Peter Brunet  IBM Software Group, 11501 Burnet Road, Austin, TX 78758 (brunet@us.ibm.com). Mr. Brunet is a senior software engineer in the Emerging Technologies area of the IBM Software Group. He has been a primary developer or team lead on accessibility products including Home Page Reader, the IBM Java Self-Voicing Development Kit, Speech Viewer III, PhoneAide, Thinking Out Loud, THINKable™, and PhoneCommunicator™. Prior to developing accessibility products, he developed robotics control language interpreters for IBM robots and IBM Series 1™ compiler runtime libraries for BASIC, FORTRAN 77, COBOL, and PL/I. Prior to his IBM career, he developed engineering software for super-minicomputers. He has received an Outstanding Innovation Award and an Entry Systems Division Award, has been awarded several patents, and has authored several publications. He holds a BSECE degree from the University of Michigan and an MASCS degree from Florida Atlantic University.

Barry Alan Feigenbaum  IBM Research Division, IBM Accessibility Center, 11501 Burnet Road, Bldg 904, Austin, Texas 78758 (feigenba@us.ibm.com). Dr. Feigenbaum is an architect in the IBM WorldWide Accessibility Center where he provides architectural and development support for IBM accessibility tools. He is the IBM representative to the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative authoring-tools working group. He created the Server Message Block (SMB) network protocol used in IBM and Microsoft networks and the Samba product, and he served on the design team for the industry standard NETBIOS interface. He received a NCSD TeamWork Recognition award, an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, five Invention Achievement Awards, and numerous author recognition awards. He has co-authored several award-winning books, several IBM technical reports, and numerous articles in IBM and external publications. He holds a Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from the University of Miami, an M.E. degree in electrical engineering from Florida Atlantic University, and a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida.

Kip Harris  IBM Research Division, IBM Accessibility Center, 11501 Burnet Road, Bldg 904, Austin, Texas 78758 (hkip@us.ibm.com). Mr. Harris is a member of the IBM Worldwide Accessibility Center in Austin, Texas, where he develops and evaluates assistive technology. His most recent projects include a lead role in the development of IBM Home Page Reader. He has been recognized with a variety of awards and patents. Prior to joining the Accessibility Center, Mr. Harris worked with a wide variety of software technologies, including both system and application product development and research work in robotics. He holds a B.S. degree in computer science from Tufts University and an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Catherine Laws  IBM Research Division, IBM Accessibility Center, 11501 Burnet Road, Bldg 904, Austin, Texas 78758 (claws@us.ibm.com). Ms. Laws is a senior software engineer in the IBM Worldwide Accessibility Center where she is the technical team lead and user interface designer for developing assistive technologies and tools such as IBM Home Page Reader. She also led development teams for the IBM Screen Reader, SpeechViewer, and THINKable projects, holds two patents related to SpeechViewer, and is the IBM representative to the W3C user agent accessibility guidelines working group. She has a B.A. degree in computer science and business administration from Texas Christian University and an M.S. degree in computing technology in education from Nova Southeastern University.

Richard Schwerdtfeger  IBM Software Group, Emerging Internet Technologies, 11501 Burnet Road, Bldg 902, Austin, Texas 78758 (schwer@us.ibm.com). Mr. Schwerdtfeger is a Senior Technical Staff Member, the Software Group Accessibility Strategist and Architect in Emerging Technologies, chair of the IBM Accessibility Architecture Review Board, and an IBM Master Inventor with over 43 patent filings. His responsibilities include overall accessibility architecture and strategy for IBM Software Group. He is a working member of the working groups for W3C WAI Protocols and Formats and HTML, and previously for the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines, which are now a W3C recommendation. Mr. Schwerdtfeger joined IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1993, where he helped design and develop IBM Screen Reader/2. He later led Java accessibility development at IBM, including the Java accessibility collaboration between IBM and Sun Microsystems and the Self-Voicing Kit for Java, co-designed the Java Accessibility API, and was architectural lead on the Web Accessibility Gateway, which was a transcoding gateway for seniors. He is the co-author of Secrets of the OS/2 Warp Masters and the author of IBM Guidelines for Writing Accessible Applications Using 100% Pure Java™. He has also published articles, such as “Making the GUI Talk” for Byte magazine. He has a B.S. degree in engineering from the University of Connecticut.

Lawrence Weiss  IBM Software Group, Emerging Internet Technologies, 11501 Burnet Road, Bldg 902, Austin, Texas 78758 (lweiss@us.ibm.com). Mr. Weiss is a senior software engineer and the current architect of the Self-Voicing Development Kit for Java, an IBM internal tool that facilitates the development of accessible talking Java applications. He began developing products for people with disabilities when he joined Special Needs Systems in 1988, contributing to several releases of Screen Reader/DOS, Screen Reader/2, Screen Magnifier/2, and SpeechViewer™. In the Accessibility Center, he helped design and develop the Java accessibility API in collaboration with Sun Microsystems, and Home Page Reader, the talking Web browser. Mr. Weiss has presented and demonstrated these and other IBM technologies at many disabilities conferences. He currently holds 16 patents in the field of accessibility with more pending, and is a member of the Austin Software Group Invention Evaluation Board to evaluate and include accessibility in IBM intellectual property. He has a B.S. degree in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.