Abha is an experienced communicator, journalist, researcher and digital professional working in a variety of sectors. She has specialisms in new technology, content development, knowledge management, and cross-cultural working and inclusion. In 2020 she was made a Fellow of the international Chartered Institute of Public Relations in recognition of her work bridging technology and communications and in promoting inclusion.
She is a member of the Advisory Board for ‘We and AI’, which promotes awareness of artificial intelligence. She is a contributor to a number of WordPress teams including Marketing (team rep), WordPress.tv and Core, and is a WordCamp and Meetup co-organizer. She has led a number of projects aimed at improving accessibility and inclusion in the community, and promoting diversity, including co-lead for a cross-team Subtitling campaign and Communications Lead for WordPress Translation Day.
She is also CPD-Lead for a number of professional organizations and writes on technology, AI and machine learning. She has a particular interest in developing approaches to greater inclusion for adults with learning disabilities and cognitive diversity. She is delighted to have been invited to speak at the first ever WordPress Accessibility Day and looks forward to sharing the time with friends old and new in the WP community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Susanna Laurin has more than 20 years experience in working strategically with accessibility at senior management level.
As an internationally acknowledged expert in EU accessibility policy and regulations, Susanna regularly performs training and practical workshops with procurement officials based on the methodology she has developed on the basis of the EN-standard and the European Procurement Directive. Since the first version of the EN-standard was published in 2015, she has been focusing on procurement, touring in many European countries within and outside of the European Union, as well as in South America and Australia.
Susanna has also developed and published a series of instructive videos around how to use the EN-standard, sponsored by Microsoft and published under creative commons license.
Susanna is often assigned at strategic policy level on behalf of national governments, studies and investigations all over the world. She is assigned as an expert to the European Commission and the Member States representatives during the transposition of the Web Accessibility Directive, chairing the group focusing on monitoring methodology in the Subgroup of WADex. With a long experience in national and international standardisation work, she is a technical expert to ETSI in the Special Task Force 536, working on assignment by the European Commission to make the EN301549 into a harmonised European standard to cover the mobile requirements of the Web Accessibility Directive.
Susanna leads the Research and Innovation department at Funka, successfully covering around 20% of the company turn over with funding from various financial research instruments. She takes responsibility for major and international assignments for the European Commission, and a number of national governments in the member states especially focusing on transposition and implementation of the Web Accessibility Directive. Susanna is responsible for Funka’s close cooperation with end user organisations in all markets.
Susanna has published several white papers published by the European Accessibility Forum, G3ict, Funka and others on accessible design, accessible procurement, accessible MOOCs, the business case for accessibility, employment of disabled persons etc.
Susanna is chairman of the Funka Foundation, created by the company Funka to be able to perform not for profit assignments on inclusion and with a specific focus on employment of persons with disabilities. She is the Vice Chair of the Global Leadership Council of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, IAAP, an international member organisation that was co-founded by Funka, and joint representative to the EU for the UN-initiative G3ict and IAAP as well as the Managing Director of the first local chapter IAAP Nordic, covering Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. She is an expert and advisor, both for Swedish Standards Institute and Standards Norway, and furthermore served as technical expert for Mandate 376, that on behalf for the EC developed harmonised requirements for accessibility in public procurement in all EU member states. Susanna was moreover over all responsible for the authorised translation of WCAG 2.0 into Swedish that Funka carried out on behalf of W3C.
During 2003-2019, Susanna has been the CEO of Funka. Since March 2019, she is now focusing on her own strategic assignments for the European Commission and national governments as the Chief Research and Innovation Officer. Before starting at Funka, she was working as the CEO of one of the subsidiaries of the Swedish Association of the Visually Impaired’s corporate group IRIS, and she has been managing external funding and projects at the Swedish Independent Living Institute. She is a frequent international lecturer and debater and she serves on a number of program committees for conferences in the field of accessibility.
Graham is a Web Accessibility Consultant with his own company Coolfields Consulting. He works with organisations to help them improve the accessibility of their websites – testing the websites for accessibility, and advising the designers and developers on how to fix issues found. He has written detailed training courses on accessibility for developers which he presents on a regular basis.
He’s also a WordPress developer, and has built many accessible WordPress websites for clients – both large and small. He has contributed to the Make WordPress Accessible Team and has spoken on accessibility to many WordCamps and other WordPress meetups.
