Computer and Information Technologies have redesigned the way modern society operates. In particular, they have identified new avenues to assist individuals with special needs and provided tools and resources to alleviate the traditional barriers encountered by persons with disabilities. For example, speech generation systems have assisted persons with visual disabilities, voice recognition has helped people with motor impairments, multi-modal presentations have been shown to be effective in helping people with learning disabilities understand information.

The ASSETS series of conferences is aimed at providing a technical forum for presenting and disseminating innovative research results that address the use of computing and information technologies to help persons with disabilities.

The ASSETS meetings have been developed with the specific focus of facilitating sharing of information, exchange of ideas, through formal paper sessions, demonstrations, posters, and informal/social events. To this purpose, ASSETS is a single-track conference to encourage group participation and interactions.

The 8th ASSETS conference will follow the successful tradition established by the previous events --- held in Marina del Rey (1994), Vancouver (1996), Marina del Rey (1998), Washington D.C. (2000), Edinburgh (2002), Atlanta (2004) and Baltimore (2005). ASSETS is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the SIGACCESS Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing.

The conference program covers a multitude of topics relevant to assistive technologies and universal accessibility and is structured around technical papers, poster sessions, demonstrations, the doctoral consortium, and the conference reception. A new addition for this year is the SIGACCESS student research competition. This is an exciting opportunity for students to receive subsidised attendance at the conference.

Note: New for this year, American Sign Language interpreters will be provided upon request for all ASSETS technical sessions and events. Requests for an interpreter must be indicated on the conference registration form when registering for ASSETS 2006.