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Bill LaPlant
Chair, INCITS V2, the IT Access Interfaces Technical Committee
of the InterNational
Committee for Information Technology Standards
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a Federal employee since 1968, first as a Computer Systems
Design Engineer for the U.S. Air Force, then as Manager of the DOD
Computer Standards program, and finally as technology and usability
researcher for the U.S. Census Bureau.
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negotiated the successful adoption and use of GENCODE by DOD (1981
to 1983).GENCODE was the name of
SGML (Standard Generic Mark-up Language) prior to its adoption as an American
National Standard and later as an International Standard.This adoption was critical to the initial success of the Computer Aided
Logistics System (CALS) and has resulted in an on-going saving for the taxpayer
of at least $1 Billion per year for DOD technical data (e.g., weapons systems
documentation). SGML is the predecessor standard to HTML (Hyper-Text Mark-up
Language) and XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) which would not exist in their
present forms without the success of GENCODE and SGML. The World-wide Web would
not be the success it has become without the existence of the mark-up and
linking concepts originally embodied in GENCODE and the creation of a support
industry for its development, use, and exploitation. as a member of the DOD Protocol Standards Steering Group in 1982,
predecessor to the Internet Engineering Task Force Steering Group (IETF-SG),
participated in the decision by the DOD to adopt TCP/IP (as opposed to OSI) as
the core Arpanet (Internet)
protocols.
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has served since 1994 as the senior standardization expert for the
U.S. Census Bureau’s Standards Management Team.
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serves as the Alternate for the National Institute for Standards
and Technology on the InterNational Committee for Information Technology
Standards (INCITS), and is the proposer (with Neil Scott of Stanford) and
organizing chair of the INCITS IT Accommodation Standards Study Group, and is
the Chairman of the Technical
Committee INCITS/V2, IT Access Interfaces.
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developed approaches to ensuring accessibility for the U.S. Census
Bureau’s data and information by people with disabilities.
One of these being the Census Bureau’s standards for the development of
accessible software and accessible web pages. These standards were first adopted
by the Census Bureau in July, 1999 and revisions incorporating requirements
based on the Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards (36
CFR Part 1194) have been issued.
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In 1998, Bill started a research effort with Stanford University
to further the work of the Archimedes Project, funded by a $250,000 grant from
GSA.Working with the Census
Bureau’s National Processing Center (NPC) the research has demonstrated the
efficacy of the Archimedes
Project Total Access System (and the Synapse Adaptive Total Access Port™)
in the NPC environment. NSF is now funding a second 3 year, multi-million
dollar, Digital Government project on IT Accommodation at Stanford for which the
Census Bureau serves as the lead agency. The
IT Accommodation Research Team, under Bill’s leadership, has won one of the
last Federal Hammer Awards, recognizing a revolutionary way of improving access
for people with disabilities to data and information.
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He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (and it’s Computer; Engineering Management; Systems,
Man, and Cybernetics Societies and it’s Standards Association), a Member of
the Association for Computing Machinery (and it’s Special Interest Groups on
the Computer Human Interface and on Computers and the Physically Handicapped), a
member of the Usability Professionals’ Association, and the Standards
Engineering Society. Bill is a founding member and Director of the International
Coalition of Access Engineers and Specialists.
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Bill has a BA in Psychology from Hobart College and an MS in
Technology of Management from the American University.
Bill has been elected to Pi Alpha Alpha (the National Public
Administration Honor Society).
contact:
blaplant@mindspring.com,
blaplant@census.gov
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