speakers.html

---
layout: page
title: Speakers
id: speakers
description: We are super excited about the this years lineup of speakers.
---

<p>We are super excited about the this years lineup of speakers.</p>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Jason-Thompson" class="speaker-name">Jason Thompson</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Jason-Thompson_300x300.jpg" alt="Jason-Thompson's Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>Jason is a Lead Digital Accessibility Specialist focused on strategy, helping organizations move beyond compliance to build sustainable, scalable accessibility practices. With a background in development and hands-on testing, he bridges the gap between technical execution and organizational change&ndash;turning accessibility from a checkbox into a capability.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Fabian-Herrera" class="speaker-name">Fabian Herrera</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Fabian-Herrera_300x300.jpg" alt="Fabian Herrera Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>Fabian Herrera is a Senior Software Engineer on the Core Front-end Platform team at Top Hat and a certified professional in web accessibility (CPWA). He is deeply passionate about digital accessibility, believing we should create seamless, delightful experiences for all end-users&ndash;not just products they merely tolerate. Beyond engineering, Fabian advocates for embedding inclusive design principles into our everyday internal communications and team culture.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Jeremy-Rivera" class="speaker-name">Jeremy Rivera</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Jeremy-Rivera_300x300.jpg" alt="Jeremy Rivera's Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>Jeremy Rivera is a Full-stack Software Engineer and Developer Advocate with extensive experience in writing and public speaking.  He is an active learner with an aptitude towards Cloud technologies such as AWS, Kubernetes and Salesforce.</p>
    <p>Jeremy holds a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA) certification from the IAAP and has presented several talks on digital accessibility at conferences like A11yNYC, A11y San Diego, Tampa Devs, Axe-Con, DroidCon, and Accessibility Camp Bay Area.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
    <h3 id="Claudio-Luis-Vera" class="speaker-name">Claudio Luís Vera</h3>
    <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Claudio-Luis-Vera_300x300.jpg" alt="Claudio Luìs Vera's Headshot" width="300" height="300">
    <p>Claudio Luís Vera is a digital accessibility consultant, speaker, and writer who explores how design and technology either enable or disable people. His work spans inclusive design, legal risk, assistive technology, and the ethics of AI. He has written for UX Collective and Smashing Magazine, spoken at CSUN, M-Enabling, and the ICT Symposium, and co-hosts Slop Happens, a podcast on the unintended consequences of technology.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Dusty-Levenberg" class="speaker-name">Dusty Levenberg</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Dusty-Levenberg_300x300.jpg" alt="Dusty Levenberg Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>Dusty Levenberg is an Accessibility Product Manager specializing in embedding inclusive design across complex digital ecosystems. Most recently at Riot Games, Dusty brings a background in compliance spanning startups, enterprise organizations, and government, bringing a systems-level perspective to accessibility that bridges regulatory requirements with player and user experience.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Ian-Lloyd" class="speaker-name">Ian Lloyd</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Ian-Lloyd_300x300.jpg" alt="Ian Lloyd's Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>Ian has been banging on about accessibility things since 2000 as a developer, in one form or another. He has spoken at CSUN, Pixel Pioneers (UK), and State of the Browser (UK). Ian creates tools and bookmarklets to help accessibility professionals, and other tools for developers in general. Ian also runs a11y-tools.com.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Justin-Stockton" class="speaker-name">Justin Stockton</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Justin-Stockton_300x300.jpg" alt="Justin Stockton's Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>Justin brings a unique combination of technical depth, accessibility expertise, and product management experience to his work. Having walked the path from developer to accessibility engineer to product manager, he understands the challenges organizations face at every level. His approach to accessibility is pragmatic and results-oriented: he believes that sustainable accessibility programs require not just technical compliance, but cultural transformation, embedding accessibility into every phase of the development lifecycle, from initial design concepts through deployment and maintenance.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="James-Steinbach" class="speaker-name">James Steinbach</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/James-Steinbach_300x300.jpg" alt="James Steinbach Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>James Steinbach is a front-end engineer with more than 15 years of experience building websites and applications for organizations ranging from agencies to developer-platform companies. His work focuses on modern CSS, design systems, accessibility, web performance, and the ever-evolving capabilities of the browser platform. Throughout his career, James has been an advocate for writing front-end code that is both user-friendly and developer-friendly: fast, accessible, maintainable, and enjoyable to work with.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Patrick-Fox" class="speaker-name">Patrick Fox</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Patrick-Fox_300x300.jpg" alt="Patrick Fox's Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>With nearly 30 years of web development experience and 20 years in the marketing agency world, Patrick has partnered with dozens of Fortune 500 clients to craft digital experiences that are as accessible as they are elegant. A passionate advocate for accessibility-first thinking, Patrick brings a combination of technical depth and real-world scale to the challenges of modern UI development - always in pursuit of solutions that are simpler, more robust, and built to last.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Jessica-Roache" class="speaker-name">Jessica Roache</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Jessica-Roache_300x300.jpg" alt="Jessica Roache's Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>Jessica Roache is Senior Manager, Global Corporate Communications at Ubisoft, where she spearheads Ubisoft's global accessibility communications program. Driving this 360-degree initiative led to her recognition as winner of the 2023 GAConf "MVP Award for Unsung Hero," an award recognizing behind-the-scenes efforts with big impact. Working cross-functionally to embed accessibility in Ubisoft's communications, marketing and events across its games and services, Jessica's passion is to empower everyone to drive accessibility improvements in their own sphere of influence.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Tait-Hoyem" class="speaker-name">Tait Hoyem</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Tait-Hoyem_300x300.jpg" alt="Tait Hoyem's Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>Tait Hoyem is a Computer Science graduate looking to make accessibility better at its technical core: building AT protocols, efficient screen readers, and firmware-level TTS capabilities. Tait’s goal is to get technology out of your way so that you can build what you want.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Roy-Samuelson" class="speaker-name">Roy Samuelson</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Roy-Samuelson_300x300.jpg" alt="Roy Samuelson's Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>Roy Samuelson ensures blind people enjoy watching videos. He holds a patent portfolio in Audio Description, authored A Voice Actor's Guide to Audio Description Performance, and hosts The ADNA Presents podcast. Through Parity Endeavors, he consults with media and technology companies on human vs. AI voice decisions and how to build accessibility into production from the start. He treats accessibility as storycraft, not compliance.</p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Dirk-Ginader" class="speaker-name">Dirk Ginader</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/Dirk-Ginader_300x300.jpg" alt="Dirk Ginader's Headshot" width="300" height="300">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>Dirk Ginader is Accessibility Engineering Lead at Google in Zurich. For the last year he focused strongly how AI generated Frontend code can be produced as accessible as possible. He has been active in the field of accessibility for over 25 years and also speaks regularly at conferences and workshops on this topic. </p>
  </div>
</section>

<section class="speaker">
  <h2 id="Gerard-K-Cohen" class="speaker-name">Gerard K. Cohen</h2>
  <img class="speaker-image" loading="lazy" src="/assets/speakers/placeholder-headshot_170x170.png" alt="Placeholder Headshot" width="170" height="170">
  <div class="speaker-bio">
    <p>Over the past decade, Gerard has built and advised accessibility teams that have impacted hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide. His experience spans from supporting commercial financial applications responsible for transferring trillions of dollars globally, to leading accessibility at pre-Elon Twitter, and helped to drive accessibility for the Atlassian Design System, where he collaborated with a team of exceptional designers and engineers at Atlassian to enhance the accessibility of components that power productivity tools like Jira, Confluence, and Trello. </p>
  </div>
</section>