Jim Tobias Webinar

Maine CITE presents a Webinar on

Accessible Mainstream Technology

with Mr. Jim Tobias of Inclusive Technologies

Many mainstream products, although not designed or marketed as AT, have certain accessibility features that can benefit people with disabilities. These products are often less expensive and more widely available. This webinar will describe several such products and will go over how to identify the features you’re looking for and locate products that have those features.

The webinar objectives are:

to familiarize attendees with mainstream accessibility and the range of accessible mainstream products
to review products in the areas information and communication technology that can be used to enhance education, employment, community living and social participation
to present sources where these products can be acquired as well as review product costs

Our thanks to the Association of Assistive Technology Act Programs (ATAP) for use of their webinar conference room.

About the Presenter

Jim Tobias has thirty years experience in accessible and usable technology in both the public and private sectors. He began his career at Berkeley's Center for Independent Living, was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs and Bellcore, and their principal liaison with the Baby Bells on accessibility, aging, and education. He is now President of Inclusive Technologies, a technology and marketing consulting firm specializing in accessible information and communication technologies. Clients have included AOL, the California State University system, Cisco Systems, HP, IBM, Microsoft, National Science Foundation, Panasonic, and Verizon.

Jim has served on several FCC and Access Board Advisory Committees, including co-Chairing the recently-concluded TEITAC, which updated the requirements for Sections 255 and 508. He chaired the Alliance for Telecom Industry Solutions's Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Accessibility Forum.

His favorite projects have been: an innovative telecommunications relay service with integrated speech technologies, network-based talking PIMs, a database-driven customized interface for voice mail and IVR accessibility, a media-rich customized online training system on accessibility, and "AT Boogie", an award-winning music video about assistive technology.

Media Files

We have posted the content from the webinar presented by Jim Tobias in several accessible formats.

Here is a link to the audio portion of the presentation. PLEASE NOTE: This link requires Adobe Flash to be installed in your browser and will automatically play the audio (there are some controls on the screen which we hope are accessible to screen readers). This presentation lasts 62 minutes and is best experienced using headphones.

The Powerpoint presentation that you will see on this link is incomplete because the images were not imported - use the link below to download the complete PowerPoint. The public chat text is also incomplete in this version. You may download that from the link below

Here is the complete PowerPoint portion of the presentation (in PowerPoint requires plugin).

Here is the same PowerPoint presentation saved in Adobe Acrobat (PDF - requires plugin)

Here is a transcript of the presentation (in PDF - requires plugin)

Here is a transcript of the public text chat (in .TXT format)

Here is a copy of the webinar evaluation form (in PDF - requires plugin)

Here is a copy of the webinar evaluation form (in MS-Word - requires plugin)