Inclusive Design 24 (#ID24) 9 June 2017

Cordelia McGee-Tubb is a cartoonist and web developer who cares a ton about accessibility. By day, she leads web accessibility at Dropbox. By night, she recently completed her MFA in Comics and is working on her first comic book. Cordelia teaches computer skills to senior citizens and hopes someone will do the same for her eventually.

• @cordeliadillon
• cordeliadillon.com

Eric is a Boston-based user experience designer who helps create straightforward solutions that address a person’s practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs using accessible, performant, device-agnostic technology.

• @ericwbailey
• ericwbailey.design

Jason Kiss is Senior Advisor and lead on web standards and accessibility for the New Zealand Government. He also advises on .govt.nz domain name management, and is a contributing editor on the W3C’s HTML Accessibility API Mappings specification.

• @jkiss
• accessibleculture.org

Bryce is a senior designer for Xbox who, through mucho grinding, unlocked the achievement of launching the Xbox One. Back in his homeland, Canada, he designed the first digital library for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind where he learned to think beyond conventional accessibility practices. Currently he has the greatest job in the world applying the Microsoft Inclusive Design practice to gaming. As a lead in the Xbox Gaming for Everyone initiative he works to make the Xbox services, hardware, and games inclusive and fun for people of all abilities.

• @brycej

Russ Weakley is a author, speaker and CSS expert, with a detailed knowledge of web design and development. Russ runs the Web Standards Group and has produced a series of widely acclaimed online tutorials on CSS, Responsive Web Design and web development.

• @russmaxdesign
• maxdesign.com.au

Eric Eggert is a web developer and accessibility educator, based in Essen, Germany. From December 2013 on, he worked for W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. Since April 2016 he works for the Austin-based non-profit Knowbility and is also a Fellow in W3C on behalf of Knowbility where he continues his work on educational material with the Education and Outreach Working Group.

• @yatil
• yatil.net

Chaals is old and tired, but sometimes does some useful stuff, including in accessibility.

• @chaals

Andrew Arch currently works in the Digital Transformation Agency in the Australian Government. He has the primary responsibility for accessibility and inclusivity issues for people with disability, people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, older people and other diverse groups. He works across the product teams, and other government agencies, to ensure diversity is considered in their user research, service design and development. Andrew also has a strong interest in broader digital inclusion issues.

Andrew has worked with the web since 1994. He has a long history with web accessibility, including working with the W3C in Europe on age-related accessibility issues and with Vision Australia as manager of their web accessibility consulting and training practice. More recently he was part of the team in the Department of Finance responsible for overseeing the implementation of the Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy for government to adopt WCAG 2.0.

Andrew is also a long-term member of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative's (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) that develops strategies and resources to promote awareness, understanding, and implementation of web accessibility. The EOWG also supports the work of other WAI Working Groups to increase public awareness, understanding, and successful implementation of WAI guidelines

• @amja

Henny Swan is a User Experience and Design Lead with The Paciello Group. Prior to TPG she worked at the BBC where she was lead author on the BBC Mobile Accessibility Standards and Guidelines, UX lead for accessibility and looked after BBC iPlayer, the BBC Standard Media Player, the 2012 Olympics, Weather and Sport. Henny has also worked as a Web Evangelist in the Developer Relations team at Opera Software ASA, and as a Senior Accessibility Consultant at the Royal National Institute of Blind People in the UK where she set up the RNIB Web Access Centre. Henny has been involved with Web Standards and Accessibility since 2001, actively participating in W3C initiatives such as the Web Accessibility Initiative Education and Outreach Working Group and the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. She is also a former lead of the International Liaison Group within the Web Standards Project (WaSP).

• @iheni
• iheni.com

Florian has been working as a digital accessibility expert for almost 2 years at SNCF. In 2016, he joined Access42, the consulting company in charge of writing the reference document about digital accessibility for the French government. Florian is now working as an expert on many projects for the French railway company, guiding a few of them through the French certification process.

Aurélie is in charge of developing the checkout process for the SNCF regional railway websites and mobile applications. She discovered digital accessibility when redesigning these websites 5 years ago. She decided the project must be inclusive and certified with the AA level of the French regulation, which the sites obtained last year. Since then, she has been lobbying for digital accessibility awareness within the railway company.

Nathalie is in charge of e-commercialising annual season tickets for SNCF regional railway services. Following Aurélie’s footsteps, in early January 2017, she launched a website featuring personal customer’s account. This enabled each subscriber to manage its contract autonomously. The website is designed to be accessible to all users.

• @access42net
• access42.net

Johan Huijkman is an Accessibility Engineer at Q42 in Amsterdam. More than once he has been called Obi-Wan Kenobi by his co-workers. Not only because he is older than the rest. And not only because he gives advice when he wasn’t asked for it. But mainly because he helps to maintain the right focus during complex projects.

• @huijkman
• q42.com

Nidhi Arora is the co founder of Topgain - a consulting firm dedicated to IT Strategy excellence in India's mid sized businesses. She is also the Founder of Esha - an organisation that works towards Dignity, Empowerment and Enablement of the visually challenged. As a social entrepreneur, she spearheads 3 important initiatives in the area of visual disability – creating Blind Entrepreneurs (www.braillecards.org) and creating and maintaining India’s largest online audio library in Indian languages (www.clabil.org) and General Public sensitisation to the needs of the specially abled.

