About
About the Author: Markku (Mark) Häkkinen
I have been involved in user interfaces and accessibility since my undergraduate years when I worked as a research programmer at the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, Missouri, developing hardware and software used in speech and hearing research. Back in the 1970’s, we didn’t call it accessibility, though. My early graduate research examined the use of synthetic speech-based warning messages in complex human-computer environments, a topic still of interest. I spent a good part of my professional career in user interface research and development for a variety of big and small software companies in New Jersey, where accessibility was largely an unknown subject.
In the early 1990’s I did some accessibility consulting while following the rapid growth of this fascinating thing called the Web. After learning about the difficulties that screen readers were faced with, pwWebSpeak, a non-visual, talking Web browser was born in 1995, and a small company called the Productivity Works was created to develop and market it. pwWebSpeak’s revolutionary approach to read and navigate Web content via structural and semantic information embodied in the HTML quickly led to my involvement with the multiple digital talking book standardization efforts at the time: the Library of Congress’ National Library Service committee and the DAISY Consortium. W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative and SMIL soon followed, with standards meetings occupying much of my time. Meanwhile, Productivity Works evolved into an angel funded company, signed a licensing agreement with Microsoft and rebranded itself as isSound Corporation, where I was CTO/founder until the company closed in 2001.
Following isSound, I worked for the DAISY for All Project, which took me to Japan, Thailand, Tunisia and throughout Europe in support of open standards and software for information accessibility. During this time, the importance of communicating preparedness information to people with disabilities was highlighted by 9/11 and the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, and led to my growing involvement with research in disaster and ICT. In 2006, I returned to graduate school in Cognitive Science at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), and am currently working on my dissertation which seeks to better understand the reasons why warnings often fail to reach audiences at risk.
I am an invited expert to the W3C WAI User Agent Accessibility Working Group and the HTML Working Group’s Accessibility Task Force, and have previously been chair of the WAI Research and Development Interest Group, a member of the SMIL Working Group, member of the ANSI NISO Z39.86 Digital Talking Book Committee and chair of its original File Format Working Group, member of the Open eBook Publication Structure Working Group, among others.
Currently I am a Senior Researcher in the Department of Mathematical Information Technology at the University of Jyväskylä where I participate in a project on secure and trusted mobile information services. I also do consulting and training for several clients, working to improve the accessibility and usability of a wide variety of products and services.
I can be reached via email at mhakkinen ((at)) acm.org
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