Jon Gunderson

University of Illinois • Champaign-Urbana, Illinois

Dr. Jon Gunderson is the Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology Accessibility in the Division of Disability Resources and Education Services (DRES).   He is responsible for computer and information technology accessibility issues for students with disabilities at the University of Illinois. He is the past chair of the W3C User Agent Working Group and currently a participant in the W3C WAI ARIA working group and is particularly interested in the development of authoring practices and implementation testing.

John leads the development group working on open source web accessibility evaluation tools including AInspector Sidebar add-on for Firefox browser, Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) 2.0 and Accessibility Bookmarklets. He is the primary software developer of the open source OpenAjax Accessibility Evaluation library used in AInspector Sideber for Firefox and FAE 2.0 to evaluate web content for W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level A and AA requirements. He is a leader and developer for the A11yFirst project to improve accessible authoring support for the CKEditor. He has taught numerous online courses and workshops on accessible web design including courses on using the new W3C Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) specifications to create accessible web applications.   He leads both regional and national consortiums of higher educational institutions to promote and collaborate on IT accessibility.