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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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