Richard Schwerdtfeger

Short biography

Richard Schwerdtfeger is a Distinguished Engineer, the Software Group Accessibility Strategist and Architect, chair of the IBM Accessibility Architecture Review Board, 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 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.

Advancing Web Accessibility – Today and Tomorrow

In the early days of the web we could depend on web content being static documents. Today's web content dynamically interactive, collaborative, and often an aggregated from autonomously created resources. IBM has been a key driver driver behind the advancements in Web accessibility to address this transformation. Our strategy for success is deeply rooted in the use of open architectures, standards, source code, and communities. This presentation will cover IBM's efforts to make Web 2.0 applications accessible. It will introduce participants to WAI-ARIA, the advancements in Web browsers to support it, and new efforts efforts underway to personalize the web to address the accessibility of mashups. The presentation will cover a critical need for next generation tooling to aid developers and testers in producing accessibility of Rich Internet Web Applications compliant with emerging Web standards such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.