AXSChat Podcast

Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

E.A. Draffan trained as a Speech and Language Therapist working with those who have complex communication needs and disabilities, before specialising in the use of assistive technologies and issues of digital accessibility. Recent research at the University of Southampton includes ‘AI and Inclusion’ as part of the Alan Turing Institute’s work. This work includes AAC symbol set mapping which links to the work of the W3C WAI WCAG cognitive task force on web-based accessibility for those with cognitive impairments. 

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

Marcie Roth is Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer for the World Institute on Disability (WID), WID is a highly regarded global public policy centre WID works to advance the rights and opportunities of over 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide by disrupting exclusion and accelerating radical social justice.

Marcie has served in senior and executive leadership roles for national and global disability advocacy and public policy organizations since 1995, establishing and leading coalitions committed to operationalizing disability inclusion as an intersectional imperative for global social justice. Marcie’s focus on improving emergency preparedness and disaster outcomes for people with disabilities and building accessible disaster-resilient communities began in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks while advising the White House on the rights and urgent needs of people with disabilities living in the area around ground zero.

Appointed by President Obama to the U.S Department of Homeland Security Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from 2009 to 2017, Marcie established and directed the Office of Disability Integration and Coordination (ODIC). Under her leadership, ODIC led national transformation towards integrating the access and functional needs of the whole community throughout emergency preparedness and disaster response, recovery and mitigation. Ms Roth represented the U.S. government internationally as an expert on whole community inclusive global disaster risk reduction from 2012- 2017, serving as a leader throughout the development and implementation of the United Nations’ Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030.

In 2017, Ms Roth established the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, the only U.S. disability-led organization (DPO) focused exclusively on disability inclusion before, during, and after public health emergencies and disasters.

Marcie is a Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Senior Executive Fellow with a BS in Public Safety Administration from the University of Maryland Global Campus. She maintains offices at WID’s global headquarters located on the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley, CA, and in Washington, DC.

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

Rajen Nair about himself:

I am semi deaf freelance photojournalist cum writer from Mumbai. I had contributed to Guardian UK and many Indian newspapers. Past 11 years teaching Photography to deaf, disabled and from 7 yrs to cancer kids. Imparted photography skills to more than several thousand students. Also conducted photo workshop over many places in India. Took photo class to underprivileged children of Dharavi. Won award from corporate BPCL. Was selected as one of the Mumbai heroes by radio city. Have several citations given by NGOs and institutions. Started Instagram account for deaf and cancer kids during the lockdown. 

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

James Partridge is the Director of Face Equality International, a Guernsey charity which he launched in November 2018. Face Equality International is an alliance of NGOs and charities around the world — already 35-strong — which work together to campaign for ‘face equality’ and challenge disfigurement prejudice and discrimination. The alliance’s website is here: www.faceequalityinternational.org.

Previously, he was the Founder (in 1992) and was until September 2017, Chief Executive of Changing Faces, the leading UK charity supporting and representing people with disfigurements, www.changingfaces.org.uk. He launched the charity after the positive response to his book (passing on lessons from his experience of severe facial burns at the age of 18), published by Penguin (1990), Changing Faces: The Challenge of Facial Disfigurement (available from JP).

He writes and presents widely on disfigurement, disability, inclusion and social entrepreneurship in the UK and internationally — and achieved an international profile by becoming the first newsreader with a facial disfigurement on any TV news channel, Channel 5, in November 2009 (https://vimeo.com/23585559).

Before setting up Changing Faces in 1992, James worked as a health economist in public health in the NHS in the 1970s, and in the 1980s, he established a dairy farming business in St Andrew’s in Guernsey and taught A level economics at The Ladies’ College.

He has won a number of national awards such as in 2010, the Third Sector award for Most Admired Charity Chief Executive and the Beacon Prize for Leadership. He has also served on public bodies such as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence and the Dept of Health’s Independent Reconfiguration Panel. He has Honorary Doctorates from both Universities in Bristol, his birthplace, and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

He is also a founding Director of Dining with a Difference, a disability consultancy company (www.diningwithadifference.com), and a long-time Associate of Business Disability Forum and Business Disability International.

Married with three grown-up children and six grandchildren, James lives in Guernsey.

