We are excited to welcome Jon Gunderson to the speaker lineup for Accessibility Camp Chicago.

Dr. Jon Gunderson is the Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology Accessibility in the Division of Disability Resources and Education Services (DRES) at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana, Illinois. He leads the development of open source web accessibility evaluation tools and coding practices resources to help web designers and developers understand accessible coding techniques.

He is the past chair of the W3C User Agent Working Group and currently involved in the W3C ARIA Working Group. As a member of the W3C ARIA Working Group has been a major contributor to the ARIA Authoring Practices and the automated testing of ATIA implementation in browsers for the Windows platform.

He has given numerous presentations, workshops and courses related to web accessibility. He leads the development of the Accessibility Inspector for Firefox and the Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) service. The tools can be used to help verify the use of the HTML4, HTML5 and ARIA techniques to implement the requirements of the Section 508 and W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.

Jon will present “Understanding ARIA 1.1 and the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide.” Understanding the how the roles, properties and states defined in the W3C Accessible Rich Internet Accessibility (ARIA) 1.1 specifications is used by assistive technologies (e.g. screen readers) is critical for accessibility professionals to evaluate and provide guidance on how to identify and remediate web accessibility issues of online resources. ARIA technology is often not well understood by designers and developers as evidenced by high percentage of the ARIA found on the web not properly implemented and often times diminishing, rather than enhancing the accessibility of a web resource. The purpose of this workshop is to help participants understand how ARIA is designed to support the creation of accessible web resources that are work with a wide range of browsers and assistive technologies.

If you haven’t already registered for Accessibility Camp Chicago, register today!