It was 2012 when I was laid off from Yahoo!, my good friend Dennis Lembree referred me PayPal; I joined them to lead Accessibility initiatives for it’s Customer Quality and Engineering Services and that has forced me to relocate to Chennai.
A couple of months later, excitement doubled as Bill Scott hired my good friend and former Yahoo!, Victor Tsaran to lead accessibility initiatives across PayPal!
At PayPal, we probably have been able to build a small but very talented accessibility team wherein each member has an unique skill. The team consist of a design expert (Cathy), two rock star engineers (Dennis Lembree and Nawaz Khan among Victor and myself.
At PayPal, what I liked the most is encouragement from leadership for any innovative idea that we come up with. They just not only encourage us to do the work but also involve as much as they can and dive into details. It was wonderful that I have been able to work on multiple projects.
Another exciting part of PayPal is that innovative projects gets open sourced and help community at large. Accessibility team, in last 2.5 years have released four such projects including:
- SkipTo plugin – a fantastic plugin for sites with large content; something like news and media websites
- Bootstrap Accessibility Plugin
- amCharts Accessibility Plugin
- HTML5 Accessible video player
I would like to call out Dennis and Nawaz for their wonderful contributions for above projects and of course Victor is certainly partner in this crime with his great ideas 🙂
In addition, we have also built an internal application for our colleagues to run accessibility tests and that has received tremendous response from across the organization.
We were also able to position ourselves representing in several conferences related to Accessibility including popular events like CSUN and Techshare India.
Well, there are many more great moments at PayPal and with mixed feelings, I have made a tough decision to put a pause to my journey at PayPal and 19th September, 2014 would be my last working day.
There is absolutely no reason as to why I’m leaving PayPal. It’s just that I have decided to explore another opportunity in service industry. Yes, I will be joining HCL Technologies later this month. eBay Inc in general and PayPal in particular is absolutely a great place to work with!
I take this opportunity to thank leadership, coworkers and everyone at PayPal and eBay for making my stint a pleasant one. In particular, I wish my mighty accessibility team all the best; I’m sure guys, you inspire a lot more in the community and looking forward to see more wonderful projects from PayPal.
Best wishes,
Srinivasu
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