This fifteenth World Computer Congress is a historic event and it is entirely appropriate that the Sixth International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP) should form a part of that congress. The advances intechnology since the first World Computer Congress are well known. Accompanying the technology development have been changes in attitudes and it is easy to suggest that if one looked at the proceedings of the early congresses, current attitudes to Information Technology were completely unanticipated. The technology is ubiquitous and is often treated with resignation: 'Love it or hate it, it is here to stay.' On the one hand, what is now possible in terms of computing power, was beyond the dreams of most people, on the other the way it is used is often the source of frustration and discontent.

Yet there is one area of application of the technology which was both little anticipated but almost universally approved - that of information technology as a means of assisting people who are identified a shaving disabilities or special needs.

The very title of the IFIP organization reflects an early recognition that the technology is concerned with the processing of information, but it must have been hard to realize how fundamental that ability is. It is because information is so important and so flexible that machines that help process it have such a broad range of applications for people with disabilities.

The range of contributions in these proceedings reflect that breadth while we are naturally confined by the current state of the art in the technology. Visual representations dominate mainstream technology, but increasingly it is feasible to implement non-visual alternatives. So it is that contributions on applications for people with visual disabilities have been most common. Among the newly emerging technologies, voice input has (it seems) suddenly become viable and that is also apparent in the submissions received.

A conference such as this can sit in an uneasy position between being adisplay of academic achievement and the channel for communication at a more practical level. I hope we have got the level right. One device that the ProgrammeCommittee introduced was the Poster with Short Presentation. This we hoped would give contributors the chance to demonstrate very practical work in an interactive manner, but also to explain the work and theory behind it more formally. Those contributions are also represented as short papers in these proceedings.

A conference such as this - and its accompanying proceedings -do not happen without a tremendous amount of work by many people. The members of the Programme Committee are listed elsewhere in these proceedings and their contribution of time, effort and expertise must be acknowledged gratefully. The programme and the proceedings would not have emerged without long hours of work by the staff at the Austrian Computer Society and the John von Neumann Computer Society and I particularly would like to mention Wolfgang Hawlik and Daniela Poetzl.

I wish to avoid writing anything here that I will regret at a later date when some future ICCHP chair looks back on these proceedings. The safest course then is not to try to make any predictions. Instead let me hope that this work will be looked on as a small but significant step along the way to the future - what ever it may be.

Index

Tactile Display - Hearing Impairment and Speech Recognition - Blindness: Access to Documents Hearing & Speech - Non-visual Communication for Blind People - Access to the World Wide Web - Medicine & Gerontechnology - Access to Hypermedia - Education - Cognitive Impairments - Information Systems - Mathematics - Human-Computer Interaction - Access to Graphical User Interfaces - Tele-learning & Teleworking - Communication