Experience

I take accessibility problems that are too new or too poorly understood to have existing guidance, and develop ways to address them. Key accomplishments are contribution to the structure and content of WCAG 2.0, helping mature WAI-ARIA 1.0 and its place in HTML, supporting the W3C's Accessibility User Requirements series, and now am leading work on the Digital Accessibility Framework.

Accessibility Consultant — Aihal Accessibility, 2023 to present

As an expert accessibility consultant, I wrote a set of articles that provide detailed explanation of the European Accessibility Act and its supporting standard for information and communications technology, EN 301 549. I also co-chair the Metaverse Standards Forum accessibility working group, bringing my consensus-building and technical-facilitation skills to an organization focused on virtual and augmented reality. The group has published an initial draft of accessibility considerations for all known aspects of XR and plans eventually to submit XR-related accessibility guidance suggestions to standards bodies. Beyond this work, I've been studying American Sign Language so I can better engage with the Deaf community, which I felt was under-represented in some of my work. To scaffold visual memory of signs I learned Sutton SignWriting, a writing system for sign languages with libraries for computer processing, which I think can be an important accessibility support mechanism.

Digital Accessibility Framework Lead — Accessible Community, 2023 to present

Throughout my career I felt the industry needed to find a way to identify and accommodate a wider range of disabilities than supported by current guidelines and practice. In the Digital Accessibility Framework project I work with accessibility experts to document a comprehensive set of human needs and content affordances, and to build a data model to help find accessibility requirements that haven't yet been formally documented anywhere. The Digital Accessibility Framework will help extrapolate from existing accessibility knowledge to anticipate barriers likely to arise in emerging technologies. This will help us to identify new accessibility practices and guidance earlier in technology lifecycles.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) / MIT — 2006 to 2023

I spent seventeen years as W3C's interface for three industry groups working on web accessibility: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Accessible Rich Internet Applications, and Accessible Platform Architectures.

WCAG 2.0 and the Understanding / Techniques model. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 is one of the key international standards for web accessibility. I was part of the leadership team working to advance accessibility meaningfully within the technological capabilities of the time. I helped conceive and build out the Understanding and Techniques documents — the layer that translates WCAG's abstract, technology-neutral guidelines into concrete, testable, implementable guidance for developers, managers, and policy makers. That structure is still how WCAG's supporting materials are organized today, and versions of the same pattern show up in accessibility guidance well beyond W3C's own work. I also implemented the structure of and provided editorial support for WCAG2ICT, a document that explains how the web-focused WCAG 2 guidance can be applied to other types of information and communications technology now itself referenced by international standards.

WAI-ARIA — bringing coherence to a fast-moving specification. Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) is a way to provide information about HTML content to accessibility APIs. I joined its development when early drafts had conflicting requirements. I implemented a quality assurance tool for the specification itself, in order to surface inconsistencies for the group to address. Then I implemented a source control and build process to ensure that each topic's source of truth lived in exactly one place, which helped produce an accurate specification. I also wrote much of the background explanatory content aimed at readers without deep technical accessibility knowledge.

Accessible Platform Architectures — translation as infrastructure. The role of the APA working group is to review new and emerging web technologies for accessibility considerations and working with the teams building them to address gaps. One recurring issues was that non-accessibility stakeholders didn't always understand why a given accessibility requirement mattered enough to prioritize. I helped instigate the Accessibility User Requirements document series specifically to solve this: each one lays out, for a given technology area, the concrete human needs at stake, in language legible to engineers with no prior accessibility background. I also did my own smaller, targeted analyses whenever I saw a technical discussion getting stuck, aimed specifically at clarifying a path to consensus rather than restating positions people already held.

Distributed leadership. Across all three groups, most of my influence had to work through guidance and process rather than formal authority. I supported technical experts through the mechanical and human process of managing groups. Over time I supported growth of participants who showed promise, giving them steadily increasing responsibility and visibility and eventually to formal leadership roles. As I became more senior in the organization I had a strong role in onboarding and mentoring new colleagues. The nature of the organization required us all to accommodate differences in language, time zone, culture, experience, etc. I tried to listen authentically and provided progressive challenges with support to help colleagues learn to work in our global environment. This meaningfully influenced career development of over a dozen people, most of whom are still active in accessibility leadership roles today.

Bobby - CAST and Watchfire — 1998 to 2006

CAST is a nonprofit focused on using technology to support students with learning disabilities, and connected to that identified issues with web accessibility barriers. They created Bobby as the first public web accessibility checker, and I became manager in 1998, when Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 was under development. Demand for the service grew, and in 2002 CAST sold Bobby to Watchfire, a web quality assurance company. I continued to develop the product at Watchfire, incorporating its features into a more commercially oriented product line, and participating in sales conversations and customer deployments. Watchfire and its product line were later purchased by IBM.

University of Denver - Disabled Persons' Resources — 1993 to 1997

My accessibility work began at the University of Denver Disabled Persons' Resources, where I was responsible for supporting accommodations for students with disabilities. To ensure the university had sufficient accessible spaces, and to meet the requirements of the recently released Americans with Disabilities Act, we conducted a comprehensive survey of physical accessibility issues on campus. I developed a database to help prioritize issues for remediation, and we worked with the facilities department to address present and future campus accessibility needs. To ensure students could find our services, I posted content on the university web site, a brand new technology at the time. Of course digital information about our department needed to be accessible as well, which is what sparked my career in web accessibility.