Work
Since 2002, I have worked on the design, implementation, marketing, and support of the Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft ® Office, an Office add-in facilitating the creation of standards-compliant and accessible XHTML via a simple wizard-style interface. The goal of the project is to leverage the information already present in the document via the Office Object Model (for example, the title and backing data table of an Excel pie chart) to create text equivalents and then to only interrogate the user for those parts of the document for which we have no other information. Simultaneously, I support a number of internal tools at DRES including an administrative database, a workflow database for our text conversion office, and a variety of other odds and ends that take me from C# to Java to PHP to Python and back to C and C++.
Prior to my work on the Wizard, I was an undergraduate and then graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Computer Science within the College of Engineering. In addition to my studies as a graduate student, I worked as a Teaching Assistant within the Department helping teach classes ranging in scope from few graduate students to hundreds of undergraduate freshmen. I simultaneously started my affiliation with the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services and the Illinois Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility working on a database-driven, XML-backed student case management system as well as some issues related to X Window System keyboard functionality via the AccessX project.
