Accessibility & Innovation Initiative Speaker Series Presents Yevgen Borodin: Improving Accessibility for the General Public

Sep
12
2013

Accessibility & Innovation Initiative Speaker Series Presents Yevgen Borodin: Improving Accessibility for the General Public

10:00 am - 3:00 pm EDT
Commission Meeting Room at Commission Headquarters, located at 445 12th Street, S.W., Room TW-C305, Washington, DC

Presentation from 10 a.m. - 12 noon in the Commission Meeting Room -
Accessible tech demos from 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. in the Technology Experience Center -

The FCC's Accessibility & Innovation Initiative hosted Dr. Yevgen Borodin as part of an ongoing Speaker Series. His presentation is called "Improving Accessibility for the General Public."

Summary: Very few technologies have been developed to be universally accessible from the start. While technologies are advancing at a rapid pace, their accessibility is often an afterthought, with the third-party assistive tools always lagging behind the latest innovations. But is there anything we can do about this?

In this talk, Dr. Borodin will gave an historic overview of how we have been “chasing the moving target,” on the example of Web accessibility. He also examined the strategies we could have pursued to keep up with the chase. Finally, he proposed a solution that could help us win this race.

Bio: Dr. Yevgen Borodin is a Research Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University. He is well known for his research on computational methods and non-visual interfaces for improving Web Accessibility. He is also the President and CEO of Charmtech Labs LLC, a start-up company that he co-founded to develop a universally accessible web browsing assistant called Capti, an early version of which is available in the iTunes App Store.

Dr. Borodin is the recipient of almost four million dollars in U.S. federal research grants. He has co-authored over 30 publications on various aspects of web accessibility, receiving several best papers awards. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation on “Bridging the Web Accessibility Divide” at Stony Brook University, where he received the President’s Award for Distinguished Doctoral Students (2010). He was the 1st place winner of the 2007 ACM International Graduate Student Research Competition. He has served on program committees for numerous conferences and journals, and he is co-chairing the International Web for All Conference in Seoul, Korea (W4A’14).

Technology Experience Center Displays

  • Yevgen Borodin of CharmTech Labs demonstrated Capti Narrator, a universally-designed web browsing assistant for creating a play list of articles to read, each being extracted from the main content of a web page without extraneous clutter. He will also show two products of ViewPlus Technologies: Voiceye, a system for creating and scanning informative barcodes, and IVEO, a multisensory system for interactive learning.
  • John Carlin of Ai Squared demonstrated ZoomReader, an iOS app, and ZoomText ImageReader, a Windows program and document camera combination. These enable optical camera recognition (OCR) of hardcopy print and reading the resulting text via speech or magnification.
  • Patrick Timony of the DC Public Library demonstrated accessibility features of iOS devices, showing built-in support for people with visual, hearing, dexterity, or cognitive disabilities.
  • Gregg Vanderheiden of Raising the Floor demonstrated the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII, a cloud-based approach for enhancing accessibility through auto-personalization of user interfaces.

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