Jon Gunderson

Dr. Gunderson is the Coordinator of Accessible IT Group in the Division of Disability Resources and Education Services (DRES) at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana, Illinois. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Industrial Engineering with an emphasis in Human Factors. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from UW-Madison in Electrical and Computer engineering. He is responsible for helping the campus understand the accessibility issues of its online administrative and instructional resources and works with campus IT professionals and instructors to improve accessibility.

He is the past chair of the W3C User Agent Working Group and currently a participant in the W3C WAI ARIA working group and is particularly interested in the development of authoring practices and implementation testing. He leads the development group working on open source web accessibility evaluation tools including AInspector Sidebar add-on for Firefox browser, Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) 2.0 and Accessibility Bookmarklets. He is the primary software developer of the open source OpenAjax Accessibility Evaluation library used in AInspector Sideber and FAE 2.0 to evaluate web content for W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level A and AA requirements.

He has taught numerous online courses and workshops on accessible web design including courses on using the new W3C Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) specifications to create accessible web applications. He also presents a national conferences on web accessibility. He participates and leads both regional and national consortiums of higher educational institutions to promote and work together on improving information technology access in higher education.

He is a Certified Web Accessibility Professional (CWAP) from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP).