Breaking Down Boxes for Accessibility
Last year, Domino’s Pizza appealed to the Supreme Court to hear the argument that their website and mobile application did not need to be accessible to users of screen-reading technology. This shut out more than 3 million users in the US alone. Some may think of accessibility as just a matter for a few individuals, but when we think outside boxes—or, better yet, break them down—we see not individuals, but a society full of people with different perspectives and abilities. With a wider worldview, we begin to understand and appreciate how we can improve the experience for everyone by embracing those differences. Come hear stories of people's lived experiences and see how universally applied accessibility empowers more than just individuals and creates a more vibrant culture.
With the exception of one year in Brazil as a high school exchange student, Kevin Jones has called Madison, Wisconsin, home his entire life. With his computer science degree, Kevin worked to squash the Y2K bug with a local insurance company before gaining a degree in network security. He worked from his first computer, an Apple 2E, to the Microsoft stack and then back to the Mac in 2010, when he felt accessibility for blind users like himself had more potential. Kevin is currently spending a great deal of his time working to improve accessibility by helping fellow blind users learn computer skills, and he enjoys showing sighted developers how to make their products more accessible. An enthusiastic supporter of technology, Kevin is keenly interested in voice-first interfaces and forms of automation to increase accessibility, even if most people only think of these as conveniences.