Panel Discussion: Let’s talk accessibility

Brian DeConinck is a Chicago-based front-end designer and developer with NC State University’s Office of Information Technology. He is committed to inclusive design principles and empathy for the users he supports.

Rachel Cherry is the Director of WPCampus, as well as a freelance software engineer and consultant with with over ten years experience in back and front-end web development and digital design. Her main areas of focus include accessibility, higher education, and WordPress.

Gian Wild is the CEO of AccessibilityOz, with offices in the United States, Europe and Australia. She has worked in accessibility industry since 1998, when she worked on the very first Australian accessible web site. Her major achievements include: six years’ active membership in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group contributing to WCAG2; her speech on the importance of web accessibility at the United Nations Conference of State Parties in 2015; and the release of the ICT Mobile Site Accessibility Testing Guidelines as the Mobile Sub-Committee Chair of the ICT Accessibility Testing Symposium. Gian speaks at conferences in Australia, US, Canada, South America and Europe.

As a user experience designer and as a speaker, Robin Smail’s mission is to connect people. Whether advocating for accessibility and universal design, helping to shape conferences and communities of practice, or designing applications, Robin’s goal is to collaborate, motivate, and transform. Recent work includes designing an open educational question bank application for instructors at Big 10 universities, Penn State’s Digital Badging Platform, an open education resource bank that offers students resources based on individual learning preferences, and the administrative usability of an intelligent collaboration research application. Robin holds a B.S. in Information Sciences & Technology from Penn State, and is an award-winning speaker and passionate user advocate. She can be found online everywhere misbehaving as Robin2go.