This year, Techshare India will be held in New Delhi on 6th and 7th February, 2012 at the India Habitat Centre. Techshare is Europe's biggest technology event to promote assistive technology for people with disabilities.

Rob Sinclair, Chief Accessibility Officer Microsoft will be delivering the keynote address. Sinclair has served on a number of advisory boards and currently chairs the steering committee of the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA) - an organization he helped to create and that later became the engineering division of the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA).

"Today, people are required to adapt to every piece of technology they encounter - whether on their desk, in their phone, their car, or a new home appliance. It is becoming a significant challenge," Sinclair says.

In his role as Microsoft's Chief Accessibility Officer, he also consults and communicates regularly with business leaders, engineers, advocacy organizations and government leaders around the world.

Ashoka Fellow Shilpi Kapoor, Founder BarrierBreak technologies and the Chief organizer of Techshare 2012 says, "we are taking ahead one conversation at a time through Techshare towards policy reform. At Techshare 2008, we invited the world wide web consortium to speak on accessibility guidelines. This then provided inputs to the Government of India guidelines on accessible websites issued in Jan 2009. At Techshare 2010, we focused on talking ATM's. The RBI passed a regulation that 33% of all ATM's to be made accessible for the differently abled. Techshare 2012 will focus on making gaming and entertainment accessible for the persons with disabilities.

Agenda for the event: http://techshare.barrierbreak.com/agenda2012.php

About Techshare 2012:
The two day exhibition and conference will witness participation from more than 500 delegates from government and non-profit organizations, educational institutes and corporate sectors from across the globe; where more than 50 speakers will address the issues related to accessibility standards and law. The exhibition will have more than 25 stalls that will display different IT hardware and software products and services for people with disabilities. Over 2000 people are expected to walk in and experience Techshare 2012.

The global objectives of Techshare include:

• Enable access to all mainstream policies, systems and services: persons with disabilities should have access to the same services (health, education, social, etc) as the general public.

• Invest in specific programs and services for people with disabilities: while mainstreaming is the ideal, sometimes support services, such as rehabilitation and training are needed to achieve parity.

• Adopt a national disability strategy and plan of action: a national disabled strategy will provide a long-term vision for the country and provide a mechanism for coordination and monitoring of the efforts.

• Involve people with disabilities.

• Improve human resource capacity to ensuring non-discrimination and participation.

• Provide adequate funding and improve affordability: consider the financial sustainability of the national action plan and programs.

• Increase public awareness and understanding of disability.

• Improve disability data collection.

• Strengthen and support research on disability

About Barrierbreak Technologies:
BarrierBreak Technologies views technology as a sine qua non for people with disabilities.

Shilpi Kapoor, Founder, MD, BarrierBreak Technologies has always believed in giving employment opportunities to the disabled rather than looking at them as a dependent segment of our society, to engage them commercially than offer them sympathy. More than 75% of the employees at BarrierBreak Technologies, her own firm, are people with disabilities. Shilpi Kapoor is building an eco-system in India that enables differently-abled people to fulfill their rights. They create products and services for people with disabilities and also make websites accessible viz; the website for the Ministry of Social and that for National Portal of India. BarrierBreak has also launched signntalk.org, for which it won an MIT Technology review award in March 2011. SignNTalk empowers a deaf person to communicate with the hearing world using sign language.