Resume

Just started, let me cook 🍳

Responsible for guiding accessibility beyond compliance, inclusive research, and trauma-informed strategy. Manage direct reports and provide leadership to specialists across engineering, research, and design practices.

• Collaborated with 30+ stakeholders to define a vision, mission, and key success metrics for an agency-wide accessibility strategy extending beyond Section 508 compliance.
• Increased research focused on disabled people using assistive technologies from 0% of studies to 12% in 2022.
• Built partnerships with disabled communities, created training materials and provided resources for researchers, worked with leadership to hire people with disabilities, and scaled up reporting on underserved populations.
• Raised the percentage of right-first-time pre launch reviews (no major defects) from 0% to 15%, saving costs by significantly reducing time spent on fixes.
• Improved the percentage of specialists with balanced workloads by 14% in 2022. Created dashboards to prioritize work, weekly specialist check ins, collaborative office hours, and more.
• Initiated and led research investigating how disabled people provide accessibility feedback to the agency. Interviewed disabled people, the Section 508 office, community organizations, and internal stakeholders which informed the release of a human-centered accessibility statement, which replaced an inaccessible, 16-year-old Section 508 page.
• Increased participation in an agency wide accessibility champions training program from 0 to 50+ participants within a month. Designed community-driven feedback methods that informed rapid iterations to the program’s redesign.

Oversaw designers, researchers, and a11y specialists, liaising between the team and stakeholders to implement, sustain, and grow a11y strategy.

Supported research efforts with trauma-informed guidance. Tracked inclusion of disabled and underserved communities.

Spot-checked wireframes and mockups and wrote a11y annotations as needed. Resolved defects by writing semantic HTML and ARIA code; documented best practices and acceptance criteria.

• Authored Ad Hoc’s Accessibility Beyond Compliance playbook, including 9 actionable plays to drive equitable outcomes in government
• Initiated maintenance audits for 6 products; identified/remediated 50+ major accessibility issues.
• Standardized tactics for including people from underserved communities in research studies and documenting instances of exclusion.
• Founded a trauma-informed design group and a grassroots inclusive research practice that grew to 140+ members.

Led 12+ product teams to launch accessible services. Used screen readers (JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, TalkBack), accessibility testing tools (axe, axe-coconut, HeadingsMap, nu checker) to create and prioritize defect tickets.

Reviewed wireframes and mockups, offering accessibility feedback and design critique. Pair-programmed with engineers and performed code reviews. Collaborated with developers to remediate accessibility defects according to WCAG, WAI-ARIA, and industry best practices. Led inclusive research.

• Updated an agency's design system; examples included replacing an outdated wizard pattern with a one-thing-per-age principle, designing an action link, and documenting accessibility bugs with remediations.
• Created training workshops for designers on inclusive design practices, such as when to use links vs. buttons.
• Led a trauma-informed redesign of a major benefits application form through co-design methods with healthcare staff and community organizations. Removed triggering questions and implemented smarter conditional form branching that reduced reactivating trauma for people with MST and PTSD.

Led the redesign of an online loan eligibility checker. Facilitated interviews with small business SMEs and usability testing with minority-owned family businesses. Served as an in-house a11y specialist.

• Prototyped, developed, and iterated a responsive one thing per page form prototype using US Web Design System components in Sketch.
• Partnered with local and state governments in Hawaii, California, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh to provide local financial relief to more than 50,000 citizens following the redesign.
• Guided accessibility for the design of a county voter election website template to meet and surpass WCAG 2.1 compliance.

Orchestrated the entire inclusive redesign of the job search experience on a government website, with the goal of increasing applications from top-talent STEM candidates.

• Designed a WCAG 2.1 AA-compliant application flow that included 100+ Sketch wireframes and InVision clickable prototypes.
• Led a 3 day Work Activity Affinity Diagram (WAAD) workshop involving 20+ project team members.
• Developed personas, journey maps, and user stories through behavioral mapping exercises informed by contextual stories from the WAAD.
• Designed a WCAG AA-compliant application flow that included 100+ Sketch wireframes and InVision clickable prototypes.
• Initiated and led usability testing to guide rapid design iterations and (in)validate assumptions.
• Reduced application time from several minutes to less than 30 seconds.

Minor in Business Leadership and Computer Science. Mentored by Kim Gausepohl, Ph.D, AUXP as a UX intern at NIS.

Awarded the higher level credential of CPWA by passing both the CPACC and WAS exam.

• Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC), Credential ID 21JACJK053
• Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS), Credential ID 21MAWJK020