GUI access conference 97 In April 1997, a conference on access to the graphical user interface will be held as part of an international conference on the world wide web. Among other activities, I understand that a "dueling web browsers" type of event is being planned. Preliminary information on the conference follows. ---------- Dear Friends and Colleagues: We are pleased to announce the third Access to GUI Conference which will be held April 7-9, 1997 in Santa Clara, California as part of the Sixth Annual World Wide Web Conference. Our focus will be on GUI access and how it relates to such web issues as the comparative accessibility of web browsers, the use of multimedia, speech access to the Internet, the use of the World Wide Web for disability issues, and creating accessible web pages. Being part of the much larger, international web conference will give us an unprecedented opportunity to share our concerns with a wide community of high-powered developers and users. The 1997 Access to GUI III conference will be a departure from the previous two in that we will be part of a much larger mainstream conference. This year's World Wide Web Conference is being co-hosted by Stanford University and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The theme of the conference this year is "Access" at all levels from geographical to sociological to physical. Project Archimedes is organizing the disability access focus of the main conference. The GUI Access group will be working to recapture some of the intimacy of our previous conferences while we also benefit from the excitement and opportunities of the larger conference. The WWW Conference will be formally requesting the submission of papers for the conference in September. We are encouraging papers on topics related to accessibility and any aspect of GUI access in relation to the World Wide Web. These papers will be due in January at which time they will be juried for publication on the web prior to the conference. This promises to be a very exciting event. There will be a number of ways in which people can participate. We urge you to put the date on your calendar now if you are thinking of attending. There will also be the possibility of virtual attendance and, for novices, there will be pre-conference sessions on accessing the Internet and the World Wide Web. Please let us know if you would like to receive further information. We are currently in the process of updating our mailing list. We would also like to hear any suggestions you might have on how to make this a better conference. You can contact Margy Kahn by email at mkahn@arch.stanford.edu or Jan McKinley at mckinley@arch.stanford. edu or either of us by telephone at 415/723-8456. We look forward to hearing from you! Jim Allan Statewide Technical Support Specialist Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired 1100 W. 45th St. Austin, TX 78756 512/206-9315 512/458-3395 fax jallan@tenet.edu "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." McLuhan, 1964