AXSChat Podcast

Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken. 

In 2005 Gareth founded the BBC’s Digital Accessibility Team. Over the course of the first 3 years, the Accessibility Team worked as an integral part of iPlayer’s core Product Team ensuring BBC iPlayer V1.0 launched as an accessible product. The team was joined the UX when the UX Design was founded in 2008.

David helps drive consistent quality of visual design and branding across the BBC’s entire online output. He joined the organisation in 2014 after a 16 year career working in the more traditional world of graphic design and branding. In 2012, D&AD included David in its list of ’50 British Creative Greats’ alongside the likes of Paul Smith, Rankin and Terry Gilliam. 

Bruno Maag is an expert typographer with over forty years of expertise in his field. He founded and led Dalton Maag Ltd, the world’s leading studio for typeface design where he worked with some of the best known brands: Amazon, Nokia, Intel, HP, AirBnB, Netflix, Facebook, DHL, FedEx, ABB, BBC, Rakuten amongst many others.

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  Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken. 

Susan Mazrui began work in Communications in 1994 at Pacific Bell in Disability Marketing. In 1998, she moved to the wireless field, where she developed corporate strategies for state and federal legal and regulatory compliance. Under her leadership, Cingular Wireless became the first national carrier to offer “talking” cellphones and establish a task force on accessibility. Mazrui worked closely with TDI and the Hearing Loss Association of America and other industry members to address hearing aid and TTY compatibility with digital wireless handsets. At AT&T, Mazrui was instrumental in establishing the Corporate Accessibility Technology Office which has assessed over 50,000 AT&T products and services. She was the architect of AT&T’s Accessibility and Inclusion Program with cross company teams addressing the needs of deaf and disabled employees and their family members. AT&T has consistently received scores of 100 in the Disability Equality Index and the National Organization on Disability’s Leading Disability Employer. Mazrui was named a Corporate Fellow by the Summit on Leading Diversity and inducted into the Spinal Cord Injury Hall of Fame in 2008. In 2013, she was recognized as Employee of the Year by Careers and the disABLED, and in 2014 by AT&T as a Champion of Diversity. In 2016, she received the Digital Accessibility Leadership Award from G3ict and the Stephen Garff Marriott Award for mentoring from American Foundation for the Blind. In 2019, Mazrui was honored by The Community of Connection and TDI for her work in the disability field. She has served several terms on Federal Advisory Committees, is on the boards of the U.S. International Council on Disability, the World Institute on Disability and G3ict. Mazrui lives with her husband, Jamal, and daughter, Nicole, in Seattle. When not working, Mazrui enjoys Dragon Boating, visiting Disneyland and performing stand-up comedy. 

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

Sophie is an award-winning disability advocate & social entrepreneur who was paralysed in a car crash when she was 18 years old. Determined to channel her adversity into opportunity, she sees her challenges as a unique chance for creativity.

She embodies her values; finding creative opportunity in diversity and adversity, and daring to be different, she proves the value and power of true disability representation in all areas of her work and life.

Sophie can be found presenting most Live Para Sport events on Channel 4 as well as hard-hitting current affairs programs such as Dispatches and Unreported World. She is also a board member for Ofcom, the UK government- approved regulatory broadcast authority.

In spring 2021 Sophie’s debut book will be published with Little Brown. The book is part-memoir, part travel log and part coping strategy on how to adapt too life’s challenges, find resilience and create positive change.

She established Sophie Morgan Creative Ltd and is leading the charge to better representation for disabled people in retail, travel and design consulting for large retailers such as Target Corporation and John Lewis & Waitrose.

Global Brand ambassador for Toyota GB and CanAm, Sophie is a passionate adventurer who believes that the right vehicle can transform your world. Sophie is also a judge for Toyota’s Mobility Prize to be announced in 2020. She is also Global Ambassador for Womens Rights and Inclusive Education for Leonard Cheshire, and on the Special Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch.

Sophie doesn’t just talk – she enables and creates change. In everything she does, from hosting Global Disability Summits to working along side global mega brands such as Air BnB or GoPro to open their minds to the ‘disability opportunity’ to traveling the world to document abuses in human rights, she lives, breathes and creates the change she wants to see in the world.

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

6 years ago, at age 35, Wendy became the Queen of Social Distancing when she became a disabled chronic Lyme disease fighter. Feeling exhaustion, pain and like daily flu with autoimmunity issues that makes Wendy catch what sicknesses others have when in groups — meant she couldn’t travel on a plane, go to work meetings or even go with her boys to their school events.  

In 2015 from her recliner, she invented the YES to SEX app, a safe way to learn about sexual consent. It was then that she realized if domestic violence event began around a sexual encounter — no one could just sit-up or run to the bathroom with their phone and have a conversation asking for Emergency help. She also learned that if a person called and hung-up, the Emergency operator would have no idea where they were calling from.  

