Resumé

Professional Experience

November 2012 - present, Founder, Prime Access Consulting, Inc.

• Folded Paper and Steel web design firm into Prime Access Consulting.
• Collaborate with Fortune-1000, or greater, companies on systemic software and website accessibility remediation, internal policy advice, training internal QA/QC teams, facilitating user-acceptance testing, and consulting with management about accessibility practices.
• Work with museums and informal learning spaces on accessible science education, (novel and exciting interfaces for eyes-free exploration of STEM and art concepts, including accessible live data visualization), training in-house and outsourced developers on accessibility and universal design.
• Collaborate with startups, venture funds, and researchers on various accessibility projects (including interesting approaches in STEM).
• Performing due diligence on prospective portfolio companies for venture funds.
• Attracting clients, negotiating contracts, and managing a growing international team of experts.
• Serving on advisory boards for entities such as Accessible Computing Foundation, Conversant Labs, and Project Possibility

Selected Clients

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

• Our collaboration with MCA led to the creation of the Coyote project, which facilitates large-scale management of rich image descriptions.
• Collaborated with multiple teams at MCA to insure digital accessibility across an aggressively designed web property containing many nontraditional components.

Canadian Museum for Human Rights

• Directly as a consequence of our fantastic long-term relationship and sustained commitment by the museum, CMHR is the most inclusive and accessible museum in the world.
• Designed a systemic approach used on dozens of interactives throughout the museum to facilitate digital accessibility and inclusive/universal design.
• Collaborated across many disparate teams, from design to development, to facilitate a wide array of novel accessible experiences.

University of San Francisco

• Advise many departments across campus on best practices regarding accommodations for students with disabilities (including training staff and faculty, performing evaluations, and facilitating user testing).
• Collaborate with web team on the accessibility of various intranet and public facing web properties.
• Collaborate with the university and its development teams on the remediation of course content to meet 508 and WCAG standards.

Design Science

• Investigated and designed novel techniques for expressing mathematics to the blind.
• The system I helped design now facilitates access to mathematics and is the gold standard for interactive accessible math systems.
• In addition to exploring psycho-perceptual and cognitive implications of the overall solution, I also advised on the interaction paradigms that must be used to achieve the various project goals.

June 2011 - Nov 2012, Co-Founder, Paper and Steel

• Responsible for technology infrastructure, policies, and direction
• Develop customer facing products for clients.
• Responsible for growing in-house talent, tools, and workflows.
• In charge of bidding on and negotiating new contracts for hire.

May 2010 - Dec 2010, Chief Technology Officer, Special Investigative University

• Joined SIU to design and implement technology stack for IT operations, software development, and external integration.
• Established organizational technology policies and designed solutions to implement them.
• Acted as Primary Lead on various projects, the largest of which was to evaluate and implement an e-learning platform for SIU's course offerings.
• Revamped existing software initiatives and worked closely with 3rd party consultants and contractors to unify development efforts with organizational goals.

Jan 2010 - Aug 2016, Research Position, NCSU Computer Science Department

• Research Position with Dr. Robert St. Amant in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) focusing on web accessibility, haptics/vibrotactile systems, and touch screen accessibility.

May 2009 - Dec 2009, Research Position, NCSU Computer Science Department

• Research position with Dr. Xuxian Jiang in systems security focusing on process/kernel/hypervisor based security measures and exploits, along with an emphasis on defeating existing virtual machine introspection (VMI) techniques.

Apr 2009 - March 2016, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, International Association of Visually Impaired Technologists (IAVIT)

• Co-founded 501C3 nonprofit to help address the issues faced by visually impaired individuals in the technology space.
• Responsible for all technology initiatives undertaken by the organization.
• Work with technology companies to promulgate universal design practices and accessibility awareness.

Apr 2006 - Nov 2008, Design architect, backend systems engineer, and web developer, RadarFind

• Designed and implemented location algorithm to locate objects in 3D space using radio telemetry.
• Wrote QuickView, a touch screen application, which allows users of the system to navigate the location based data presented to them, purely by touch.
• Designed and implemented a framework to gather information from hundreds of embedded devices running uCLinux. Developed applications for this platform, fixed bugs in existing code, made efficiency recommendations, maintained the system, released new firmware upgrades, remotely deployed new builds of software, wrote management applications to interact with the system, and programmed the hardware (namely Arcturus and Blackfin).
• Maintained J2EE environment running MySQL, Tomcat, and many other technologies on the side such as PHP, Perl, C/C++ applications, and Java apps not part of Tomcat.
• Rolled out systems upgrades, security patches, and performed other administrational tasks to production systems in the field.
• Wrote a myriad of different scripts in various programming languages to help the stability of the various systems.
• Reviewed doctoral research from academia and integrated key concepts from this research into applications, approaches, and strategies used by RadarFind.
• Interviewed and offered recommendations about various candidates for different senior developer/architect/engineering positions. I lead efforts to hire the director of IT, chief software architect, a web developer, and a senior java developer positions.

Oct 2006 - Dec 2007, Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer, Adlib Technology

• Led a growing team of developers, web designers, marketing staff, etc.
• Was Chief architect for all software and technical products.
• Oversaw the development of five comprehensive and diverse products with a six to twelve month time to market deadline.

Dec 2005 - Sep 2006, Consultant, developer, and customer relations manager, Alpha Zeta

• Due to software which I designed and implemented, as well as policies I put in place: AlphaZeta enjoyed a more than 400% growth in sales and simultaneous boost in productivity.
• Designed and implemented shipping, invoice management, and printing systems for handling online orders.
• Designed and implemented an in-house payroll system.
• Designed and implemented an analysis tool for displaying and printing employee efficiency reports.
• Wrote applications to integrate data from SOAP/WSDL/XML services offered by ebay.com, alibris.com, half.com, abe books, b-n.com, and more.
• Was in charge of customer relations, email response, issuing of refunds, and similar responsibilities.
• Setup internal Voice Over IP (VOIP) network using Asterisk PBX and services offered by Telliax, as well as others for both hard and soft phones.

Sep 2005 - Dec 2006, Accessibility/Usability architect, Friday Institute

• Responsible that all external and internal web content meet accessibility guidelines.
• Taught students, faculty, and staff best practices for accessibility, usability, and security.
• Served as consultant on how technology can help blind/visually impaired students in all levels of education with a major emphasis on STEM (Science Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).

May 2005 - Dec 2006, Research Assistant, NCSU Computer Science Department

• Research position with Dr. Donald Bitzer and Dr. Mladen Vouk, focusing on convolutional coding theory, security aspects thereof and more.
• Designed and implemented k/n convolutional encoder/decoders including those supporting various error correction techniques. Also researched other modern implementations.

Mar 2004 - Aug 2008, Accessibility/Usability Systems Specialist, NCSU Office of Information Technology

• Was part of the effort to bring about the NC State web accessibility policy, which further supports NC State's commitment to accessible websites for students, faculty, and staff.
• Took a large number of internal and external websites, web applications, and other such tools, and worked with their authors and designers to make them accessible.
• Participated in bottom up approach such that the individuals involved are now teaching others how easy and necessary universal design is.
• Performed both manual and automated accessibility and usability testing with regards to internal and external applications, public and private websites, and internal administrative tools.
• Presented to various audiences on accessibility/usability and the importance of universal design.