TDI 2003 Convention

TDI's 15th Biennial International Conference and Expo tool place in Las Vegas, NV July 14 - 16, 2003. Many of the movers and shakers in the world of telecommunications for people with hearing loss were in attendance. I attended as many of the workshops as possible, and tried to take careful notes. NVRC's Cheryl Heppner did the same. Here are the resulting articles.

So what's up with Multimedia on the Web? Is it going to be accessible to people with hearing loss? Judy Brewer, the Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the WWW Consortium (W3C) gives us her thoughts.

In a similar vein to the previous article, here's a report on the Captioning on the Internet workshop. The presenter was Linda Idoni, the director of the West Coast office of the Media Access Group (MAG) at WGBH.

So what does the future of telecommunications hold for people with hearing loss? Suppose all telecommunications devices has a universal interface that supported inputs in a variety of formats. That's the sort of technology that Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden discussed in his workshop entitled "Catching up to the Future".

Here's a report on the what's happening in the world of television captioning. The workshop was conducted in a panel format, with participants who have many years of experience in the industry. Check this out for an insider's look at television captioning!

Have you ever heard of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)? Do you know that a TTY user in the US can't call a TTY user in most places in Europe? Do you know what those two questions have to do with each other? To find out, check out the TDI workshop entitled "ITU Standards".

"Town Hall on Advocacy: an Interactive Session to Address the Telecommunications Problems of Today" was presented by Karen Pelz-Strauss of Gallaudet University. She has long been involved in telecommunications issues related to hearing loss. The workshop focused on telecommunications and television access issues.

How do people with hearing loss get information in an emergency? Are there systems in place, and are they effective? Cheryl Heppner addressed these issues in her Homeland Security presentation at the 2003 TDI Conference.