To fix these Emergency Caller issues, in 2016 Wendy invented SafeTracer’s distress transmission: a universal update to the standard “Emergency SOS” caller tools on every smartphone and wearable. This is a completely new user interface designed to stop SOS butt-dials, while it shares every caller’s SOS location and helps protect every victim in an emergency situation, especially people that can’t talk, hear or move when danger strikes.  

In 2019, she took on the DisabledCEO title to show the world that even though she is disabled, she can accomplish amazing things — this was inspired by the Valuable 500’s CEOs talking about their invisible disabilities.  

Educating the world’s top executives about the problems with Emergency Calls being non-accessible and non-usable to so many millions of victims through social media, while marketing my SafeTracer and disability-focused FastFactsSOS products exclusively online to Apple and Google was a big challenge until COVID-19 hit. Now everyone is working from home, they don’t expect me to fly out to conferences to be able to meet in person — with phone calls and Zoom meetings being commonplace, this works so much better for me!  

As a Founder’s Circle member of the Global Alliance Disaster Recovery Acceleration, she ready to help make everyone in this world feel safer and be better protected on every Emergency Call by 2021.  

Wendy knows she can make this universal Emergency Caller update happen, and asks for the continued support and backing of the disability community, as convincing big tech’s Public Safety and Accessibility departments about these over-looked lifesaving Emergency Caller needs is not easy, but it is definitely possible — and she patented solutions all ready to help save people from Emergency danger worldwide.

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axschat https://bsky.app/profile/axschat.bsky.social

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

Lorena Julio is a human rights advocate with a Master in Compared Public Policies and a degree in Social Communication. She worked for more than 14 years in the promotion and protection of human rights in Latin America and the United States.

She participated in multiple high-level events as a speaker on human rights, youth and disabilities in the United States, India, Israel, and many countries in Latin America. 


Lorena worked for the Government of Argentina as Head of Press in the Human Rights Secretariat of the Province of Buenos Aires as well as in the Coordination Team of the Vulnerable Groups Assistance Program. In the international arena, Lorena worked in the Organization of American States (OAS) as Program Officer of the Young Forum of the Americas in the framework of the Presidents Summit. After that, she took functions as Communications Officer at the Young Americas Business Trust, leading the youth networks from the Forum. Lorena completed courses on entrepreneurship in Israel and Silicon Valley and a leadership course for social change-makers at Kanthari in India. In 2015 she founded Fundación Comparlante in Argentina to shorten the gap to access education and information for visually impaired persons. Currently, Comparlante promotes equity through universal accessibility.
She was awarded an “Honorable Mention” under Ideas For Action Program by the World Bank and Wharton Business School in 2015 and as “Iconic Woman Creating a better world for all” by Women Economic Forum in 2018.
Fundacion Comparlante was awarded and funded by the Government of Buenos Aires Province and IncluYes by the National Government of Chile in 2018.
In 2020 she joined Jai Jagat Global Peace Campaign. A wake-up call to respond to the current deepening economic, social and environmental crisis.

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axschat https://bsky.app/profile/axschat.bsky.social

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

Disabled/Wild/Hot AF Exploratory Storyteller and Adventurer. Creating relationships, stories, and magic. A Continual WIP.

Sulaiman is an independent consultant, speaker, and writer on Divergent Leadership, Creativity, and Equitability (characterised by equity or fairness; just and right; fair; reasonable: equitable treatment of all citizens). The igniter of hearts creatively, a disabled wheelchair user exploratory storyteller and adventurer, he loves to create relationships, stories, and magic. Also, Sulaiman is the award-winning Founder and Chief Purpose Officer of ThisAbility Limited, which is a disability-led equity business.

Deeply invested in working towards disability justice and disability solidarity, he works tirelessly to destabilise the accepted narratives of creativity and disability, changing the culture to make equity the default via disabled creativity. And Sulaiman is an active intersectional ally-in-progress and a continual work-in-progress too, relentlessly and unapologetically.

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axschat https://bsky.app/profile/axschat.bsky.social

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

This Week’s chat is about authoring tools. When we produce content for the web we use authoring tools to publish. How these tools can help produce accessible content can have a profound impact on the overall inclusiveness of the internet.

Mike Gifford is the founder of OpenConcept Consulting Inc, which he started in 1999. Since then, he has been particularly active in developing and extending open source content management systems to allow people to get closer to their content. Before starting OpenConcept, Mike had worked for a number of national NGOs including Oxfam Canada and Friends of the Earth.

Susanna Laurin is Chief Research and Innovation Officer at Funka. Susanna has more than 20 years experience in working with disability-related issues at senior management level. She is a frequent international lecturer and debater and she serves on a number of program committees for conferences in the field of accessibility. In Sweden and Norway, she is a technical expert in several standardisation committees.

Timo Stollenwerk is a Plone core developer and founder of kitconcept, a Plone solution provider from Bonn, Germany. He is a member of the Plone Framework Team, the Plone Release Team, the Plone REST API team and he is leading the Plone Testing & Continuous Integration team.

