SPEAKER BIOS

Alice Anderson

is the Technology Accessibility Program (TAP) Coordinator at

DoIT for the UW-Madison. This position was created in 2000.

She came to DoIT from  UW Extension and Southwest Wisconsin Technical College,

where she held faculty support and Distance Education positions.

The TAP position was appealing because it was a blank page,

in that it was a new campus position with new challenges

and opportunities to grow -- and meeting creative people, able to

solve problems, and create a more accessible e-world has been the reward.

Lisa Jansen

became interested in web accessibility in 1997, the year the

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World-Wide Web

Consortium issued its first web accessibility guidelines. Since

then she has taught numerous workshops on web accessibility

and has integrated WAI and WCAG guidelines and practices into

all of her workshops and web work. When UW-Madison

introduced its Policy Governing World Wide Web Accessibility in

2000, Lisa and other campus colleagues participated in a

community organized around understanding and implementing

the UW-Madison policy. Though it's been a while since she's led

a web accessibility workshop, she remains committed to

providing (and helping others provide) accessible web materials.

Nicole Soukup

is a lifelong advocate for the equal rights for individuals with disabilities,

particularly for the Deaf and hard of hearing.  Nicole first advocated

for captioning in the early 1980s and joined her family in asking the

local television stations to provide captioning for the news and other

primetime television shows.  Since then, Nicole has varied experiences

of working in Deaf and hard of hearing organizations (Communication

Service for the Deaf, World Federation of the Deaf), disability organizations

(Center for Disability Rights), and health organizations (Washington Health

Foundation) in which she worked towards improving the quality of life

for underserved populations.  Nicole now works at the

McBurney Disability Resource Center as the Deaf/ Hard of Hearing Program Manager,

where she brings her passion to the UW and to work towards bringing

an equally accessible and communicative environment for the Deaf and

hard of hearing student population as well as those with other disabilities.

Joyce Tikalsky

became interested in web accessibility in 1995 when she

began buiding websites for public groups. She read

a white paper by Prof. Gregg Vanderheiden, now director

of the Trace Center, about using alternate text to make

images on websites usable by more people. When she

joined Engineering External Relations in 2001 as webmaster,

she became intrigued by new methods and possibilities

that were part of a campus-wide focus on web accessibility,

especially for course materials.