about
I am an author, activist and developer. I co-wrote “Universal Design for Web Applications” with Matt May (O’Reilly, 2008). Before that, I co-edited Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and 2.0–the basis of most web accessibility policies. I recently appeared dressed as Wonder Woman in a web comic with the other HTML5 Super Friends and as myself in interviews on Minnesota Public Radio, Puget Sound Public Radio, and at Ignite Seattle. For one week in November 2009, I was the Seattle PI’s Geek of the Week.
I’ve focused on inclusive web design since 1995. Being both a developer (B.S. in Computer Science) and a Human Factors Engineer (M.S. in Industrial Engineering/Human Factors), I bridge communication between developers and designers. As a staff for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for 6 years**, I helped synchronize work on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines with developments in internationalization and mobile design.
Part of my time is spent working for the University of Washington’s AccessComputing project helping to increase the number of people with disabilities in computing fields. As part of that project, I contribute to the development of WebAnywhere–a screen reader on the go. Another portion of my time is spent consulting. I’ve worked with Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and others to integrate universal design into their products and I am a Senior Accessibility Consultant for the American Foundation for the Blind.
My personal mission is to find elegant solutions that remove barriers that prevent everyone from participating fully in society. I am an advocate for people with disabilities, people who are injured (especially vets) and people who are aging (i.e., all of us). I want to make inclusion a reality–both online and off. Please get in touch and let’s chat: chisholm dot wendy at gmail dot com.
Photo provided by Matt.
**When I want to show off, I can say that I’ve worked with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web. Here’s a photo of several of the W3C team. I’m seated in the front row to the far right of the picture, to my right is Steve Bratt (at the time, the CEO of the W3C, now the CEO of the W3C Foundation) and to Steve’s right is Tim. I like Tim. He’s a cool dude.
Hi Wendy,
Thanks for this book. I’m enjoying the read.
I’ve a question, however. On page 101, you write: “If you can live with UDM4’s licensing regime, it’s a good product and can save you a lot of time. But [...] So we wrote an open source menu script of our own, which you can download at http://ud4wa.com.”
I’ve looked for this menu script both on ud4wa.com and the book’s O’Reilly site but to no avail.
Can you please point me to where this script can be downloaded
Thanks a lot
Bill
Bill Shackleton
8 May 09 at 8:10 pm
Bill,
I’m glad you’re enjoying the book.
I just published Open source menus and code on the ud4wa site. This gives pointers to the YUI and Dojo libraries–which are far more comprehensive than anything we could write on our own.
Thank you,
–wendy
wendy
11 May 09 at 8:41 pm
hey wendy –
this is yoni.. remember me from the trace research center? i went by the name of john for ease of use there and now its been like 10 years and i just wanted to say hi! i’m in nyc doing both academic and web/graphic design stuff… hope you’re well, looks like your investment in good content and design continues.
cheers
yoni
30 May 09 at 3:57 pm
Hi,
Heard your interview on KUOW on 7-25-09 and it was good to hear this topic being discussed. Regarding your book, I was wondering if, along with the Universal Design topics, do you cover the area of information management? One thing I’ve noticed with our aging population is the difficulty of finding things on their computers. They may be able to navigate a site just fine, but when it comes to information retrieval and organization, this becomes a serious issue (perhaps memory loss, etc.). Setting up mnemonic assistants or similar seems it would be part of a good accessibility design.
Your thoughts appreciated,
Rob
Rob
25 Jul 09 at 9:28 pm
Rob: Sorry it took me so long to comment.
I’m glad you like the interview. We don’t specifically cover information retrieval and organization in the book, except that using principles of universal design usually makes information easier to find with search engines.
Mnemonic assistants are likely to help everyone and in that case are good universal design. This is what I like about universal design, oftentimes when you design to make something easier to use or easier to understand for a particular population, it often makes it easier to use or understand for everyone.
So, if you end up using some mnemonic devices on your site, let me know. It would be interesting to see if more people find it easier to use.
wendy
1 Sep 09 at 4:15 am
Wendy,
I saw the post on you in the PI today. We’re drawing together some UD folks to advise around the Rio 2016 Games and a few other major sports events. Let me know if this interests you.
Scott Rains
Scott Rains
5 Nov 09 at 5:28 pm
[...] A bit more about her: she co-authored the O’Reilly book “Universal Design for Web Applications” and I worked at the W3C for 6 years. She currently splits her time between the UW and consulting. For even more, including a link to her stint as Wonder Woman: http://sp1ral.com/about/ [...]
Interact Seattle » Blog Archive » Accessiblility Makes the Experience More Usable by More People – IxDA Interact
1 Feb 10 at 7:17 pm