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.

Øyvind Engh

Øyvind Engh is Acting Deputy National Librarian at the National Library of Norway. For nearly twenty years, he has headed Norway’s accessible literature services and has been a strong advocate for international collaboration in this field.

Hadrian Gardeur

Hadrien Gardeur is the Deputy Director at EDRLab and has over 20 years of experience in digital publishing. He has led the development of multiple reading apps (native mobile apps and Web apps) and is the lead architect on Readium projects (reading engines for mobile, desktop, and the Web).

Since 2008, he has worked on all major revisions of the EPUB standard and he is currently the lead of the Media Overlays Task Force and Digital Comics Task Force at W3C. In addition to digital publishing formats, he is the co-creator of Readium LCP (an ISO standard for protecting digital publications) and OPDS (a distribution standard for digital publications).

Jens Halvarsson

Jens Halvarsson is CEO and co-owner of Textalk. He works with commercial digital publishing platforms for publishers – solutions designed to make editorial content accessible to everyone across formats and devices.

Jens is driven by the belief that what matters should be accessible to all, at the right moment and in the right format.

Mattias Karlsson

Mattias Karlsson has been part of Dolphin since 1994, beginning his career as a software developer before stepping into the role of Product Manager in 2009. He now leads the development team for Dolphin EasyReader and has played an active role in shaping international accessibility standards, contributing to initiatives such as DAISY, EPUB 3, eBraille and multiple EU funded projects.

At Dolphin, he champions the creation of assistive technology built from the ground up to support people who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic or have other reading difficulties. Under his leadership, the team designs intuitive, purpose built software that enables users of all technical abilities to access computers, phones, and tablets with confidence. Empowering independence through accessible technology remains central to his work.

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)

Rafael Martins

Rafael Martins, holds a degree in Business Administration and specializes in web development and programming, databases, and data protection. He applies innovative solutions, systematization, and Artificial Intelligence focused on accessibility, organizational efficiency, and digital transformation, always oriented towards creating accessible solutions with real impact that strengthen the cause of the Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind.

Currently, he is the IT, Infrastructure, Development and Innovation, and Digital Publishing Manager at the Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind.

Julian Nauta

Julian Nauta works as a product manager for Tactile images, Braille books and music at Dedicon in the Netherlands. Dedicon is a non-profit organisation that adapt materials for all visual or reading impairments. Nauta has a background in product design and believes in co-creating tangible solutions for real-world problems or limitations. In his role as s product manager he applies his knowledge of design thinking to improve Dedicon’s products to better suit their clientele in the Netherlands.

Nauta will talk about Tactile images and an international working group that aims to define a common design language and and to be able to share production files amongst each other.

Richard Orme

When teaching in a college 40 years ago Richard met a blind student who needed to access textbooks and exam materials. Thus began a rewarding and varied career in what is now called accessibility. At RNIB he worked with more than 400 blind and partially sighted people to support their use of technology in education and employment before going on to hold senior positions in national and international non-profits and software companies.

Richard is now Chief Executive of the DAISY Consortium. He is a founding member of the UK Publishers Accessibility Action Group, and Advisory Board Vice Chair of the Accessible Books Consortium (an initiative of the UN agency WIPO).

Alexandre Munck

Alexandre Munck, Executive Superintendent of the Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind since October 2016, holds a Master’s degree in Corporate Sustainability Management from Cranfield University School of Management (United Kingdom) 2015/2016; an Executive MBA in Finance from Fundação Getúlio Vargas; 26 years of experience in the third sector (NGOs); and a degree in Business Administration from Faculdade Metropolitanas Unidas (FMU). He has participated in courses on Entrepreneurship and Finance at Babson College in Boston (USA), Introduction to International Relations and the Norwegian Sociocultural System at the University of Oslo (Norway), and the National Financial System (Profins) in São Paulo.

Sami Määttä

Sami Määttä works in Accessibility Library Celia, Finland. He is an expert in accessible mathematics in digital publications and takes part in the translation work with the screen reader add-on MathCAT. He has experience in planning and doing user research with children with print disabilities.

Sami Määttä will discuss authoring and proofreading MathML content. MathML wasn’t intended to be written by hand but rather be generated by different converter tools. Sami will give an overview of existing solutions and different formats that can have MathML code. The aim is to also open discussion on solutions we don’t know of yet!

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.

Fredrik Schill

Fredrik Schill is CTO and co-owner of Textalk and has worked with digital publishing and content conversion technologies for more than 25 years. He develops robust systems that transform complex editorial content into structured and accessible formats such as EPUB and DAISY.

Fredrik is driven by a commitment to quality, scalability, and long-term sustainability in digital publishing.

Edmar Schut

Edmar Schut works as a Technology Architect at Dedicon, one of the largest producers of accessible content in the Netherlands.
With many years of experience at the intersection of technology, accessibility, and automation, he focuses on designing and implementing innovative systems for the production and distribution of accessible information.

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.

Wilfred Østgulen

Wilfred Østgulen is the Director of IT at the National Library of Norway. He is responsible for the development of national language models for Norwegian and Sámi. He has 30 years of experience in IT development, organization, governance, and leadership, gained through roles in the Armed Forces, the Ministry of Defence, Aetat/NAV, Altinn, Sykehuspartner in South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority, the police, and Accenture.

Wilfred has been working at the National Library of Norway since the autumn of 2021 and holds a Cand. Scient. degree in Computer Science from the University of Oslo, awarded in 1993.