• @eshabraille
• braillecards.org

Shwetank Dixit works at BarrierBreak as Head of Accessibility Innovation and Research. He is looking at how to use technology, standards and policy in new ways to make society more inclusive. Previously he worked at Opera, where he was Product Manager of its extensions platform, and a member of its developer relations team. His interests include accessibility, open web standards, browser extensions and Batman.

• @shwetank
• shwetankdixit.com

Web Accessibility Consultant in Japan. Makoto has been contributing to the JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) Working Group and W3C WCAG Working Group as a web accessibility expert. And he has been a chairman of the Web accessibility Committee in Japan (WAIC) since 2012.

• @mak_en
• infoaxia.com

Suzanne has worked as a visual designer for over 15 years, and has worked at the Children’s BBC for 2 years, where she designs and represents the needs of younger audiences, especially children who might be underserved or overlooked. As a User Experience Designer, Suzanne enjoys bridging the gap between assumed needs, and actual needs, and enjoys talking to peers from all professions to increase her understanding of emerging technologies and produce best in class creative solutions.

• @suzanneclarke

Hi! I'm Molly. I'm a Graphic and Communication Design student at the University of Leeds, currently on a placement year and graduating in 2018.

• @mollymayfw

Jared Smith is the Associate Director of WebAIM. He is a highly demanded presenter and trainer and has provided web accessibility training to thousands of developers throughout the world. With over 16 years experience working in the web design, development, and accessibility field, he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience that is used to help others create and maintain highly accessible web content.

• @Jared_W_Smith
• webaim.org

Jesse Beach's technology career started in linguistic research, shifted to UX design and then landed solidly in front end development. At Facebook, she channels her energies into building rock solid, beautiful and accessible interfaces. And whenever possible, Jesse staunchly advocates for diversity and inclusion in technology.

• @jessebeach
• facebook.com

Cynthia is a technical product manager at Starbucks, focusing on digital accessibility. She has been involved in Web Accessibility since 2000, and was part of the working groups who wrote WCAG 2.0, WAI-ARIA and HTML5.

• @cyns

Lainey Feingold is a U.S. disability rights lawyer and author who works with the blind community on technology, digital, and information access issues. She is widely recognized for negotiating landmark accessibility agreements without lawsuits with organizations as diverse as Walmart, Bank of America, the City and County of San Francisco, Anthem, Inc. and Major League Baseball.  Her book, Structured Negotiation, A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits, is a nuts and bolts guide to the process she and her clients have used for two decades, presented in an easy-to-understand format for lawyers and non-lawyers alike.  The book is full of stories of the disability rights and accessibility issues Lainey has worked on and the people she has worked with. Lainey Feingold is the individual recipient of the 2017 American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution "Lawyer as Problem Solver" Award. She has also twice received a California Lawyer Attorney of the Year (CLAY) award for her digital accessibility Structured Negotiation work.

• @lflegal
• lflegal.com

Jennifer is currently the Chief Experience Officer at Emmetros, a tech company focused on creating accessible software for people with early- to mid-stage dementia. A long-time user advocate, Jennifer has a passion for understanding user needs and seeing those needs reflected in clear, elegant, and accessible products. She is delighted to use her experience to help make a difference in lives of people living with memory loss.

By working closely with developers, designers and end users to develop a fuller understanding of how people with disabilities use the web, Janna has parlayed a passion for user research into a career that has helped remove barriers to web applications. Janna is a Senior UX Designer for Manulife / John Hancock. Prior to Manulife, she worked for a decade as an accessibility champion in EdTech.

Chris is the Accessibility Officer for Accessible Media Inc (AMI), a national not-for-profit broadcaster in Canada committed to making Accessible Media for all Canadians. Chris is the Chair of the Described Video Best Practices committee in Canada, W3C Invited Expert for the Web and TV Interest Group, member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Disability Advisory Committee (DAC) Video Programming subcommittee, Accessibility Strand Advisor for Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA), and member of the Mohawk College Program Advisory Committee (PAC).

• @a11ycob
• ami.ca

Birkir is the real (from a genetic point of view) accessibility Viking (even if he believes Karl Groves has earned an honorary title of accessibility Viking). Born as a result of 800 years of Icelandic inbreading he lost his sight due to a genetic defect at age 5. Since then he has never looked back (after all, how could he?).

After graduating from Yale University with degrees in Computer Science and Economics, and spending 7 years working as a financial analyst for two banks who both failed spectacularly, he turned his attention to accessibility, partly as a result of not having being able to come up with materials for the Certified Financial Analyst (CFA) degree. After working for various Icelandic and European accessibility forces, mostly for the light side, and 3 years at Deque Systems, he took on an accessibility lead position at BB&T Bank, one which he has held for almost a year now. In his job he leads the accessibility efforts of the USA's 6th largest financial institution, not a trivial task, but he enjoys it.

• @birkir_gun

Denis Boudreau is a Principal Web Accessibility Consultant, Strategist and Trainer working for Deque Systems. He is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the Education and Outreach Working Group, advocating social inclusion on the Web for the past 16 years. Denis has been running the a11yMTL monthly meetings and annual conference in Montreal, Canada since 2010. An admitted nerd with an unhealthy fixation on UX and digital inclusion, he has a passion for design that emotionally resonates, is beautifully engaging, and delightfully accessible.

• @dboudreau
• about.me/dboudreau