The FCC’s Accessibility & Innovation Initiative has a goal of bringing awareness and recognition to the creation and advancement of accessible communication technologies for people with disabilities by promoting collaborative problem-solving among academic, industry, consumer, and government sectors.  We have hosted several events at FCC Headquarters to promote our efforts including the “Chairman’s Awards for Advancement in Accessibility” and a “Developing with Accessibility” event

We are very excited about the launch of this speaker series on Tuesday, July 16, 2013 and are honored to have Clayton Lewis, Professor of Computer Science and Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, as our first special guest. A full description of the event and more details about Dr. Lewis can be found here

In addition, there will be a technology showcase reflecting the themes of the morning’s presentation and exhibitors will be demonstrating their accessible technology solutions.  These demonstrations will be held from 12:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. in the FCC's Technology Experience Center (TEC).  The TEC is open to the public and offers a unique, hands-on opportunity for visitors to experiment with new technologies.  

The four demonstrations will include:

  • The software development kit (SDK) of the FCC's Accessibility Clearinghouse.  This demonstration will show how Clearinghouse data on accessible communications products may be queried with the Python programming language, producing alternative presentations to the view on the FCC website  including mashups with data from other sources.
  • Amaze by Deque Systems.  This demonstration will show a cloud-based service that can make automatic corrections to web accessibility problems, displaying the corrected pages to users in real time.
  • Recapd and SyncWords by Frameweld.  This demonstration will show tools that can produce rich captions of videos efficiently and accurately.
  • Accessibility Management Platform by SSB Bart Group.  This demonstration will show a cloud-based infrastructure for analyzing and managing the accessibility of various website components over a productive lifecycle.

This event is open to the public and will be webcast live with open captioning and web participants may send their comments and questions to aiispeaker@fcc.gov.  For more information on attending, please see the news release.