OZeWAI online event - Ask the Professionals - 29 January 2025

Introduction

OZeWAI has moved from running an annual conference to partnering with many in-person and online conferences and offering membership benefits as part of individual and organisation membership tiers. 

The 'Ask the Professional' events are free for OZeWAI members and have a small cost of $10 for non-members to cover administration and tools to ensure OZeWAI events are accessible.  

By joining OZeWAI (from as little as $50 for the Advocacy level) you will have access to a year's worth of 'Ask the Professionals' for free (including the recordings), and many other benefits. If you wish to discuss assistance with OZeWAI membership, please contact info@ozewai.org.

Topic: Accessibility and design systems and patterns

This panel event will bring together accessibility specialists for you to:

• Ask questions from the experts 
• Share knowledge of similar issues
• Find where to get help with accessibility advice and expertise

Session access requirements

The session agenda and access details will be shared 2 days before the event. This is a remote online event using Zoom.

Please email info@ozewai.org if you wish to share any tools, communication methods or anything else we should consider to ensure you can fully participate in the session.

Thank you from the OZeWAI Committee

Panelists:

Adam Zerner (He/Him)

Adam Zerner is Design Delivery Lead for the Macquarie Bank, a major Australian financial services group. Adam is a design systems, accessibility and product design specialist - with extensive end to end experience, including in leading design system initiatives, design system transformations, and leading accessibility initiatives within a range of public and private organisations.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-zerner/

Hidde de Vries (He/Him)

Hidde (@hdv) is a freelance front-end and accessibility specialist, currently working in the NL Design System team at the Dutch government. He is also involved in the W3C’s Open UI Community Group and Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. His favourite programming language is CSS and he strongly believes in a web that puts people first. Hidde writes about these things and more on hidde.blog. He used to work at W3C/WAI on WCAG’s supplemental guidance, ATAG and WCAG-EM Report Tools. In his free time, he works on a coffee table book covering the video conferencing applications of our decade and fun fact: he met his partner in Australia while backpacking  <3

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hiddedevries 

Ross Mullen (He/Him)

Ross is director of CANAXESS a digital accessibility company. He helps businesses build digital experiences which are accessible and apply WCAG and best practice techniques. He's supported Australian supermarket Coles making their website accessible and created processes to improve accessibility across the software delivery process. He provides extra accessibility testing capacity to accessibility and UX agencies globally and writes regularly on diverse accessibility topics.

His Introduction to Web Accessibility Udemy course has provided support to over 4400 students, helping them enhance their fundamental knowledge of accessibility. Additionally, he’s edited web accessibility content for Pluralsight. And is the creator of the accessibility resource tool called thisiswcag, which assists people in understanding how to test against success criteria. This tool has not only served as inspiration to several other popular checklist tools but also contributed significantly to the accessibility community.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossmullen/

Moderated by:

Amanda Mace (She/Her)

Amanda is a Subject Matter Expert in Digital Accessibility with more than 10 years of experience in the industry. She manages the Australasia office for GrackleDocs while growing and promoting the brand across the region. She also manages the audit team which is responsible for manual WCAG audits for our clients. Amanda is one of only two Australian-based W3C evangelists and the W3C Australian Western Region Chapter manager.

When it comes to accessibility, she believes that innovation with accessibility built into it provides security, independence, and privacy for people with disabilities and ultimately better, more usable digital products for all. She has spent her career advocating that it is everyone's job to do their bit to remove barriers so all people can have equal access and equal opportunity in the digital world. Using her expertise in WCAG and PDF/UA to educate and help others understand digital access as well as how to go above and beyond standards, to ensuring great user experiences.

She is certified by the Australian Computer Society (ACS) as a Certified Professional. Having begun her accessibility career as a WCAG auditor/tester, she worked her way up in that small business through to management. Throughout her career, She has had many opportunities to contribute to educating others about digital accessibility including, co-authoring a book chapter for the textbook, "Web Accessibility A Foundation for Research," as well as a white paper entitled, "Digital Accessibility: Perceptions, Expectations and Reality."

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-mace-85171b77/