Fluid he splits his time between JavaScript component development and the Fluid Skinning System - an easy to use CSS system designed to help applications with rapid, semantic development and flexible skinning technologies.

James Yoon

ATRC, FLUID

James is an Interaction Designer on the Fluid Project, where he applies human-centred, participatory, and inclusive design principles to designing open-source applications. He completed his Master's at the University of Toronto where his research focused on aesthetics, usability, and complexity in information visualizations.

Jamon Camisso

ATRC, SCYP

Jamon is a student researcher and system administrator at the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto. He is part of the Aegis project, and is specifically interested in leveraging the various types of connectivity provided by mobile devices to create accessible indoor navigation and location systems.

Janina Sajka

The Linux Foundation

Jess Mitchell

ATRC, FLUID

Jess Mitchell is the Project manager for Fluid (http://fluidproject.org/), (Fluid Engage, Decapod, etc.) a distributed community-source project, working closely with open source projects, museums and cultural institutions. Jess works with a large team of distributed Fluid team members to produce accessible, high performance, clean and nimble front-ends using new technologies for the web and beyond. Jess has worked on a number of large, complex distributed projects, bridging gaps and fostering innovation. Those projects have ranged from building the Ghana Internet Exchange Point to serving as co-Project Manager on the Duke Digital Initiative (iPod project +), and co-teaching an open source project course with 4th year students at Duke University.

Jorge Silva

ATRC, SCYP

I coordinate SCYP and volunteer with Tetra. I've also been hacking hand prosthesis, powered wheelchairs, gaming consoles and 3D games for people with disabilities for a while.

Joseph Scheuhammer

ATRC, AEGIS

I've been a developer at the ATRC since 1996 and have worked on various projects: an audio look and feel for the Swing GUI toolkit, Web-4-All, the IMS "Access for all" user preferences specification, the Fluid project, the ARIA effort at the W3C, and the dojo toolkit, specifically its implementation of ARIA and keyboard a11y.  Most recently I have been modifying GnomeShell , a window manager for Gnome, for the purpose of adding UI enhancements, including screen magnification for the Gnome desktop.

Justin Obara

ATRC, FLUID

Justin Obara is both a software developer and Quality Assurance manager for the Fluid Project. When not building JavaScript components for Fluid Infusion and Fluid Engage, he is busy managing product releases, enhancing and maintaining documentation, and assisting Fluid partner communities to get the most out of Fluid products.

Jutta Treviranus

ATRC

I direct the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, a research and development centre that focuses on the inclusive design of emerging information and communication technology and leads or participates in a large number of open and community source software projects including Fluid, Fluid Engage, Decapod, CulturAll, ATutor, CapScribe, GOK, AEGIS, Raising the Floor and others. I chair the W3C WAI Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines working group and am the project editor of a number of ISO accessibility standards. I work with several jursidictions on accessibility legislation.

Laurel Williams

ATRC, FLUID

I have been a software developer at the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) since 2000, working on a wide variety of projects, holding different roles and responsibilities and coding in several different programming languages. I came to the ATRC in 2000 after working with Jutta Treviranus (ATRC) and Dr. Deborah Fels (Ryerson University) on the PEBBLES project (a video conferencing system for children in hospital), which was my masters thesis work.

Laurie McArthur

ATRC

I coordinate the services at the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, and am involved with a growing number of projects focussed on inclusive design and open source solutions.

Louis Suarez-Potts

SUN Microsystems, OpenOffice.org

I lead the OpenOffice.org community project and also represent the Project on the Oasis ODF Adoption TC and the OIC TC, as well as in other related ODF endeavours. I am also striving to position accessibility issues and more broadly inclusive design considerations at the centre of both any design and promotion of OOo and related technologies.

