Michael Paciello is the Executive Director of the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation (YRIF). The Foundation is dedicated to stimulating research and development of technologies that will ensure equality of access to information for all people. Mr. Paciello has more than 16 years experience in the area of assistive technology and interface design, including 10 years as Program Manager for Digital Equipment Corporation s Vision Impaired Information Services (VIIS) office.

Mr. Paciello currently serves as consultant to the Electronic Industries Foundation s Technology Access Center (EIF/TAC). Mr. Paciello designed and created the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) in behalf of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the White House, is co-founder of the International Committee for Accessible Document Design (ICADD), a member of the FCC Telecommunications Act Advisory Committee (TAAC) and is creator of WebABLE!, a powerful information metacenter for people with disabilities (www.yuri.org/webable/).

Mr. Paciello serves on a number of University, Government and International advisory committees, is a public speaker at several international conferences and contributes a number of articles to technical journals including his semimonthly column, "Web Enabled" for Web Techniques magazine.