In June 2020, his new book ‘FACE IT: Facial Disfigurement and My Fight for Face Equality’ will be published. TO ORDER with a signature: https://jamespartridge.wordpress.com/ordering-face-it-directly/

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

Zara is proud to be Accessibility Director at HeX Productions and Influencer of Accessibility Nottingham. Living the dream and trying to make the world a better place.

Nurturing businesses in best practice use of the internet through strong foundations of accessible web development.

I aspire to be a top business change leader and change the perception of web accessibility in our industry, whilst supporting, teaching and leading others on their journey.

Passionate about digital creative, web design, coding and programming. I believe, in order to add value in the future digital world, you need to have accessibility awareness with knowledge in design, coding and assistive technology.

With over a decade of business and process-driven administration experience throughout a range of sectors including Construction, Finance, Print and Digital Marketing and now Digital Accessibility, I like adding structure, form and process to proceedings.

I have common sense – which you cannot teach.

I’m interested in the creative arts, painting, photography. Play (now quite badly) the saxophone and drums and have a rather large motorbike.

I am fascinated by Big Data.

If I could flick a switch and change one thing overnight, it would be to make all software (productivity suites, websites, apps, intranets, extranets) accessible and inclusive.
Anyone know a big blue genie?

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken

Sarah Simcoe is an experienced business leader who held several positions within the private sector before embarking on her own business, DMS (Wirral) Ltd, early in 2018; and Sarah may be familiar to you for having previously worked at Fujitsu where she led the conversation around disability networks and accessibility.  Passionate about responsible inclusive practice that is inherently accessible and collaborative, Sarah now supports organisations such as Purple, enei, Druthers Search and PurpleSpace in providing coaching, consultancy, organisational assessment, access auditing and people development to their members and clients.

Given Sarah’s belief in collaboration being essential to inclusion and accessibility, Sarah created and founded EMBED last year.  This consortium brings together inclusion focused consultants and organisations from across sectors and industries to offer accessible, affordable and inclusion focused services – with clients now leveraging this cross-sector expertise and through partnerships with DCN, Druthers and Cleen already in flight, EMBED is encouraging collaboration as a core value and essential ingredient in helping organisations learn lessons from other sectors as they consider and evolve their own inclusion and accessibility.

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken

Chris Grant is AbilityNet’s Area Coordinator in Scotland, or “King of Scotland” as he is affectionately known by the central team. Since starting in May 2018, he has completely transformed their free services in Scotland, generating huge growth in the number of volunteers and the hours of free tech support provided to older people and people with disabilities.  He has recruited and now manages a team of 25 volunteers who provide telephone, remote and in-person IT support to older people and people with disabilities, with another 25 volunteers in the pipeline.  They fix IT problems, give impartial advice and adapt equipment to suit the clients’ individual needs.  Alongside this, Chris motivates and supports his volunteer team offering regular meetups, training and one-to-one support & coaching.  In Scotland, he is a networking champion, contacting like-minded organisations and charities to spread the word of their free services and increase their impact.  There is not a day goes by that he is not making contact with a volunteer, potential volunteer, client, local organisation, or anyone else he can get his hands on (!) to grow the AbilityNet service in Scotland.  All this is despite long term health issues that mean he is in constant pain and discomfort.  He’s energetic, reliable and truly committed.

Before Chris joined there were just 6 volunteers in the whole of Scotland. Within just one year, Chris had recruited 25 new volunteers and there are now 50 volunteers in his team..  He has interviewed each of these potential candidates, and communicated with them throughout the process so they feel part of a team before they are even actively making visits. He has also set up eight training sessions in Scotland, inviting experts from other organisations or running it himself, covering topics such as Facebook security, Dolphin, Apple software, etc. He instigated and organised their first-ever Scottish volunteer event. Collaborating with RNIB, he set up the day and organised for volunteers and local charities to attend and take part.

He has helped numerous clients. He personally calls every new client to introduce himself, reassure them, and have a good long chat about their IT issues and anything else that’s on their mind. Chris’ persistence, endless energy and commitment is special.