Monica Ackermann

Scotiabank

Monica is a partner in the company Assistive Vocational Technology Associates (AVTA) and is currently consulting with the Enabling Solutions Support Management Group at Scotiabank implementing systemic IT accessibility solutions. Monica has been working in the area of assistive technology, job accommodation and accessible software design for almost 25 years. She is Systems Design Engineer and member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario and the Canadian Association of Rehabilitation Professionals. While completing her Masters in the York University Critical Disability Studies program, she explored the intersection of accommodation and accessible software design through her research into accessible technology infrastructures and as a Research Associate for the DIS-IT research alliance (dis-it.ca). She is currently a member of the AODA Employment Accessibility Standards Committee and a board member at ARCH Disability Law Centre.

Michelle D'Souza

ATRC, FLUID

I am a software developer with over ten years of professional experience developing accessible web applications and software development tools. I have a deep interest in collaborative software development and have been integral in mentoring and integrating new team members. In the last three years, I have been experimenting with merging agile development and open source techniques to refine and individualize the development process based on the unique project requirements and team culture of the Fluid project.

Peter Korn

SUN Microsystems, AEGIS

Peter Korn is a Principal Engineer & Accessibility Architect at Sun, and is also the Technical Manager of the AEGIS project. He has over 15 years' experience in the field of accessibility – as a designer of assistive technologies, as a developer of architectures and APIs for accessibility, and as a creator of accessibility standards. With Willie Walker, he developed the Java Accessibility API and implemented it on the Java/Swing toolkit. He also was the initial developer of the Java Access Bridge for Windows which exposes Java platform accessibility to Assistive Technologies in Windows. With Bill Haneman and members of the GNOME community, he helped create the GNOME accessibility framework. He co-chairs the OASIS OpenDocument Accessibility Standards Subcommittee, and was Sun's representative to the U.S. Telecommunications and Electronic and Information Technology Advisory Committee, which is developing a set of recommendations for the update to the U.S. Section 508 and Section 255 accessibility regulations. He is presently consumed by the AEGIS project, which is developing a suite of open source accessibility solutions for the open desktop, Web 2.0, and mobile environments with a particular focus on the entire "Accessibility Value Delivery Chain" including the developer tools used to create accessible software. Blog at: http://blogs.sun.com/korn

Pete Brunet

The Linux Foundation

Pete has worked in the field of accessibility software development for most of his career. Most recent work includes:
•Development of the IAccessible2 accessibility interface standard. Facilitated the parallel development of the specification, the applications, and the assistive technologies. This enabled IBM to make IBM Lotus Symphony (ODF documents) accessible on Windows. The implementation in Firefox made WAI-ARIA possible.
•Implemented accessibility code for the Dojo JavaScript toolkit.
•Enhanced the state of the art of accessibility on Linux, implementing portions of the Linux Screen Reader.
•Provided project management for IBM Java Self Voicing Development Kit.
•Led the architecture and development team for IBM Home Page Reader 3.0.
•Acted as either team lead or developer of various versions of IBM's SpeechViewer, a speach therapy product.
•Created the architecture and then designed and developed a prototype telephone based communications system for users who are deaf or hard of hearing.
•Led development teams for two versions of IBM THINKable, a product for cognitive therapists.

Pina D'Intino

Scotiabank

Pina D'Intino has worked for Scotiabank in Canada since 1986 and has 22 years of combined work experience in the financial industry. During her career, she has held several positions with responsibilities ranging from business case reviews, financial analysis, procurement and acquisition, project management, service level agreements, contract negotiations, ABM support and deployment, and accessibility driven initiatives. She is the founder and Senior Manager of Enabling Solutions at Scotiabank and is leading the accessibility strategy roadmap from an IT perspective. Her goal is to ensure accessibility standards and guidelines are embedded in all processes within the bank from a customer to an employee basis. She works collaboratively with all areas of the bank to leverage other initiatives within the global accessibility roadmap. In 2000 she founded the Scotiabankers for Universal Access group (SUA), an affinity and support group for all BNS employees. Pina is the chair of the Canadian Financial Institution on Assistive Technology (CFIAT), bringing together financial organizations to leverage and share accessibility best practices and strategies and also is a member of the AODA Information and Communication Standards Development Committee. Pina has a PMP Master from Schulich and is certified by the ITIL organization.

