About The Authors

Cathy O'Connor

Cathy O'Connor has worked as a senior web application designer for fifteen years in large and small companies. She relishes the challenge of incorporating complex and sometimes conflicting requirements such as compliance, security, globalization, and accessibility to distill and deliver useful, appealing, end-to-end experiences for customers. For the past six years she has been working with product teams to make sure PayPal products can be used by as many people as possible as an accessibility subject matter expert and now program manager. She enjoys coming up with new techniques and strategies to keep accessibility top of mind as product teams rapidly deliver new products in a constantly changing environment. She has spoken on some of these strategies at the California State University Northridge International Technology and persons with disabilities Conferences (CSUN): Web Accessibility Training for Product teams, with Jared Smith, WebAIM, and Color Contrast Tips and Tools for Designers¹ at CSUN 2014. Outside of work, Cathy is a part-time Zumba Fitness instructor, and enjoys designing in the physical world: crafting handmade toys, decor, and accessories for her family. Twitter: @cagocon².

Chaals McCathie Nevile

Chaals McCathie Nevile has over 30 years of professional experience with hypertext systems, for the last two decades focused on the web. He currently works in the CTO group of Russian internet giant Yandex, primarily focused on web standards and accessibility. Chaals was previously Head of Standards and a member of the board of directors at Opera, after working at the W3C specialising in the Semantic Web and accessibility. Chaals is still closely involved with the W3C, as co-chair of the Web Apps working group, and HTML Accessibility task force, and a long-standing member of the Advisory Board. He is interested in many different things, but current areas of focus there include SVG accessibility, the interaction model of the web, and Web Components. He also works on schema.org as part of his role at Yandex. Twitter: @chaals³.

Henny Swan

In her capacity as User Experience and Design Lead at the Paciello Group (TPG) Henny Swan looks at ways of integrating the principles of inclusive design early on in projects. She joined TPG in 2014 having previously worked at BBC, Opera Software and Royal National Institute of Blind People. Henny has a particular focus on mobile and multimedia bringing her experience to bear on products delivered on multiple platforms. Previous work has included BBC iPlayer (web, iOS and Android), BBC Olympics, BBC Sport and the BBC cross platform Standard Media Player. Twitter: @iheni⁴.

Léonie Watson

Léonie Watson is a Senior Accessibility Engineer with The Paciello Group (TPG) and owner of LJ Watson Consulting. Amongst other things she is a director of the British Computer Association of the Blind, a member of the W3C HTML and SVG working groups, and HTML Accessibility Task Force. In her spare time Léonie blogs on tink.uk⁵, talks on the AccessTalk podcast⁶, and loves cooking, dancing and drinking tequila (although not necessarily in that order). Twitter: @leoniewatson⁷.

Marcy Sutton

Marcy Sutton is an international public speaker, Angular core team member and accessibility engineer at Adobe. She is a primary contributor to ngAria, Angular’s accessibility module, as well as the author of an accessibility plug-in for Protractor, the end-to-end testing framework. Recently Marcy launched Accessibility Wins⁸, a Tumblr highlighting successes in web accessibility. She loves riding bicycles and throwing the frisbee for her dog, Wally. Twitter: @marcysutton⁹.

Ollie Campbell

Ollie is one of four co-founders at Navy Design¹⁰, a design consultancy which specializes in digital products. He’s interested in how good design can make people healthier, happier and safer. He writes about design on Medium¹¹ and occasionally contributes to publications such as Smashing Magazine¹² and UXMatters¹³ and Creative Review¹⁴. His most recent speaking engagement was at the Medical Software Industry Association in Sydney. Ollie has a degree in computer science and is currently completing a postgraduate diploma in psychology. Twitter: @oliebol¹⁵.

Scott O'Hara

Scott O'Hara is a UX designer and developer based out of Boston, Massachusetts. He loves pushing the limits of CSS, designing usable experiences for everyone, writing about what he knows and what he’s learning. Website: scottohara.me¹⁶. Twitter: @scottohara¹⁷.

TJ VanToll

TJ VanToll is a senior developer advocate for Telerik, a jQuery team member¹⁸, and the author of jQuery UI in Action¹⁹. He has over a decade of web development experience — specializing in performance and the mobile web. TJ speaks about his research and experiences at conferences around the world, and has written for publications such as Smashing Magazine, HTML5 Rocks, and MSDN Magazine. TJ is @tjvantoll²⁰ on Twitter and tjvantoll²¹ on GitHub.

About Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine²² is an online magazine dedicated to Web designers and developers worldwide. Its rigorous quality control and thorough editorial work has gathered a devoted community exceeding half a million subscribers, followers and fans. Each and every published article is carefully prepared, edited, reviewed and curated according to the high quality standards set in Smashing Magazine’s own publishing policy²³.

Smashing Magazine publishes articles on a daily basis with topics ranging from business, visual design, typography, front-end as well as back-end development, all the way to usability and user experience design. The magazine is — and always has been — a professional and independent online publication neither controlled nor influenced by any third parties, delivering content in the best interest of its readers. These guidelines are continually revised and updated to assure that the quality of the published content is never compromised. Since its emergence back in 2006 Smashing Magazine has proven to be a trustworthy online source.