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#GAAD – also celebrating my 10th year of accessibility life!

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:

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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