About the speakers

Robin Christopherson

Firstly, we'd like to introduce our host for the day Robin Christopherson.

After a degree in Engineering at Cambridge and working as an IT instructor for the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), Robin was a founding member of AbilityNet in 1998. Robin now manages AbilityNet's Accessibility services.

Despite being blind, Robin uses a computer very effectively by relying on speech output to access the full range of mainstream software including email and the internet. He has a first-hand appreciation of the importance of good web design practice and accessibility.

Mike Davies

Mike Davies is a web developer for Yahoo! Europe focusing on web accessibility. He was the Technical Lead Developer of a website redesign which became a PAS 78 case study into the business benefits of accessible websites. Mike writes about web accessibility, Atom and web standards on his personal blog at isolani.co.uk.

Bim Egan

Bim joined RNIB's Web Access team at the beginning of 2005. She leads on training courses , as well as assessing and advising on the accessibility of client sites. She also contributes some of the most contentious blog posts on the WAC blog.

Prior to this, she'd been working with computers since 1981 to help control and manage her own business, and started using access technology in 1990.

As a (very) mature student in 1999, Bim ‘discovered’ web accessibility the hard way, by trying to use the web to supplement other accessible study materials during her degree IT course. It was incredibly frustrating to be unable to access information, despite having a computer running a full suite of access technology. So frustrating that she changed the focus of her studies from training to web accessibility.

While still studying, in 2000, Bim started work as a web author for Salford University School of Construction, and developed an online information resource for environmentally friendly planning and building practices for the construction industry.

After gaining a BSc in IT, Bim was lucky enough to join the BBC as a web producer in 2001. Unable to keep quiet about the need for functional accessibility, she was co-opted as an advisor to the BBC’s web accessibility workshop.

In her spare time she's an avid reader of crime fiction, and developing web sites for small charities that can't afford to pay for web design.

As someone who is reliant on screen reader output to use a PC, she brings a wealth of personal knowledge and experience of using assistive technology to the team, in addition to a range of technical skills.

Stephen Elsden

Stephen Elsden is Marketing Manager at Leonard Cheshire Disability. He has been involved in website development for over ten years for a number of charities. Prior to this he worked as a writer and editor for a number of marketing magazines.

Steve Faulkner

Steve is the Senior Web Accessibility Consultant and Technical Director, TPG Europe, based in London. He joined The Paciello Group in 2006 and was previously a Senior Web Accessibility Consultant at Vision Australia.

He is also the Director of The Web Accessibility Tools Consortium (WAT-C) . He is the creator and lead developer of the Web Accessibility Toolbar (WAT) accessibility testing tool. And co-developer of the Color Contrast Analyser (CCA), he has worked with many individuals and organisations around the world to provide translated versions of the WAT-C web accessibility testing tools.

Steve researches, presents and writes articles on how Assistive Technology, used by people with disabilities, works with Web 2.0 technologies such as JavaScript, AJAX and rich internet applications.

Steve is also a member of several groups, including the Web Standards Group and the W3C HTML 5 Working Group.

Ian Forrester

Ian Forrester heads up the BBC's Backstage, a developer/designer network like no other. His role as head of BBC Backstage includes working with internal and external developers/designers to express their creativity through BBC feeds and APIs. Backstage makes available as much BBC data as possible for any member of the public to republish, remix and mash-up under a non-commercial license.

Ian is also well known for geek social events, including London Geekdinners, BarCampLondon, Hackday, Edinburgh TV Un-Festival and recently BarCampLondon3. He's currently master minding plans for "Over the Air" , a series of Backstage university outreach events and is a founder of the dataportability.org group. Somehow, Ian finds time to blog online regularly at his personal blog cubicgarden.com

Jonathan Hassell

Jonathan Hassell is Acting Head of Audience Experience and Usability for BBC Future Media & Technology. He leads the BBC Usability & Accessibility team to ensure BBC projects and services are usable to all users, including disabled users, by helping production teams engage with those users throughout product development. He has five years experience in the field of accessibility, setting accessibility standards across web, mobile and interactive TV for the BBC, and sitting on the steering group for the BSI specification for accessible web design PAS 78. For the last three years he has commissioned groundbreaking projects using innovative new accessibility techniques and technologies to enable a wide-variety of groups of disabled children to learn via multimedia and user-generated learning on BBC jam. He has a PhD in Human Computer Interaction, and won the BIMA 2006 for Best Achievement in Accessibility for his first commission: the BBC accessibility site "My Web, My Way".

