Digital Accessibility

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.  

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. 

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. 

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. 

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

Series Host Joe Welinske previews the guests appearing in the next several episodes.

Host Joe Welinske introduces himself and the show - Interviews with accomplished accessibility professionals to learn about their career journeys.