Also available in Spanish.

PRESS RELEASE


Asturias will bring together international experts in an effort to achieve a 'Web design for all'

You will meet with leading experts on accessibility, usability and Web Standards such as Jakob Nielsen, Jeffrey Zeldman, Steven Pemberton, Shawn Lawton Henry, John Slatin and Inmaculada Placencia

“Web Foundations 2005” Conference is part of the Regional Government's e-Asturias 2007 Plan, organized by Fundación CTIC

This event has the support of the W3C Consortium through its Spanish Office and the participation of European Commission representatives

For further information please see the Contact information.


ASTURIAS, 14th July, 2005

International experts on Internet accessibility and usability together in Spain for the first time. Web Foundations 2005 Conference, to be held November 22-24 in Gijón, Oviedo, Asturias, Spain, will highlight the urgent need to guarantee a universal access to information. Due to the prestige of the speakers, the event will probably reach about 500 attendants.

These experts will pose the "design for all" as a requirement to ensure universal access to information regardless of hardware, software, network infrastructure, language, culture, and user capabilities.This conference is the first major event supported by the Regional Government's e-Asturias 2007 Plan, as a strategy for the Information Society development. For the organization of this event, Fundación CTIC has count with the support of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) through its Spanish Office, located in the Principality of Asturias, and with the participation of the European Commission, through the Deputy Head of the e-Inclusion Unit, Inmaculada Placencia.

During two days, the speakers will discuss about accessibility, usability and Web standards in the morning session. In the afternoon, there will be a panel where the speakers from the morning session, together with three national experts in the area, will discuss on accessibility and usability. A tutorial course on XHTML2 and XForms, the next generation of Web pages and forms, will be held on the third day.

Web Foundations 2005 Speakers

Jakob Nielsen Jakob Nielsen, known as "the king or guru of usability", has created the basic principles of usable development. He is the author of books and the creator of several usability methods to analyze usability, since his work at Bell Communications, IBM and Sun research laboratories. He is currently co-managing director of NNGroup, together with Donald A. Norman and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, one of the most important companies in the usability area.

Jeffrey Zeldman Jeffrey Zeldman is Web Chief architect, founder and creative Director of Happy Cog. His work on usability and Web standards is of crucial importance for web development. In 1998, Jeffrey co-founded The Web Standards Project (WaSP), association of Web developers that work together with browser and authoring tool manufactures to increase the use of standards on the Web.

Steven Pemberton Steven Pemberton is Senior Researcher at CWI. He is also the XForms and HTML W3C Working Groups Coordinator. Pemberton chaired some of the first W3C events such as the workshop on style sheets and internationalisation. His professional career is focused on the importance of usable Web development and the design for all. His interest in Human-Computer Interaction is evident as he has written several articles on Human-Computer Interaction and he was editor-in-chief of ACM/Interactions from 1998 y 2004.

Shawn Lawton Henry Shawn Lawton Henry is Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Outreach Coordinator at W3C, and holds a research appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). She is a recognized expert on the combination of accessibility and usability. Her work is focused on establishing strategies to encourage cooperation among industry, researchers, educators, government, and people with disabilities in the development and implementation of consensus-based accessibility solutions.

John Slatin John Slatin is the Director of the UT Accessibility Institute, at the University of Texas, Austin, multidisciplinary institute focused on accessibility, and the research and development of Web accessible resources for all. He is the co-author of "Maximum Accessibility"; a comprehensive resource for creating Web sites that comply with accessibility standards. He is also co-chair of the WCAG Working Group at W3C. Slatin is the Vice President of the VSA Arts Board of Texas, organization that works to make the arts world accessible for people with disabilities.

Inmaculada Placencia is Deputy Head of Unit, "e-Inclusion", Directorate General Information Society and Media European Commission. She is graduated in Physics and Computer Science. Since 1991 she joined the European Commission and worked in several research programmes addressing accessibility and applications for older people and people with disabilities. The focus of the recent work addressed policy related activities in the area of eAccessibility and eInclusion in particular work related to eEurope in DFA and AT. Inmaculada Placencia has also participated at WAI-DA and WAI-TIES, and in Web accessibility activities under the eEurope initiative.

About Fundación CTIC

Fundación CTIC (Centre for the Development of Information and Communication Technologies in Asturias) is a private non-profit organization, set up in 2003 and founded by the Regional Government of the Principality of Asturias and a Consortium of regional private companies in the field of Information and Communication Technologies. CTIC Foundation was set up with the objective of promoting and encouraging activities related with the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in every economic, institutional and social sector, which can contribute to the development and improvement of the community of Asturias. In order to reach this goal, Fundación CTIC carries out activities such as dissemination, promotion, design of strategies, management and development of technological projects, and also research activities.

About the W3C Spanish Office

Established in October 2003, the W3C Spanish Office is hosted by Fundación CTIC. Located at the Science and Technology Park of Gijón, Asturias, Fundación CTIC is a non-profit organization which carries out and disseminates applied research on information technologies. W3C Offices assist with promotion efforts in local languages, broaden W3C's geographical base, and encourage international participation in W3C Activities. W3C currently has fifteen Offices located in Australia, the Benelux countries, Germany and Austria, Finland, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Korea, Morocco, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom and Ireland.