Digital Accessibility
Joe Welinske
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Interviews with accomplished accessibility professionals to learn about their career journeys
Available episodes
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5 hours ago
Technology Is the Great Connector Unless There Are Barriers
Jill Bateman, Ohio University, Digital Accessibility Coordinator
Jill Bateman provides comprehensive accessibility support for students and staff at Ohio University. That includes reviewing tools and technology and processes for purchasing. Starting in web design, Jill found similarities between usability and accessibility. She shares the challenge of an elderly family member which helped drive her work and interest.
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May 14, 2023
Not About Can I Code My HTML Right but Can I Do My Relationships Right
Jonathan Hassell, Hassell Inclusion, Founder & Chief Executive
Jonathan Hassell talks about his many years of experience in accessibility. He describes the evolution and challenges at the BBC to make their content available to all across their many services. Jonathan also explains the importance of standards organizations.
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Apr 30, 2023
Make People More Self Sufficient When It Comes to Accessibility
Léonie Watson, TetraLogical, Director
Léonie Watson's early work as a web designer was interupted when she lost her sight. As she began to use assistive technologies for her own needs, she found her way into accessibility testing. This led to many years of solving accessibility problems for a wide range of organizations. Now, Léonie is the Director of TetraLogical - a consultancy for accessibility.
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Apr 16, 2023
Considering Disabilities in the Context of our Environment
Jamie Knight, Jamie + Lion (limited), Director
Jamie Knight talks about the many activities he was involved with in eleven years working in accessibility at the BBC. Now he provides consulting and workshops. Jamie also shares his own experience as a person with disabilities and the importance of accommodations in life and work.
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Apr 2, 2023
Accessibility Support in the U.S. Federal Government
Dominique Wheeler provides training and support for accessibility implementation within U.S. federal agencies. She started her career work at a Baltimore education non-profit organization. It was while creating training materials for the Department of Defense that she became familiar with Section 508 requirements. That led to her full-time work as an accessibility specialist. She talks about the Trusted Tester program that is open to anyone for certification.
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Feb 19, 2023
Understanding That Accessibility Is Not Just About the WCAG
Derek Featherstone, Saleforce, VP of Accessibility and Inclusive Design
Derek Featherstone VP of PAccessibility and Design at Salesforce. Derek describes how accessibility is integrated in the overall structure at Salesforce. He shared his own disability challenges and starting his own consulting firm that was acquired by Level Access.
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Feb 12, 2023
Not Just Making the Design Process Accessible but the Workplace Overall
Amanda Powell, Target, accessibility in user research
Amanda Powell works as a senior UX designer at Target. Her exposure to accessibility came from her own challenges of having an autoimmune disorder affecting her sight. She became an advocate for accessibility tools and processes internally at her organization. That expanded to helping research and design address the needs of disabled customers.
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Feb 5, 2023
Building Accessibility into the Engineering Life Cycle
Mike Paciello, Pearson, Director of Accessibility Implementation
Mike Paciello is one of the pioneers is helping accessibility become an organized discipline for improving products and services. He began his career as a technical writer and that brought him to voluteering with the publishing of braille documents. From there, Mike formed The Paciello Group which brought usability methods into accessibility design. Mike continues his work with braille standards, the IAAP, and immersive interfaces.
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Jan 29, 2023
We Need a Lot of People Knowing Just a Little Bit
Michele A. Williams, M.A.W. Consulting, owner
Michele talks about her wide variety of experiences in accessibility. Much of her work aligned with user experience activities. This included graduate research and study, working as a researcher, and accessibility consulting. Michele has written many papers and articles and has a patent for a wearable device.
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Jan 22, 2023
The Learning with Accessibility Never Ends
Ross Mullen, CANAXESS, Director
Ross Mullen talks about his extensive experience in working with standards organizations for accessibility. He spent many years working with accessibility for government agencies. Now, Ross has his own consulting practice.
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Jan 15, 2023
360 Degrees of Accessibility
Meryl Evans, independent, Professional Speaker and Trainer
Meryl Evans is an accessibility evangelist who works as a trainer, speaker, and consultant. Her early career was with business writing and digital marketing. She then became involved with making and instructing how to make high-quality captions for video. Meryl stresses the importance of going beyond digital accessibility and considering the touchpoints with the physical world. That includes offering multiple formats for interacting with a product or service.
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Dec 12, 2022
Accessibility is a Journey
Thomas Wlodkowski, Comcast, Vice President, Accessibility
Currently, leading the accessibility program at Comcast. Tom's team supports both employee-facing or customer-facing accessibility. He shares his experience being blind from birth and finding his way into the media world through radio at WPOP in Boston. That led to work with audio descriptions, policy-making for accessible media and then a position at AOL as director of accessibility.
