Ken Nakata, Director, Accessibility Consulting Practice, HiSoftware
Ken Nakata directs the Accessibility Consulting Practice (ACP) at HiSoftware, a leading company in helping organizations achieve IT accessibility and other compliance requirements. His ACP team focuses on helping organizations understand the legal and business drivers for accessibility and then manage this change using both manual and automated testing solutions. He is probably best known, however, for his work as a Senior Trial Attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was the federal government’s lead attorney for Section 508 implementation. During that time, he also crafted many of the laws and policies still used by the federal government and much of the current technical assistance material currently in use by the Department of Justice and U.S. Access Board was authored by him. In addition to being a lawyer, he is active in software and Web-based technologies, including Java, JavaScript, and SQL. In 2001, he was certified by Sun Microsystems as a programmer for the Java 2 Platform. He is a frequent speaker on both law and technology. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He is admitted to the bars of Washington, New York, and the District of Columbia.