Hello everyone,
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day and already a lot of energetic events including Inclusive Design Talks – #ID24 are happening across the world.
Thanks to good friends, Jennison and Joe Devon who thought of creating such a platform to raise awareness in the community.
The good part of this event is that it’s not essential to host a huge event. Everyone can mark this day by just raising awareness to as many as they can including just to a co-worker sitting at next desk!
Some of the events that I’m attending / participating are:
- Inclusive Design Talks hosted by The Paciello Group and Adobe
- App-athon hosted by BarrierBreak and NASSCOM Foundation supported by IBM.
Oh yes, this year also marks my 10th year working in the accessibility industry! It was 2005 when Shilpi Kapoor pinged me over then MSN messenger and asked if I’m looking for a change in career and want to take up an interesting career. Though that requires me to relocate all the way to Mumbai from Hyderabad, I accepted her kind offer and that’s when I started learning about accessibility. Sincere gratitude to Shilpi and Net Systems Informatics (India) Pvt. Ltd., (now BarrierBreak). At BarrierBreak, I learnt quite a lot of things including accessibility testing, promoting accessibility and that was an awesome opportunity to talk to community about inclusion.
In 2009 – moved on to Yahoo! to set up accessibility practice in India office and that’s when I got an opportunity to work with mighty Victor Tsaran who I see as most energetic person and one who always love to learn something new. It was a fantastic experience to work with a large company and help designers and developers learn about accessibility.
In 2012 when Yahoo experiencing market crisis, I along with another 3000+ folks got laid off but luck is in my favor and I quickly got options to work with few companies and I chose to work for PayPal where I was responsible to work mostly with Quality engineering group across the company. This gave me an opportunity not just work for PayPal but also support one of the largest e-commerce company eBay for accessibility.
In 2014 September, I made a tough decision to leave PayPal and join HCL Technologies to again explore service industry and this gave me yet another awesome opportunity to work with Google where I supported exciting products like YouTube, Hangouts, Play and Search.
However, I recently realized there is a danger of moving myself away from core accessibility enthusiasts in the world if I’m at HCL and this is for several reasons which I would be writing in my next post… but the good news is that starting mid-June, I’ll be joining yet another awesome accessibility gang at Deque!
So wishing you all a happy accessibility day!
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