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Dec 4, 2022
Mindset Change Doesn’t Happen Over Night
Miriam Nabinger, independent, Accessibility Specialist
Miriam Nabinger began her work career at IBM where she first became aware of accessibility. She decided to study accessibility and make that the focus of her work. That led to her starting her own accessibility consulting practice. She talks about the current status of accessibility in Austria and the need to create more awareness.
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Nov 27, 2022
Negotiation, Leadership and Other Soft Skills Help to Become an Accessibility Professional
Rajesh Kalidindi, independent, Accessibility & User Experience Consultant
Rajesh Kalidindi enables individuals and corporations through his accessibility consultancy by providing training, comprehensive validations, VPATs, usability studies, empathy workshops, etc. He began as a multimedia designer and moved into UX. Joining Microsoft, Rajesh found a passion for inclusive experiences that lead to learning about standards and observing users' challenges in usability studies. He enjoys presenting at conferences.
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Nov 20, 2022
Everyone Who Does Accessibility Ends up at Some Point Teaching It
Sarah Horton, University of Southampton, Research Fellow
Sarah Horton is currently a research fellow at the U. of Southhampton working on a study about the teaching of accessibility. Her career began by working with instructional technology in academic circles and the led to her work in web development. She was part of the staff in the early days of The Paciello Group, contributing to audits, design reviews, and usability studies. Along the way she has written many books.
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Nov 13, 2022
Our Ability to Communicate Business Goals Is Something That We All Need to Work On
Cam Beaudoin, CIBC, Senior Manager of Accessibility
Cam Beaudoin is the Senior Manager of Accessibility for a financial institution in Canada. He started as a developer at a consulting company and was immediately charged with understanding the WCAG. That led to his current position as well as consulting, speaking engagements, and his own accessibility podcast. Cam describes a bit about regulatory compliance in Canada. He also talks about the importance of melding our work with business goals, design systems, and metrics.
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Nov 6, 2022
Creating Carrots for Accessibility and Not Just Sticks
Rachael Bradley Montgomery, Library of Congress, Digital Accessibility Specialist
Rachael talk about her work as the co-chair of the W3C's Accessibility Guidelines Working Group and her charity work in supporting accessibility for small community organizations. In her work at the Library of Congress, she help create accessible experiences for employees and patrons. She talks about her own challenge with having a chemical sensitivity disability.
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Oct 30, 2022
Regulations Would Improve the Tools That We Use and Awareness
Ken Nakata, Converge Accessibility, Principal
Ken Nakata helps law firms and corporation understand web accessibility issues. His career began in the Department of Justice working on the original Americans with Disability Act legislation and litigation. When Section 508 appeared, Ken started working in that area and spent a long time in that digital accessibility effort.
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Oct 23, 2022
With a Good Defined Workflow We Can Identify Moments for Discussing Accessibility
Marie Van Driessche, Unc, UX Designer
Marie Van Driessche helps her organization's clients understand the importance of accessibility in their web sites and apps. She shared her own experience with the many accessibility issues specific to being deaf.
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Oct 16, 2022
Technology Is a Lifestyle Companion That Should Fully Support People Who Are Blind
David Schleppenbach, Tactile Solutions, President
David Schleppenbach produces a braille computer for people who need tactile or haptic input. He gives a quick tour of the product and manufacturing facility. As an instructor at Purdue University, he began supporting blind students by creating a better learning environment. This led to participating in the tech entrepreneurship program at Purdue and the start of his accessibility company.
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Oct 9, 2022
Trying to Change Perspectives Globally About Disabilities and Accessibility
Sambhavi Chandrashekar, D2L, Accessibility Lead
Sam is the accessibility lead at an educational technology company called D2L. She began her career as an IT professional. Her post-graduate work focused on online accessibility for people who are blind or vision impaired. She taught a master’s program in Inclusive Design at OCAD University in Toronto. Two of her students started Fable - now a prominent platform to connect to people with disabilities for user research and accessibility testing.
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Oct 2, 2022
Our Idea Is to Get Everyone Knowledgeable About Accessibility
Ian Kersey, Thomson Reuters, Senior Accessibility Specialist
Ian Kersey supports the designers in customer-facing products at Thomson Reuters. That includes adding annotations to Figma prototypes and making sure developers have everything they need. Starting in an accessibility office at a community college, Ian continued his career with accessibility consulting, including working at Level Access.
