News

Trace Center Director Gregg Vanderheiden presented on “Creating an Inclusive Infrastructure to Allow Affordable Access across Technologies, Disabilities and Ages” at the NIST workshop on Usability in Health IT, held July 13, 2010. The workshop brought together experts from industry, academia, and government to prioritize, align and coordinate short, medium and long-term technical strategies and […]

Updated drafts of two key WCAG 2.0 supporting documents, Techniques for WCAG 2.0 (Editors’ Draft) and Understanding WCAG 2.0 (Editors’ Draft) have been released by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group for review. The draft includes the addition of Flash techniques and a number of clarifications based on input from public comments. Comments are […]

The Federal Communication Commission’s National Broadband Plan, sent to Congress on March 16, 2010, includes broad-ranging disability access recommendations. Cited in the plan are the extensive public comments submitted by Center Director Gregg Vanderheiden and both RERC teams (Telecommunications Access; Universal Interface & IT Access), discussing issues and potential solutions to ensure that people with […]

The ISO Focus+ February 2010 issue features an article by Gottfried Zimmermann and Gregg Vanderheiden about the universal remote console work pioneered at the Trace Center. The dream of taking your personal user interface wherever you go is slowly becoming a reality, starting with the ISO standards adopted in 2008, continuing R&D at Trace to […]

The UW-Madison’s Trace Center, in partnership with Gallaudet University and Omnitor AB of Sweden, has been awarded a five-year, $4.75 million Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) grant by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, U.S. Department of Education. This grant will fund a broad scope of work on disability access to emerging mainstream […]

A new, and significantly improved, beta release of the Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool (PEAT) is available for download from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Trace Center. PEAT is a free, first-of-its-kind resource that developers can use to identify seizure risks in their web content or computer software. The software was developed specifically for web and computer […]

Trace Center Director Gregg Vanderheiden and other team members from the RERC on Telecommunications Access provided an update on current status, standards, and work in industry on real-time text. Presentations were made to the U.S. Access Board at their meeting in Boston on Wednesday, May 27, and at the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C. […]

In early April, doctoral student Adam Wilson posted a “tweet” on the social networking Web site Twitter, using an experimental system that allows use of EEG as input to a standard computer. A system similar to this might be used in the future by people with severe disabilities, enabling them to use a computer for […]

Channel 3 News in Madison, Wisconsin, featured the Trace Center in an in-depth report on March 31, 2009. View the story or read the transcript on the Channel 3 website. The story shows UW student Andrew Hasley demonstrating his use of the Automated Postal Center, which is accessible for people who are blind or have […]

Trace Center Director Gregg Vanderheiden described the Raising the Floor initiative in his presentation Friday, March 20, 2009, at the annual CSUN conference. Raising the Floor (RtF) is an international collaborative effort to build access features directly into the Internet. Vanderheiden provided details of the initiative, including information on benefits and how to participate. A […]

The Trace Center presented the 2009 Harry J. Murphy Catalyst Award to Frank Hecker, Director of Grants and Programs for the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit organization promoting choice and innovation on the Internet. The award was presented in Los Angeles on March 17, 2009, at the opening session of the annual CSUN Conference on Technology […]

On Dec. 11, 2008 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced a new standard that will help Web designers and developers create sites that better meet the needs of users with disabilities and older users. This is the culmination of a ten-year collaborative effort with the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), for which the Trace […]

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 was published as a W3C Proposed Recommendation on Nov. 3, 2008. This means that the technical material of WCAG 2.0 is complete and it has been implemented in real sites. WCAG 2.0 has now been submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) membership for final review and endorsement, […]

A five-year, $4.75 million Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center grant was awarded to the UW-Madison’s Trace Center by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, U.S. Department of Education. This funding will continue the Center’s broad program of research and development focused on improving accessibility of information technologies and electronic products. The work funded by […]

On April 30, 2008, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) as a W3C Candidate Recommendation. This is an important milestone, indicating that there is now a broad consensus in the WCAG Working Group and among public reviewers on the technical content. “The community is eager for WCAG […]