Christian Heilmann

Christian Heilmann has been developing for the web for over ten years in several agencies, .coms and at enterprise level development. He developed large web sites like McDonalds, HP and Visit Britain before working on Yahoo's properties in the US, India and the UK. He has written several books and countless articles on web development, Ajax and Accessibility and blogs at http://wait-till-i.com.

Julie Howell

Julie Howell is Director of Accessibility at digital design agency Fortune Cookie. Prior to this she was the Digital Policy Development Manager at the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). Julie has worked with businesses, the public sector and government agencies to ensure the accessibility to disabled people of digital information products and services. She is Technical Author of the BSI specification for accessible web design, '"PAS 78'.

Julie held the New Media Age Effectiveness Award for 'The Greatest Individual Contribution to New Media 2005/6'. In 2007, Julie received 'The Special Lifetime Achievement Award' at the Imperatives Digital Awards.

Antonia Hyde

Antonia left a career in television production to work in the charity sector. She secured a post in 2000 with United Response to work with people with learning disabilities and mental health needs. She was initially tasked with developing the charity's communication platforms.

Antonia took responsibility for United Response’s web presence. She quickly appreciated the power of collaborating with people supported by the organisation to develop its online presence and other multimedia work.

In developing the site over the last six years, she has balanced the needs of accessibility with an understanding of how people with learning disabilities like to view and use websites. She is now responsible for web strategy, technical development and content authoring.

Antonia is driven by the need for inclusion and representation of people with learning disabilities. She constantly challenges how people think about communication in new media. Her current focus is how rich media can be used to enhance the experiences of people with learning disabilities.

She also acts as a consultant alongside people with learning disabilities to advise top FTSE companies and other charities on how to make their websites easier to use and providing them with the tools to do so.

Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer living in Brighton. Working with the web consultancy firm Clearleft, Jeremy enjoys building accessible, elegant websites using the troika of web standards: markup, CSS and the DOM. He has written two books: DOM Scripting and Bulletproof Ajax. When he's not making websites, he plays bouzouki with the band Salter Cane.

Kath Moonan

Kath Moonan is Senior Accessibility and Usability Consultant at AbilityNet. Kath is the Accessibility 2.0 conference organiser. She has recently been researching the use of social networking websites by people with disabilities. This included the recent State of the eNation report which highlighted the poor accessibility level of the most popular social networking websites.

Kath also conducts many of the disabled user tests at AbilityNet. She is interested in the overlap between accessibility and usability and believes testing with end users is the only way to achieve a great user experience for all.

Andrew Travers

Andrew Travers is Head of Consulting at Precedent Communications. His work focuses on user experience and the application of new technologies.

Before joining Precedent, he was accessibility and usability lead at another major digital agency, working with clients such as the Disability Rights Commission, Department of Trade and Industry and Cancer Research UK. Prior to this, Andrew was Internet Manager at the Improvement and Development Agency for local government (IDeA), in charge of its new media strategy and implementation.

He has written extensively on new media issues for publications including .net magazine and New Media Age.

Dr. Panayiotis Zaphiris

Dr. Panayiotis Zaphiris is a Reader at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design (HCID), School of Informatics of City University London. Before joining City University, he was a researcher at the Institute of Gerontology at Wayne State University where he also got his Ph.D. in HCI.

His research interests lie in HCI with an emphasis on inclusive design and social aspects of computing. Panayiotis Zaphiris has published over 100 publications in prominent journals and conferences. He is the editor of four books.