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Sep 25, 2022
Gaming Accessibility Is a Very Empathy-Driven Industry
Lorelei Root, Eagle's Flight, Digital Accessibility Specialist
Lorelei Root digital accessibility focus with a focus on video games. She shares her experience of becoming disabled due to multiple sclerosis. Having to learn to speak, read and write again, she used the few accessible video games to help provide the road back. This led her to her work consulting about and evangelizing the need for accessibility in video games.
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Sep 18, 2022
How Often Do You Get a Chance to Make That Much of a Difference
Rich Schwerdtfeger, Retired, IBM, Former Chief Technology Officer for Accessibility
Rich began his work in accessibility with the early development of a screen reader for Windows. He was a key member of the world-wide team that brought technologies like ARIA into mainstream use for accessibility. Rich chaired the board of Knowbility and currently is President and Creator at A Diver's Life YouTube Channel.
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Sep 11, 2022
Getting to a Point Where Everyone Is Talking About Accessibility
Charlie Turrell, BBC, Change Manager - Accessibility Champions Network
Charlie onboards product development staff about accessibility and evangelizes it throughout the BBC. Starting as a personal assistant in many sections of the BBC, she found her way into user experience and then to guiding the internal accessibility champions network.
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Sep 4, 2022
Accessibility Needs to Be Interwoven With All the Steps in the Business Process
Sam Ogami, HP, Accessibility Program Manager
Sam shares his early personal experience having a learning disability that was helped with assistive technology. That coupled with his interest in technology sparked his lifelong work with accessibility. This included assisting university students with assistive technology and with accessible procurement of products for the institutions. Now at HP as an Accessibility Program Manager, Sam describes how HP supports accessibility across a wide variety of groups within the organization.
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Aug 28, 2022
Working to Integrate All Abilities Through Design
Betty Troy, Yahoo, Accessibility Specialist
Betty Troy started her career through engineering with an emphasis on biomedical programs. That led to specializing in rehabilitation engineering and a position designing physical assistive technology devices for the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs. She further developed her skills as an accessibility auditor at Applause. Now she is an accessibility specialist Yahoo with a focus on user studies.
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Aug 21, 2022
Disrupt the Culture of Digital Product and Technology Development to Include Accessibility
Jennison Asuncion, LinkedIn, Head, Accessibility Engineering Evangelism
Jennison talks about his lived life being blind and growing up with an interest in computer technology. He describes his challenges in getting employment early on until he found a place at Royal Bank of Canada working with UX and web development and accessibility. That led to his current position as Head of Accessibility Engineering Evangelism at LinkedIn.
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Aug 14, 2022
To Ensure That Accessibility Is Not Forgotton and Is Incorporated as Early as Possible
Mary Jo Mueller, IBM, Worldwide Accessibility Standards Program Manager
Mary Jo talks about her long career with accessibility at IBM. She talks about the challenges in supporting digital accessibility in a large, global organization.
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Jul 24, 2022
Raising Awareness in Public and Private Sectors of the UK
Richard Morton, Head of Accessibility for Government, UK Central Digital and Data Office
Richard talks about his early work with usability testing that also exposed him to the opportunities working with accessibility. He describes the community and knowledge-sharing in the UK. Now he works for the UK Digital and Data Office where the team support accessibility in government organizations.
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Jul 17, 2022
Getting Everyone to Understand That They Play a Role
Julie Romanowski, State Farm, Senior Digital Accessibility Specialist
Starting out as a web developer, Julie is now supports a wide range of accessibility activities with State Farm. She takes about the efforts to help executive leadership understand the need for a digital accessibility team. Her team provides training and individual teams work on accessibility for their own roles. That include a focus on communication documents and video media.
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Jul 10, 2022
Tapping Into the Commitment Compliance Continuum
Jeremy Katherman, USAA, Lead Accessibility Advisor
Jeremy talks about his early work with accessibility through tech support at his university. After that he has enjoyed a lengthy career at USAA where he helped build an accessibility team that supports activities throughout the organization.
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Jul 3, 2022
Bringing the Disability Community Together With Organizations to Work on Solutions
Lainey Feingold, Author, Negotiator, Lawyer, Speaker at Law Office of Lainey Feingold
Lainey describes her career as a legal advocate for people with disabilities. She talks about her process of structured negotiation to foster change without litigation.
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Jun 26, 2022
Working Accessibility Into an Organizational Culture
Christopher Land, Oracle, Senior Accessibility Technical Program Manager
Chris started out in web development and was first exposed to accessibility working for the University of Michigan. That led to accessibility consulting work at Deque and Level Access where he learned from a great team of experts and did a lot of training. Now he is Senior Accessibility Technical Program Manager at Oracle.
