Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

I love my digital camera and taking lots of pictures. However, most times that means I'm not in the picture. Neil Soiffer of Design Sciences took this nice picture of me on the top of the mountain for the ICCHP conference's Mountain Attack on July 12th, 2008. Of course, I had forgotten to bring a jacket, so I used a handy conference umbrella during a brief rain on the mountain top.

I just got back from a terrific week in Austria at the International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs conference. This is an academic conference on access technology, full of researchers trying out new things that will help people with disabilities. My first day was hanging out at the Young Researchers seminar, which was organized by Professors Paul Blenkhorn (the UK's first professor of access tech) and the ICCHP host Klaus Miesenberger. It was fun to hear students and fresh Ph.Ds talking about their research. I gave the opening keynote, on my main new theme, Raising the Floor. The goal is to get more people working to make this happen: getting access tech to every person in the world who needs it. People from all over Europe talked to me about their dreams for improved accessibility. And, there were many projects that definitely fell under the RTF umbrella. I met the developer behind WebVisum, which is getting much attention from blind people for ...