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Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., CWAP

Dr. Gunderson has over 35 years of experience in technology and disability. He most recently served as the Coordinator of Accessible IT Group in the Division of Disability Resources and Education Services (DRES) at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana for over 25 years. At Illinois he was responsible for helping the campus understand the accessibility issues of its online administrative and instructional resources and worked with campus IT professionals and instructors to improve accessibility. As an undergraduate and graduate student he worked at the Trace Research and Development Center on assistive communication devices and computer access technologies for people with disabilities, including many of the precursors to the built-in accessibility features of modern operating systems.

He has participated in the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) since its inception in 1997. He is the past chair of the W3C WAI User Agent Accessibility Working Group and currently participants in the W3C WAI ARA working group. He is a major contributor to the ARIA Authoring Practices and ARIA AT Community Group for testing assistive technologies for ARIA implementation. He develops open-source web accessibility evaluation tools including AInspector for Firefox, OpenA11y Evaluation Library and SkipTo.js project.

He has taught numerous online courses and workshops on accessible web design including courses on using the W3C Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) specifications to create accessible web applications. He also presents at national conferences on web accessibility.

He is a Certified Web Accessibility Professional (CWAP) from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering (Human Factors) all from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

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