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Jun 19, 2022
Helping Colleagues to Grow and be Empowered
Poornima Subramanian, Princess Cruises, Sr. Digital Accessibility SME
Poornima talks about learning on the job about disabilities and getting started as a tester with assistive technologies. She moved into the role of subject matter expert and assisted developers to understand what was relevant to their role. Her work at Holland America merges digital accessibility with a user experience that takes place in the physical world of a cruise.
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Jun 12, 2022
Accessibility Spans Across All Different Industries
Glen Walker, TIAA, Principal Accessibility Architect
Glen talks about his early years as a software engineer and his personal interest in keyboard support. This lead him to accessibility work that included solving screen reader issues and compliance with Section 508 and WCAG. In his consulting work he continues to help other developers by sharing knowledge in a variety of ways.
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Jun 5, 2022
Imagining How Other People Experience the World
Joanne Lastort, Booz Allen Hamilton, Digital Accessibility Specialist
Joanne talks about her first career as a professional pastry chef. The loss of use one of her hands moved her to working in IT. Her desire to still be a keyboard user brought her into accessibility testing at the IRS and the FCC. Now she is part of the Section 508 team at Booz Allen Hamilton at the Department of Labor.
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May 29, 2022
Designers and Developers Need to Understand the Basics of Accessibility
Zack Klein, iSoftStone, Software Test Engineer II
Zack talks about his work as an accessibility tester and his unique perspective as a person who is totally blind. His love of technology helps him solve issues with the accessible content he relies on. He describes the tools he prefers including his Mac, iPhone and refreshable braille display.
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May 22, 2022
Need Leadership Support to Prioritize This Type of Work
Jen Devins, Google, Head Accessibility UX
Jen talks about her journey into user experience and design and then an opportunity to work with accessibility. She considered accessibility from a UX perspective as a champion of the user. Jen describes how research helped to develop training to create more awareness about the need for accessibility.
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May 8, 2022
Push the Conversation at Every Level of the Development Process
Andrew Hayward, Twitter, Accessibility Engineer
Andrew Hayward talks about discovering accessibility in his early years as a web developer. He describes his path that weaved through Mozilla and most recently found him helping to set up an emerging accessibility team at Twitter.
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May 1, 2022
Shifting Accessibility Into the Discovery and Ideation Phase
Nicole Bergstrom, Hilton, Senior Director of Digital Accessibility
Nicole Bergstrom talks about her first exposure to accessibility while working in the federal government. She describes her move to Hilton and how they are building accessibility into all the touchpoints of their customers for digital services.
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Apr 24, 2022
Perspectives From a Lived Life of Overcoming Physical Challenges
Ricardo Rodriguez, independent Accessibility Consultant
Ricardo Rodriguez talks about the challenges of growing up with extreme visual, mobility and cognitive challenges. He describes how a support system helped him adjust to those challenges and made it possible to become a professional accessibility practitioner.
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Apr 17, 2022
Dedicating the Time and Resources Throughout the Enterprise
Natalie Patrice Tucker, Spotify, Senior Accessibility Lead
Natalie Patrice Tucker talks about her early work as a political organizer in Washington, DC. She found her way into accessibility, first through work at the federal government, then into independent consulting. She talks about improving her skills through reading, networking, finding mentors, and conferences like CSUN. Now she is leading the effort at Spotify to make the experience delightful for all abilities.
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Apr 10, 2022
Leveraging Coding Experience to Help Other Developers
Chetan Bakhru, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Sr Accessibility Specialist
Chetan Bakhru talks about the challenges of his early education as someone who was born totally blind. The emergence of accessible technologies made it possible for him to be independent in his studies and lead him into software engineering. His continued interest in technology and helping others brought to the National Industries for the Blind and consulting at Level Access. Now he works for JP Morgan Chase coaching and guiding product teams on how to meet accessibility requirements.
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Apr 3, 2022
Inspiring Others to Embrace Accessibility Is the Promising Thing
Lucy Greco, U. California - Berkeley, Electronic accessibility expert
Lucy Greco talks about always being a technology nerd and early adopter who is totally blind. Her first computer - an Apple IIe - transformed her ability to be successful with schoolwork. She started helping others during her college years, into consulting, and now back in the academic environment. She describes her work at UC Berkeley making sure the wide variety digital assets are accessible to all.
