I have a little history with adaptive technologies during the past 3 years in Urbana.

First, I was in charge of loading a text-to-speech program that resided on a couple of machines at UHS and UMS. This was a pretty bland DOS program that was limited to DOS text files. It was unable to deal with images and the web.

In the Fall of 1996, I worked with Deborah Fell, a learning disabilities teacher at UHS in the development of a grant proposal, Talking Good News Bears, to Project Pursuit at the UI. We received the grant that would allow her to purchase a speech synthesizer, scanner, and special software that allows users with visual impairments to read text and alt tags within a web browser. We wrote this because we wanted one of her visually impaired students to be able to take part in the Good News Bears stock market simulation that we were doing in several classes at UHS.

We brought in Keith Wessel, a graduate of UHS and visually impaired programmer at NCSA, to assist us in the set-up of the hardware and software. Keith was very excited about this himself, because he was able to use Netscape for the first time (he normally used Lynx). Keith also came in several times during the year to mentor the students. Overall, the project was a great success. We documented the Talking Good News Bears as well. This just provides some pictures of her students during the project. There is also a page with all of the specific hardware and software that we were provided through the grant.

Some of the better sites that I found on accessibility issues included:

• W3C Accessibility Site - This is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) which is part of the World Wide Web Consortium, the same people who bring us the HTML standards. Here you can find a number of links to white papers, design guidelines, new products, conferences, projects and research. We used this site heavily during our research for the Project Pursuit grant.
• TOM - This is the Text-Only-Maker, which was developed by the same person that I was talking about above, Keith Wessel. He has been a great resource during the past 3 years in Urbana.