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Gottfried Zimmermann, Ph.D.
IT Accessibility Architect
gzimmermann@acm.org
To facilitate the design of Information and Communication Technology applications that are usable by everybody, including people with disabilities and older people.
Ph.D. in Computer Science - University of Stuttgart, Germany, 1999. Thesis: "GONVI - Non-Visual Access to Documents and GUIs with a Constraint-Based Approach."
Diplom-Informatiker - University of Stuttgart, Germany, 1994. Thesis: "CritiGUI, a Critic System for Graphical User Interfaces in Smalltalk."
July 2003 - present: Information & Communication Technology (ICT) Accessibility Architect and founder of Access Technologies Group in Pfullingen, Germany. Research and development work for Trace R&D Center, University of Wisconsin, USA, including standardization of a Universal Remote Console framework under ANSI and ISO/IEC JTC1. Technical coordinator for the European project i2home ("Intuitive Interaction for Everyone with Home Appliances based on Industry Standards"). Development of a task model description standard for Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, MA, USA. Web accessibility consulting services for Competence Center Human-Computer Interaction, Fraunhofer Institut, Stuttgart, Germany. Lectures on accessible design within the HCI course at the Berufsakademie college in Stuttgart, Germany. Reviews on accessibility aspects of W3C standard drafts as invited expert of the Protocols and Formats working group of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. Independent expert for the European Commission, acting as reviewer for funded projects on Web accessibility.
August 2000-June 2003 Information Technology accessibility researcher, Trace Research & Development Center, College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Research and development activities in several areas: interconnectivity standard for user interface adaptation and substitution; network-based services for translation, modality transformation and assistance in tele-collaborative environments and beyond; accessible design principles for software/Web technologies and their user interfaces; development and review of standards within ANSI/INCITS, W3C, IETF, and ISO/IEC JTC1. Supervision of up to 9 students in different prototyping teams, involving technologies such as Java, Jini, UPnP, IEEE 802.11b, Bluetooth, XML, XML Schema, HTTP, SOAP, WSDL, and RDF.
July 1999-July 2000: Employment as executive consultant at debis, Services by DaimlerChrysler, Department of New Technologies. Internal and external consulting and coaching activities for system architectures, Java enterprise applications, eCommerce applications, performance engineering, quality assurance and process design for software development projects.
April 1996-June 1999: Subcontracted software architect and developer at debis, Services by DaimlerChrysler, Department of New Technologies. Software design and development, system analysis, quality assurance, configuration management and consulting activities in several large-scale software development projects.
March 1994-January 1996: Employment as principal for software development at SUEBIA GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany. Concept modeling, design and development of assistive and educational software components and a multi-lingual Braille publishing system. Installation and training in several countries in the Middle East.
October 1989-June 1993: Part-time job (for the time of undergraduate education) as software developer at SUEBIA GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany. Software design and development of a multi-lingual Braille publishing application in C.