Richard Schwerdtfeger

IBM

Rich Schwerdtfeger is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, the Software Group Accessibility Strategist and Architect, and a Master Inventor. His responsibilities include overall accessibility architecture and strategy for IBM Software Group. Richard participates in numerous W3C standards efforts including HTML, WAI Protocols and Formats, Ubiquitous Web, and previously the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines. Richard chairs the W3C WAI-ARIA accessibility effort for Web 2.0 applications as well as OASIS and IMS GLC Access for All accessibility standards efforts. Richard joined IBM at the Watson Research Center in 1993 where he helped design and develop IBM Screen Reader/2. He, later, led numerous accessibility efforts at IBM, including: the collaboration with Sun on Java accessibility where he co-architected the Java Accessibility API and the IBM Self Voicing Kit for Java; the Web Accessibility Gateway for seniors; the IAccessible2 strategy; and the Linux accessibility strategy. Rich is leading an effort in the Open Ajax Alliance to develop an open source rules libary and best practices to boost tools vendors to properly support WCAG 2 and WAI-ARIA. His focus is on an open, personalized web experience for all users and and is working to ensure the Web has this capability throuth his work on WAI-ARIA, HTML 5, and Acces For All integration with the ubiquitus web

Saulo Barreto

The Human Project

Dr. Saulo Faria Almeida Barretto is associate researcher at IPTI - Instituto de Pesquisas em Tecnologia e Inovação, Brazil. He received his BS in Civil Engineering from Universidade Federal de Sergipe in 1986 and his MS in Finite Element Methods from Universidade de São Paulo in 1990. He received his Doctoral Degree in Boundary Element Methods from Universidade de São Paulo in 1995. In 1997 he became professor from the Engineering Department at the Universidade de Mogi das Cruzes, Brazil. In 2003 he helped to create IPTI and in 2005 he left to university to be full dedicated to IPTI. Since then he has been involved and coordinating projects related to digital inclusion (Digital Culture project), web based collaborative environments, local development, knowledge management. Since 2006 he is the technical coordinator from IPTI in a project from the European Comission (OPAALS - Network of Excellence). Since May 2009 he works as special advisor for the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology for the bilateral dialogue between Brazil and European Comission in the area of ICT adoption for socio-economic development. He is also national coordinator of The Human Project which is an initiative of setting a research center in a low developed region in Brazil as a manner to foster local development through art, science and technology.

Stian Håklev

Peer2Peer University

Pursuing an MA in Higher Education at OISE/University of Toronto, researching a large government-funded OER project in China. Also co-founder of Peer2Peer University, whose launch will be announced during OpenEd09. Particularly interested in multilingual computing and issues of language and equity. Blog at http://reganmian.net/blog

Willie Walker

SUN Microsystems, GNOME

Willie currently leads the GNOME accessibility project and the Orca screen reader project. Prior to joining Sun, Willie worked for Digital Equipment Corporation from 1988-1997 on the X Window System and Motif. His work on X/Motif included the Remote Access Protocol (RAP), which is one of the first API-based approaches to accessibiltiy, and the XKB keyboard extension, which includes the AccessX functionality. While at Digital, Willie also helped found DACX, the Disability Action Committee for X. Since joining Sun in 1997, Willie worked on the Java/Swing toolkit, including the design and implementation of the Java Accessibility API. Willie also led the open source efforts for FreeTTS (a speech synthesis engine) and Sphinx-4 (a speech recognition engine). Willie has also been involved in creating several standards for the accessibility industry.

Yura Zenevich

ATRC, SCYP, FLUID

I am a Master student at the Faculty of Information (UofT) specializing in the Information Systems Design. I started working at the ARTC and its child SCYP project as a work study student in the last year of my undergraduate degree. That work helped me to discover my interest in design and development of accessible software that I have a chance to practice through my involvement in such ARTC's projects as Fluid Enage and Fluid Infusion.