Experts
Jim Allan
James Craig
Rhodes Gibson
Kelsey
Ruger
Sharron Rush
Glenda Sims
John Slatin
Jim Thatcher
Jim Allan
James Allan is the webmaster at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. He has worked in the field of assistive technology and accessible information access for over 20 years. James Allan received a Distinguished Service Award from the City of Austin's Mayor's Committee on People with Disabilities for his work on the advisory board of AIR Austin, an annual event in which teams of professional Web developers and nonprofit organizations compete to produce Web sites that are accessible to people with disabilities.
James Allan is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium's-Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C - WAI). James Allan is an active participant in the User Agent working group. Previously, he served on the Authoring Tools and Education and Outreach working groups. James Allan is the chair of the Research and Development working group of AFB's Textbooks and Instructional Materials Solutions Forum, a national effort directed at getting usable textbooks into students' hands in a timely manner. James Allan chaired the Texas Education Agency Computer Network Study Project - Accessibility Subcommittee, which produced a comprehensive guide for accessible multimedia and Internet textbook design and delivery. As webmaster, James Allan is committed to the design of accessible web pages and the development of accessible multimedia textbooks, learning materials, and assessments for use by all students.
Kelsey Ruger
Kelsey Ruger is an accomplished software architect, designer and information architect who has lent his expertise to high profile Internet projects at Prodigy and SBC as well as a number of start-ups. Kelsey is passionate about creating a world where technology is transparent, simple and universally accessible to all people regardless of ability. He spends a great deal of his free time teaching and writing about usability, accessibility and standards-based Web design. You can often find Kelsey blogging on his site.
Glenda Sims
Glenda Sims is a Senior Systems Analyst at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. As a member of UT Team Web, Glenda helps support the central web site for the University. She serves as an Accessibility and Web Standards Evangelist and the self-appointed Web Accessibility Goddess at UT. Her specialties include usability/accessibility testing, handheld wireless devices, technical training and project management.
Glenda is an advisor and co-founder of the AIR-University (Accessibility Internet Rally) and AccessU. She serves as an accessibility consultant, judge and trainer for Knowbility, whose mission is "to support the independence of children and adults with disabilities by promoting the use and improving the availability of accessibility information technology - barrier free IT". Glenda is all about empowering people with information and functionality on the web.
James Craig
A former skate punk and radio deejay, James Craig is a senior design technologist for frog design. He has spoken at SXSW Interactive and is a sometimes contributor to the Knowbility Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR), the W3C, and AIGA. Currently the web communications director for the Austin chapter of AIGA, he also contributes to several of the AIGA national initiatives. James often imagines updating his personal website, cookiecrook.com.
Rhodes Gibson
Rhodes believes that good design and accessibility can co-exist. After several years in the web design and development field, Rhodes became involved in accessibility through the Knowbility sponsored event, AIR Austin. From that point on, the goal was to implement accessibility in as many projects as possible and spread the word that accessibility was an important component. Rhodes has been a participant in a number of AIR Austin events, AIR Interactive and has served as an Advisory Board member and trainer.
Sharron Rush
Sharron is the co-founder and Executive Director of Knowbility, a nonprofit organization that grew from the first Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR) in Austin in 1998. Sharron leads the effort to replicate the AIR program in cities throughout the country. Because of AIR, professional Web developers from hundreds of state agencies and technology companies have learned about the benefits, tools, and techniques of accessible Web design. In addition to improving the accessibility of their own work, AIR volunteers use their accessible Web design skills to create sites for more than 500 nonprofit groups, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Sharron believes strongly in the power of technology to support the independence of people with disabilities - and in the value of dynamic, ongoing collaboration to strengthen communities. She has led Knowbility to national recognition, including appearances on the Oprah Winfrey TV show, "Best Practice" feature at the National Labor Skills Summit, and recognition for excellence and innovation by the Peter F. Drucker Foundation. In April of 2001, she was named one of the Top 25 Women of the Web and in March 2002, she received the Dewey Winburne Award for Community Service through Interactive Media. She is a ComputerWorld Laureate, an advisor to the SXSW Interactive Media Conference, was named Community Tech Champion by the Congressional Black Caucas and co-wrote the book, "Maximum Accessibility", which is recognized as one of the definitive accessibility resources. Sharron annually assembles the best minds in web accessibility to deliver training conferences that teach and define interactive accessibility from the basics to the bleeding edge.
John Slatin
John Slatin is an internationally recognized expert on Web accessibility for people with disabilities. He is the founding director of the Accessibility Institute, a research group based at the University of Texas at Austin. He is co-author of Maximum Accessibility: Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone (Addison-Wesley, 2003) and other publications, including "The Art of ALT: Toward a More Accessible Web" (2001) and "Proactive Accommodation" (with Jim Allan; forthcoming 2005). Since 1998 Slatin has been a member of the advisory board for the Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR), an award-winning, nationally recognized program to promote accessible Web design by fostering competition among topnotch Web professionals. Slatin led UT Austin's first Task Force on accessibility (1999), and guided development of the University's Web Accessibility Guidelines (2003). Slatin chairs the Accessibility and Usability Committee for the Texas e-government initiative, Architecture Components for the Enterprise. Slatin has developed and led successful accessibility training programs for numerous educational and corporate clients, and is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences. He has participated since 2002 in writing the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) new international standards for Web accessibility, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (forthcoming 2005), and is Editor of General Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. In 2005 Slatin was named co-chair of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.
Jim Thatcher
Dr. Jim Thatcher received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1963, one of the first PhDs in Computer Science. Together with his thesis advisor, Dr. Jesse Wright, Jim then joined the Mathematical Sciences Department of IBM Research, where he stayed until 1996.
His research area was mathematical computer science, including automata theory, semantics, and data abstraction. Jim began moving away from the abstract and toward the practical when he and Dr. Wright, who is blind, started working on an "audio access system" for the IBM Personal Computer.
This work culminated in the development of one of the first screen readers for DOS in 1984-85, called IBM Screen Reader. (Such access systems are now known as "screen readers"!) He later led the development of IBM Screen Reader/2, the first screen reader for a graphical user interface on the PC. Jim was intimately involved in the development of IBM Home Page Reader, a talking web browser for the blind and visually impaired.
In 1996 Dr. Thatcher joined the IBM Accessibility Center in Austin, TX, where he led the effort to include accessibility in the IBM development process. A key part of that effort was the establishment of the IBM Accessibility Guidelines specifically for use within IBM's development community.
Jim served as Vice-Chair of the Electronic and Information Technology Access Advisory Committee (EITAAC) which was impaneled by the Access Board to propose standards for Section 508; he chaired the subcommittee on software standards. Later he wrote the course on Web Accessibility for Section 508 for ITTATC, the Information Technology Technical Assistance and Training Center, which was funded in support of Section 508.
Dr. Thatcher received numerous awards for technical work over his 37 year career with IBM. He received a Distinguished Service award from The National Federation of the Blind in 1994 and the Vice President's Hammer Award for his work with the Department of Education on the development of Software Accessibility Standards in 1999. Jim retired in March, 2000, becoming an independent consultant in the area of accessibility.
Jim is co-author of "Constructing Accessible Web Sites" with Paul Bohman, Michael Burkes, Shawn Lawton Henry, Bob Regan, Sarah Swierenga, Mark D, Urban and Cynthia Waddell, published by glasshaus, UK, April 2002, published again by Apress, Berkeley, CA, July 2003.