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Mar 27, 2022
Enabling People to Unlock Their Creativity
Jack Nicolai, Adobe, Senior Product Manager, Accessibility
Jack Nicolai talks about his experience working as a web developer in eLearning and then with accessibility at Starbucks. Now at Adobe, he describes how the compnay continues to build accessibility into their tools so that customers of all abilities are able to have an equitable experience.
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Mar 20, 2022
This Field Is Never Boring
Karli Yeoman, Expedia, Senior Accessibility Engineer
Karli Yeoman talks about her foundation background as a web developer. She describes the approach at Expedia for helping teams and individuals to bring accessibility into their project work.
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Mar 13, 2022
Building Consensus and Explaining How to Improve the Customer Experience
Ted Drake, Intuit, Global Accessibility Leader
Ted talks about his early work in web development and how that led to building a program of Accessibility for engineers at Yahoo Finance. That led to his current position at Intuit where he brings accessibility into the customer experience across all their products and services.
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Mar 6, 2022
Our Mission is to Create Equal Access to All of Our Digital Assets
Pat Kogos, U. of Chicago, Director, Digital Accessibility
Pat talks about her first work with accessibility as a college student and how she rediscovered it in her work as a writer. She describes how accessibility is supported in her current position as Director of Digital Accessibility at the University of Chicago.
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Feb 20, 2022
Enthusiasm From All of the Developers and Curiosity From Everyone Else
Ashley Firth, Octopus Energy, Author of Practical Web Inclusion & Accessibility
Ashley talks about his early experience as a web developer - trying to find the resources to build accessible products. He describes his efforts to recruit team members for the effort and how those experiences contributed to the writing of his book.
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Feb 13, 2022
Advocate, Educate, and Celebrate People with Disabilities
Blake Geyen, People First of Washington, Accessibility Advocate
Blake talks about his personal challenges from cerebral palsy and how that informs his consulting and advocacy work.
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Feb 6, 2022
Technology Always Evolves Faster Than the Ethics Behind Using That Technology
Sheri Byrne-Haber, Vmware, All around evangelist
Sheri and her daughter have disabilities and that provided a launching point for advocacy for accessibility. She brought that interest into her work as a software tester and now building out the comprehensive internal and external accessibility programs at VMWARE.
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Jan 30, 2022
A Little Yellow Sticky Note With the Word Accessibility on It
Lori Samuels, NBCUniversal, Accessibility Director
Lori talks about her early exposure to the discrimination her disabled sister experienced in school. She describes her professional introduction to accessibility working with consumer multimedia software and then helping to build the accessibility program at Intuit.
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Jan 23, 2022
Lower the Barriers, Reduce Accommodations and be more Inclusive
Jon Gunderson, U. of Illinois Coordinator of Accessible IT Group
Jon relates an interesting history about the pioneering support for accessibility at the U. of Illinois. He talks about building out technologies for students and faculty at the university and also his work with the W3C ARIA working group.
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Jan 16, 2022
Passion about Mobile Devices as the Key to Greater Independence
Kisiah Timmons, Yahoo, Principal Technical Program Manager
Kisiah talks about going blind right after finishing college and the significant challenges of gaining employment at that time. She describes her work to improve support for assistive technologies in a variety mobile devices, tablets, and the associated apps.
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Jan 9, 2022
All of it Stems from Passion and Empathy with Matthew Luken
Matthew Luken, U.S. Bank, Vice President - Digital Accessibility
Matthew talks about his work teaching and building the accessibility team at US Bank. He describes his career in aviation which brought him into system engineering and then into web design and user experience.
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Jan 2, 2022
Incorporating Accessibility into UX Education from the Beginning
Reginé Gilbert, NYU Assistant Professor
Reginé talks about growing up with a family member who is deaf and taking that awareness into her UX studies and the digital accessibility community. She describes her research evaluating the accessibility associated with immersive technologies.
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Dec 26, 2021
We Believed in 'Nothing About Us Without Us' with Bryce Johnson
Bryce Johnson, Microsoft, Co-inventor of the Xbox Adaptive Controller
Bryce Johnson talks about his early work building web pages and how that lead to accessibility consulting and his current work with console gaming.
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Dec 19, 2021
It’s Not Magic, It Doesn’t Just Happen with Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Quesenbery talks about her career encompassing user research and the design of vote-casting. She describes the influences for the role-based format of her book A Web for Everyone.
* Center for Civic Design
* A Web for Everyone
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Dec 12, 2021
Coming Soon
Series Host Joe Welinske previews the guests appearing in the next several episodes.
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Dec 5, 2021
Welcome to the Series
Host Joe Welinske introduces himself and the show - Interviews with accomplished accessibility professionals to learn about their career journeys.
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