Gian Wild
CEO
AccessibilityOz
History of web accessibility
History of web accessibility
You shouldn't move forward until you have a really good look at where you've come from. In this session, Gian Wild, shows us where we've been, what some of the stumbling blocks can be and how we can learn from them to ensure a bright future for the area of accessibility.
Although the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 1.0 was released in 1999, it wasn’t really taken seriously until Bruce Maguire made a complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2000 about the Sydney Olympic Games website. The rest, as they say, is history.
AccessibilityOz Founder and CEO Gian Wild will discuss digital accessibility’s hard-won and progressive history, how it started, where it is now and where it’s headed.
Gian Wild
Gian Wild is the CEO, Founder and President of AccessibilityOz, established in Australia in 2011 and the United States in 2015. Gian has worked in the accessibility industry since 1998. She worked on the first Level AAA accessible website in Australia (Disability Information Victoria) and developed one of the first automated accessibility testing tools, PurpleCop, in 2000. She spent six years on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group contributing to the development of WCAG2 and is currently a member of the Automated WCAG Monitoring-Community Group. Gian is on the Higher Education Content Steering Group for Accessibility Switchboard, and a committee member of the ICT Accessibility Testing Symposium conference in the United States. She also chairs two of the symposium’s sub-committees: the Mobile Testing Sub-Committee and the Native App Testing Sub-Committee. The committees work to create up-to-date mobile accessibility testing guidelines.
Gian ran the Usability and Accessibility Services Division at Monash University for six years, conducting user testing, usability reviews and heuristic evaluations.
Gian often speaks at web and accessibility conferences around the world. She spoke at the United Nations on the importance of accessibility at the Eighth session of the Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In 2017, Gian was nominated as Australian of the Year. In 2019, Gian was inducted into the Centre For Accessibility‘s Australian Access Awards Hall of Fame as their Accessibility Person of the Year.