Jim Tobias has thirty years of experience in technology and disability in both the public and private sectors. He was a technician at Berkeley's Center for Independent Living and later the Rehabilitation Engineer at the Matheny School and consultant to a wide range of public and private agencies, before joining Bell Labs and later Bellcore as their in-house expert on disability issues.
After ten years, he left to found Inclusive Technologies, the only firm of its kind offering both technical and non-technical services to companies, agencies, and consumer organizations.
Mr. Tobias's technical background supports Inclusive Technologies’ hardware and software services. In addition, he specializes in accessible business practices, primary and secondary market research and accessible business practices, customer surveys, focus groups, product trials, product management, strategic partnership development, staff training, internal team-building, and consumer and other stakeholder liaison.
Mr. Tobias is a long-standing member of the Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA), an interdisciplinary association of people with a common interest in technology and disability. He sat on the Access Board’s Telecommunications Accessibility Advisory Committee, which was responsible for drafting Section 255 regulations, and on the FCC’s Consumer/Disabilities Technical Advisory Committee.
He is Co-Chair of the Alliance for Telecom Industry Solutions’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Accessibility Forum. Mr. Tobias developed several accessibility projects: an innovative deaf relay service that integrates speech detection and text-to-speech, a network-based talking PIM for blind users, and a database-driven customized interface for voice mail and IVR accessibility.
