Wendy Chisholm

Wendy Chisholm is an author and strategist who has pushed to make the world more equitable since 1995. She co-wrote “Universal Design for Web Applications” with Matt May (O’Reilly, 2008) and edited Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and 2.0. She has appeared as Wonder Woman in a web comic with the other HTML5 Super Friends and as herself at Ignite Seattle. In 2014, she gave a short keynote at OSCON, “Introvert? Extrovert? Klingon? We’ve got you covered.”

As a Principal Accessibility Architect at Microsoft, Wendy leads AI for Accessibility – a $25 million grant program that aims to accelerate the development of accessible and intelligent AI solutions that amplify human capability for the more than 1 billion people worldwide with a disability.

Previously, she helped start the infusion of accessibility throughout Microsoft’s internal engineering systems; worked to make Visual Studio Team Services more accessible; shepherded Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and 2.0. as staff for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); helped the University of Washington’s AccessComputing project increase the number of people with disabilities in computing fields; contributed to the development of WebAnywhere – a screen reader on the go; and independently consulted for companies including Microsoft, Google, and Adobe to integrate universal design into their products and as a consultant for the American Foundation for the Blind. Wendy has a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Industrial Engineering/Human Factors.