“In recent years, the Scottish volunteer community had become quite dormant, with very few calls coming through. Chris breathed new life into the area, putting an immense amount of energy into working with the existing volunteer group, finding new volunteers and looking at ways to publicise the service so that we find clients who need our services. He’s pretty much the non-stop human dynamo in this regard! He also carefully finds the right balance between providing a professional service to our clients on the one hand and awareness that the people providing the service are volunteers with many other demands on their time on the other. This is a real skill – to get the best response possible from a volunteer workforce, while keeping everyone feeling that they are making a valuable contribution.” Simon Flower, AbilityNet volunteer

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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken

Cordelia McGee-Tubb (@cordeliadillon) is a web accessibility specialist and cartoonist. She is a Principal Accessibility Engineer at Salesforce and previously led Dropbox’s accessibility program. She’s passionate about making technology accessible and enjoyable to all, regardless of age, ability, or circumstances. Cordelia currently co-hosts 13 Letters, the accessibility podcast by Be My Eyes, where she has the extreme pleasure of interviewing accessibility professionals about the work they do and why they do it.

An advocate for digital literacy, Cordelia is a technology tutor for Community Tech Network, where she helps senior citizens build up their iPad and internet skills. She’s also just a few classes away from completing her masters in gerontology and is excited to apply what she’s learned towards building better tech-enabled services for older adults.

When not working on web accessibility or doing her homework, Cordelia can often be found drawing comics. She holds an MFA in Comics from California College of the Arts and loves exploring the intersection of accessibility and comics. Her interest areas include comics for blind & low vision readers and using comics as a tool for teaching about accessibility.

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#AXSChat – 21st of April – Kate M. Sonka & Larry Goldberg
Hosted by Antonio Vieira Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

Kate M. Sonka is the Executive Director of Teach Access and the Assistant Director of Academic Technology at the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. She holds a M.Ed. in Bilingual/Bicultural Education and a TESOL certificate from DePaul University. She improves teaching and learning with technology through course design and support, experiential learning, and training and mentorship for faculty members and students. Her scholarly areas of interest include disability, accessibility, second language acquisition, the role of language in identity development, and the intersection of accessibility and experiential learning.

Kate’s teaching experience includes a first-year writing course for non-native English speakers; a study abroad about language acquisition and global English in China; a study away to Los Angeles where students explore and meet leaders in the film and creative industries; and a study away to Silicon Valley where students engage and build relationships with tech companies around accessibility.

Larry is Senior Director and Head of Accessibility at Verizon Media. In this role, he directs a dedicated team of accessibility professionals and coordinates with thousands of designers and developers to ensure that Verizon Media’s many products, services and media offerings are as accessible as possible to people with disabilities. Verizon Media brands (Yahoo Finance, News, Sports and Lifestyle; Huffington Post, Engadget, Tech Crunch, Makers, AOL, and many others) all have mobile apps and websites that are designed and developed to conform to the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The brands also produce dozens of daily original programs – virtually all of which are captioned – and provide captions for thousands of partner videos, including content from Bloomberg, Fox Business News, AP, Reuters, MLB, NFL, Conde Nast, the Discovery networks and more. The Verizon Media Accessibility Team also supports major industry-wide efforts to raise the level of accessible technology awareness and understanding, as well as depiction of people with disabilities in the media, through projects such as The Disability Collection, Teach Access and XR Access.

Larry joined Verizon Media in June of 2014, having previously worked at WGBH Boston, where he founded and directed its National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM). NCAM focused on research and development, public policy initiatives and strategic partnerships for global impact on inclusive media and technology. Larry was directly involved in such ground-breaking legislation as the TV Decoder Circuitry Act, The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. He led efforts to create standards adopted by media organizations and the FCC to implement legislated mandates for accessible technology.

Before starting NCAM, Larry directed WGBH’s Media Access Group and its Caption Center and Descriptive Video Service. He holds a patent for “Rear Window,” a theatrical movie captioning system, and developed the market for captioning in movie theaters.

Larry majored in Cinema Studies at SUNY Binghamton and received a BA with honors in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Southern California.

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Nabil has held several positions and worked with numerous INGOs, civil society networks, UN agencies, governments, private sector, and grassroots organizations to successfully create positive change at global, regional, and national levels.

• 20+ years of experience in disability inclusion strategies. Providing counselling, coaching, researches, evaluation & monitoring and ICT accessibility solutions and assistive technology services.
• Develop policies in the field of development, rehabilitation, integration, and empowerment of persons with disabilities.
• Support inclusive communities, a community of disability services in inclusion, social life skills, accessible services in the fields of education, employment, health, and others.
• Author of 6 books about disability inclusion and ICT accessibility

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