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axschat https://bsky.app/profile/axschat.bsky.social

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

Thea Kurdi has nineteen years of experience consulting and teaching accessible architecture with a specialization in universal design. In her role as an accessibility consultant at one of Canada’s oldest and leading specialty firms, Thea has assisted design teams to realize the benefits of universal design and achieve higher levels of accessibility on projects within the education, health care, justice, institutional, commercial, residential, and entertainment sectors. Thea has completed drawing review for over 60 new and renovated buildings, completed building audits for over 150 buildings, and has been a lead or contributing author for over a dozen accessibility standards and manuals.

Thea has participated in the Ontario governments Built Environment forum reviewing accessibility in the Ontario Building Code (OBC) and Accessibility for Ontarian’s with Disabilities Act (AODA), the kick-off forum for the 3rd legislative review of the AODA with his Honour David Onley, federally at consultations on accessibility in architecture for the Canadians with Disabilities Act, and most recently for the new AODA Education standard development committee for both K to 12 and post-secondary accessible building design. She is also a board member with the Universal Design Network of Canada and ArtsBuild Ontario.

Thea Kurdi is a dynamic speaker known for her enthusiasm for teaching. Her most popular course is an Accessibility Bootcamp workshop which empowers participants by teaching them to see the barriers that surround us. She has presented keynote addresses and lectures at local and international events and post secondary design programs. From the human rights code to evidence-based design and increased marketability, Kurdi shares her passion for how accessibility is fundamental to successful architecture.

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axschat https://bsky.app/profile/axschat.bsky.social

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

Vernon Sankey is a Leadership Coach and Author.

He has been in business for many years during which time he has been the CEO, Chairman and Board member of major international corporations including Reckitt & Colman plc (now Reckitt Benckiser), Pearson plc, Zurich AG, Taylor Woodrow (now Taylor Wimpey), Cofra AG, Firmenich SA, Gala Group plc and Atos SE, where he is a Board member, Chairman of the Audit Committee and Board Member of the Corporate Social Responsibility Committee.

He was also a Governor of Harrow School for fifteen years, a Board member of the UK’s Food Standards Agency, and on the advisory boards of several international companies such as Korn/Ferry International. He is also a former Chairman and co-founder of The Really Effective Development Company (RedCo Ltd) a coaching and mentoring company.

Throughout his career, and enhanced by his years working with RedCo clients, Vernon has applied his cognitive psychology, NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and people skills to mentoring senior executives, celebrities and high profile men and women from many different walks of life and at different stages of their career. As a result of a coaching engagement with a major international company, Vernon was invited to join its Board of Directors.

Vernon has also done and continues to do considerable pro-bono coaching of adults, parents and children. He has lectured extensively on leadership, personal change and development and corporate and individual transformation in the UK and the US, at international conferences around the world and in schools and universities.

In 2018 Vernon published a book called The Stairway to Happiness which includes many of the techniques and lessons of Cognitive Psychology and, in 2019, he co-authored, with Ms Katey Lockwood, a second book called: The Way; Finding Peace in Turbulent Times.

Katey Lockwood is a Personal Transformation Coach and Teacher.

Katey’s personal development skills together with her NLP practitioner background and her knowledge of cognitive psychology and philosophy creates a unique platform for supporting businesses and helping individuals.

Her personal approach is based on two, life-transforming principles, ‘Know Thyself’ and ‘Be the change in the world you want to be.’ Guiding her clients to work introspectively and to discover their true purpose, she helps them find a more effective, happier and successful way of conducting their life and career.

Katey’s clients include business executives, well-known celebrities, sportspeople and people wanting to make changes in their life. She also does voluntary coaching, helping members of the public and friends.

Katey has also been a Trustee of the Katie Piper Foundation, whose vision is to have a world where scars do not limit a person’s function, social inclusion or sense of wellbeing. She worked extensively with Katie herself.

She studied Philosophy at The London School of Economics and has attended numerous courses. Her previous career was in media, during which she has been a model, an actress and on the Harry Potter special effects team.  

Katey has been working with Vernon Sankey for several years, has taken part with him in international workshops on stress management, life skills and personal transformation and, in 2019, co-authored a book with him called The Way: Finding Peace in Turbulent Times.

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axschat https://bsky.app/profile/axschat.bsky.social

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

David is a Costa Rican Political Scientist with his MBA and masters in diplomacy.  He is also a leader, advocate, social media specialist, and communication strategist.  David has experience in public policy implementation, development, and evaluation as well as consultancy services for NGOs like UNESCO and others linked to the European Union. David´s professional background is mainly in work with minorities, ensuring they have access to their rights. 

His primary focus is to expand the vision of Ruh Global IMPACT across the globe and impact the lives of People with Disabilities both in developed and developing countries. He has spoken in Latin America and the US on disability inclusion and accessibility.  He has been asked to be a Visiting Professor on these topics and Future of Work for The University Del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia. David recently was a keynote speaker at the Future of Work and the Employment of Persons with Disabilities is one of the first conferences on this topic in Colombia.

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axschat https://bsky.app/profile/axschat.bsky.social

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