We’re super excited to be able to start announcing speakers for the first WP Accessibility Day. We’ve got an absolutely fabulous selection of speakers and topics, and we hope you’re as excited as we are about what’s coming up in October.
Keep watch here for upcoming rounds of speaker announcements and the grand unveiling of the full 24-hour schedule!
Alicia St Rose
Alicia St Rose began her adventure with WordPress when a UX friend offhandedly suggested using the CMS for a mutual friend’s website. That was over 10 years ago and the adventure has turned into a torrid love affair. Now she is a freelance developer, exclusively powered by WordPress, and has yet to find a limitation in this magical piece of software.
She is owner, principal designer and developer at WP with Heart, a small agency that employs one…so far. In addition to creating for WordPress, she provides an online one on one coaching for DIY website creators. She is also a Creativity and Mindshift Mentor, empowering people to bust through their own limitations in order to radically express their authentic and creative selves.
Mitchell Evan, CPWA
Mitchell Evan has coached design and development teams for nine years, harnessing his ADHD creativity to achieve enterprise-scale accessibility through the power of authoring tools, UI frameworks, and design systems. Most recently he led the VPAT reporting practice at Level Access, applying international accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1, Section 508, and EN 301 549) to web applications, native software, authoring tools, and two-way communications. Mitchell recently moved from San Francisco to Berlin to help build delightfully inclusive technology in the new era of European accessibility directives.
Meryl K. Evans
Born hearing-free, Meryl’s first encounter with captions came in 1983 when she received a closed-caption decoder. Because she depends on captions to follow the video, she has seen the best and worst of captions. Fast forward decades later, Meryl’s digital marketing career has come in handy in educating people about the benefits of captioning videos and captioning them well.
When she started making videos, she wanted to caption them. As a self-employed professional, she worried about the investment to make this happen. Through trial-and-error, she figured out an effective process for creating awesome captions. That led her to create the 10 Rules of Great Captions. Since then, how-to videos and guides have educated and encouraged many to start captioning their videos. She has also created and promoted the use of #Captioned in social media to help people find captioned videos.
Joe Hall
Joe has been a WordPress developer and SEO for the last 11 years. He first became interested in accessibility consulting back to the 90s, but, mostly does technical SEO for medium size companies, non-profits, and enterprise level brands.
He is passionate about accessible, highly optimized, and fast WordPress themes.
Christina Workman
Christina Workman is a Support Technician at Web Dev Studios / Maintainn. As an advocate for contributing to WordPress, she recently launched the wp_contribute() podcast and helps organize WordCamp US, WordCamp Calgary and the Calgary WordPress Meetup.
She has a passion for teaching kids STEM and improving her accessibility skills. Outside of WordPress, Christina is a purple-o-phile, tea fanatic and lover of British detective shows.
Hidde de Vries
Hidde is a Web Developer and Accessibility Specialist at the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. As part of the WAI-Guide project, he works on the accessibility of authoring tools like CMSes and website creators, and guidance that supports the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG). He has over 10 years of experience working as a freelance front-end developer and accessibility person for organisations like Mozilla and the Dutch government. On his blog, he writes regularly about reusable components, CSS and web accessibility.