FCC’s Accessibility and Innovation Initiative Speaker Series: Yevgen Borodin

By Renee Dopplick, ACM Director of Public Policy
September 6, 2013

The FCC’s Accessibility and Innovation Initiative Speaker Series will feature Yevgen Borodin on “Improving Accessibility for the General Public” on September 12, 2013, at 10 am EDT. The presentation will be followed by accessible technology demonstrations in the FCC’s Technology Experience Center. The event is free and open to the public. Pre-registration for in-person attendance is not required but highly encouraged. A live webcast will be available.

Dr. Borodin, a Research Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University in New York, will use the example of web accessibility to explore how accessibility is usually incorporated after-the-fact and how assistive tools have lagged behind the latest innovations. He then will discuss how to shift the paradigm to strategies that incorporate accessibility by design, such that technologies are universally accessible from the start.

In 2007, he won the first place Graduate Research award in the ACM Student Research Competition for his research on “HearSay: Context-Directed Non-Visual Web Browser.”

The technology demonstrations in the FCC’s Technology Experience Center will include:

  • Yevgen Borodin will demonstrate: (a) Capti Narrator, a web browser assistant that creates a list of articles containing the extracted main content of web pages; (b) Voiceye, a system for creating and scanning barcodes; and (b) IVEO, an interactive learning system.

  • John Carlin of Ai Squared will demonstrate the ability to magnify hardcopy printed materials or to transform them to speech using optical camera recognition and ZoomReader for iOS or ZoomText ImageReader for Windows.

  • Patrick Timony of the DC Public Library will demonstrate accessibility features of iOS devices.

  • Gregg Vanderheiden of Raising the Floor will demonstrate the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII), a cloud-based approach to personalizing user interfaces.