If you’re not excited yet, I hope these speakers do a lot to help encourage you in that direction! Every day we creep a little closer towards the first WP Accessibility Day event, and these generous speakers are an enormous part of what’s making that reality.
Here’s another batch of six speakers to whet your anticipation!
Darice de Cuba
Darice is a web developer and blog writer for the independent news magazine and website of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. Where she most enjoys writing a blog, brainstorming with the team about the editorial, working on new designs, optimize pages and maintaining and improving the WordPress website.
Being late deaf which gives her a unique insight into inclusive design. She likes to write down her musings on her website. She loves to explore the food scene in her hometown The Hague in The Netherlands. She’s keeping track of cool places she finds in her food guide.
Chip Edwards
Chip is a partner at CreateMyVoice.com. He helps content producers engage audiences on Smart Speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Chip is a teacher, speaker, and technologist who is passionate about connecting WordPress content to the new Voice Technology platforms.
Rian Rietveld
Rian Rietveld is a web accessibility specialist at the full-service WordPress agency Level Level and a trainer at the A11Y Collective.
Accessibility is important to her, everyone should be able to use the web.
Her mission is to educate everyone involved in a web project to create a web that works for all.
She lives in a pretty little town near The Hague in the Netherlands. When not reviewing, teaching or coding, you can find her working in her garden.
Calum Ryan
Calum is an accessibility consultant for dxw, helping the public sector make their websites more accessible.
His background is in front-end web development and user interface design, having worked in the web industry for around ten years.
Graham Armfield
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.
Susanna Laurin
Chief Research and Innovation Officer at Funka
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.