Speakers
Clint Covington
Clint Covington is a 28-year Microsoft veteran and leads the accessibility strategy and execution for the company’s Experience + Devices group. This means he works to make Windows, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, SharePoint and Copilot usable for people with disabilities.
Clint is also responsible for the redesign of the Accessibility Assistant now shipping across M365 applications. He is one of the driving forces behind Microsoft’s mission to empower every person on the planet to achieve more.
Michael Johnson
Michael Johnson is a seasoned executive with over 40 years of experience in the technology, publishing, and education markets. He has worked on digital database and content creation projects around the world.
Michael is the Vice President of Content at Benetech. In this role he works directly with publishers, conversion houses, technology platforms, and educational institutions to help them understand and implement processes that allow for fully accessible content to get from authors all the way through to the end reader.
Michael is on the Board of Directors of the DAISY Consortium. He has a long-time relationship to standards having sat on several ISO, NISO, and MARC standards committees throughout his career. He has a deep background in the creation and distribution of content.
George Kerscher
George Kerscher (PhD) began his IT innovations in 1987 and coined the term «print disabled». George is dedicated to developing technologies that make information not only accessible, but also fully functional in the hands of persons who are blind or who have print disabilities. He believes properly designed digitally published materials and web pages can make information accessible to all people. George is an advocate for semantically rich content which can be used effectively by everybody.
As Chief Innovations Officer of the DAISY Consortium, Senior Advisor, Global Literacy to Benetech, and member of Publishing Groups in the W3C, Kerscher is a recognized international leader in document accessibility. In addition, Kerscher chairs the DAISY/NISO Standards committee.
«Access to information is a fundamental human right.» (2003 to the United Nations)
Basile Mignonneau
After 9 years in publishing and digital publishing, Mignonneau joined the Valentin Haüy Association in 2020 to put his skills and knowledge to the benefit of people with sight disabilities. He is now working to improve the numbers of adapted books in France through semi-automatic solutions to bring more adapted books (Full Daisy and Digital braille) to their users (17k people).
Christophe Rigaud
Christophe Rigaud (PhD) is a guest researcher in document image analysis at the computer science laboratory of La Rochelle University and AI architect at Mangas.io company based in Caen, France. He received a double European PhD degree in computer science from the University of La Rochelle (France) and the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain) in 2014.
His research focuses on the analysis of comic book images by combining computer vision techniques and recent large language model capacities. Dr. Rigaud aims to find and develop methods to automatically describe comic book content for diverse application such as content retrieval, interactivity, translation, accessibility, audio description etc.
Neil Soiffer
Neil Soiffer was a principal architect of MathML, the standard for putting math on the web. He is the main developer of MathCAT, which is used with NVDA, JAWS, EasyReader and other assistive technologies to make math accessible in Web, Word, and PowerPoint documents.
He has published numerous papers on math accessibility and is a member of various standards groups concerned with accessibility on the Web and elsewhere. He currently co-chairs the W3C’s math working group. He received a BS in Math from MIT and a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
