Jory Cunningham

This is huge step towards normalizing and formalizing accessibility transparency. Sooooooooo many a11y issues end up emerging from third-party libraries hastily adopted by uninformed engineers, and those end up being some of the hardest to resolve. Hopefully this will start introducing a11y into the heuristics for considering a new package.

Want to work with me? Of course you do! We are looking for a Seattle-based Senior Accessibility Specialist for our team here at AWS. We have a great team in AWS and there is an amazing community of accessibility experts across Amazon. This is an opportunity to apply your deep accessibility knowledge at scale, you'll be supporting over 200 products to help ensure that building scalable digital products is available to all. How do we do this? Constant reinvention and refinement of our processes. You will be working at the bleeding edge of applying AI to deliver accessibility expertise to all of our builders and to ensure we can finally deliver the levels of accessibility most of us have only dreamed about in previous roles. It's an exciting time for the curious and inspired! You will be given the resources to succeed and only be limited by your ability to think big. Are you ready? https://lnkd.in/gV6FaFY4

Great stuff as always from Fatemeh.

I learned a lot about leadership and mentoring from working with Katie. She one of the very best. This is a great opportunity for mid-career designers.

"This is one of the tensions I want to explore through my journalism and the documentary we are developing: how can technology support communication without eclipsing the person using it?" Love this question.

Amazon has an awesome accessibility culture. Join us and let's make great things together. (Disclaimer: this is not my org and I'm not involved in hiring)

If you are looking for top-tier accessibility talent for your team, look no further. Michael has been doing amazing work around the intersection of LLM's and accessibility. This is the kind of expertise any mature accessibility program needs right now.

Alright folks, its Global Accessibility Awareness Day (shoutout to Jennison Asuncion and Joe Devon for keeping this ever-growing). And spoiler alert... yes I'm going to make this about AI. I'm really proud and honored to work in Accessibility, but sometimes it is really hard. We deal with a lot of ignorance and institutional ableism in our work. It can be really taxing to absorb that all day while you are trying to do your best with the responsibility you have been given as an accessibility professional. I going to be real here: I have reached a breaking point with this so many times where I've wondered if I can keep doing this work while preserving my mental health. I'm an emotional guy. I've cried so many times at home when I couldn't deliver access to my customers or when the mechanisms of large companies have stood, immovable, in my way. But you know what? It is getting better and I know my work has a role in that. What I treasure about this work is the community and my teammates (thank you Justine, Imran, Suvidha, Charlotte, Peter, Samantha). Knowing that there are others I can talk to and learn from gives me the energy I need. The accessibility community has always always had its share of curmudgeons who can sometimes make it scary to put yourself out there in the public accessibility conversation, but what I'm seeing right now around the schism between those that want to explore the benefits of AI for accessibility versus those who refuse to even consider it is getting really out of control. I recently read a post where an anti-AI person accused their fellow accessibility professionals of "digital euthanasia" of people with disabilities. When we start comparing our peers to the actions of Nazis and or the dark history of eugenists such as Felix Adler in the U.S. we are going too far. This sort of language is violence and breeds violence. Its fine to have absolutist perspectives on AI, I totally understand and respect that position. But maybe let's tone it down a notch and perhaps assume that people working in accessibility may be doing this work with a good faith belief, like I have, that it in fact we have an opportunity to actually bring the expertise and voice of accessibility professionals, including people with disabilities, to EVERY line of code that is written in a way that is just not possible without it. There is just not enough of us, and budgets for this work never allow that. Furthermore, if the people who care about this don't do the work of taking accessibility into the AI-era, someone who doesn't care will do that instead of us. Keep doing your work to stop AI if that's what you believe in, I'll keep doing the work to use AI to deliver accessibility at scale within my own moral framework. We need all these ideas, but we also need to see that we are all humans who care deeply about accessibility and keep extending grace to each other in our shared commitment.