EASI NEWS 06/19/1998
EASI Equal Access to Software and Information

EASI is announcing the webcast of parts of the RESNA 1998 conference.  There
will be webcasts of 2 presentations and also a special live chat.  These events
will be webcast on June 28-29.

To listen, you will need to download the real audio player and then access the
EASI page at the presentation times.  Our audio server will handle up to 100
persons simultaneously.  If it is overloaded, it will give you an error
message.  We wish it would tell you it was loaded, but you only get an error
message.  These webcasts will be archived and will be posted in archive from by
July 4 and will stay on the web.  If you cannot make the live webcast, come
back and listen to the archive.

We tried to arrange for live text transcirption for the hearing impaired, but,
for a number of technical reasons, this flopped, but we will have the text
transcriptions on the web when the archive versions go up by July 4.  The
transcription company required the kind of connectivity to our machine using
java that we cannot presently provide.  Actually, the machine is not under our
control, and we cannot set some protections the way it was required.  We regret
this and will continue to work for real time captioning.

Below is the list of the 3 events to be webcast.  The url you will need for the
webcast is:

http://www.rit.edu/~easi

and select the webcast link.


Sunday June 28 11:00 - 12:30  Live Broadcast: Advanced Topics in Seating
This advanced seating session will describe medical and surgical treatments
for spasticity including intrathecal baclofen pumps, selective dorsal
rhizotomy, botulinum toxin and phenol blocks, and anti-spasticity medications.
The impact of increased muscle tone and its relief by these techniques on
seating, positioning,and access will be reviewed.
Presenter: Lynne Stempian, MD, The Children's Hospital Medical Center

Monday June 29 9:00 - 10:30 Live Broadcast: Don Ross Lecture: Evaluation of
Current Speech Recognition Systems
The area of speech recognition is exploding. As this area grows there are more
and more products available and more and more questions. This presentation
will address the following questions: 1) What types of speech recognition
systems are available? 2) What are the strengths and weaknesses of each
product? 3) When is speech recognition appropriate and when is it not? and 4)
What are the future trends within speech recognition?

Sunday June 28 3:00 - 3:30 Chat : Upcoming Fourth Annual Research Symposium
Outcomes Research: Measuring the Impact of Assistive Technology
This chat will discuss the report on the upcoming Research Symposium regarding
the fundamentals in outcomes research methodology and report current outcomes
research investigations related to assistive technology. Prominent researchers
will portray state - of - the - art in outcomes research and suggest
directions for the next decade.
Facilitator: Roger Smith, University of Wisconsin



Norman Coombs
Chair of EASI (Equal Access to Software and Information