Michael Curran
Founder Technical Consultant at NV Access Limited
Greater Brisbane Area Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Curran is a founder and technical consultant with 18 years of experience building accessible software and driving adoption of inclusive technologies worldwide. As the original creator and ongoing core developer of NVDA—the free, open-source screen reader used by over 200,000 blind and vision-impaired people—he blends deep hands-on engineering in Python and C++ with high-level advocacy and standards work across IAccessible2, UIA and PDF/UA. He has advised and collaborated with major tech firms including Microsoft, Google, Adobe and Mozilla to improve accessibility inside flagship products, and he frequently triages, debugs and prototypes complex interoperability issues between assistive technology and mainstream software. Known for practical expertise in accessibility APIs and usability best practices, he also brings organizational leadership from running NV Access and grassroots disability advocacy roles. Less obvious is his sustained capacity to manage and mentor contributions to a large, mature codebase while shaping both product strategy and international accessibility standards.
18 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Victorian Certificate of Education, English, Business management, Information Technology, Victorian Certificate of Education, English, Business management, Information Technology at Upwey High School
Github Skills (5)
accessibility10
ui-automation10
ria10
python10
wai-aria10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
nvaccess/nvda
Dec 2012 - Dec 2022
NVDA, the free and open source Screen Reader for Microsoft Windows
Role in this project:
Accessibility Specialist
Accessibility SpecialistContributions:1 release, 993 reviews, 1707 commits in 10 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to improving the NVDA screen reader's functionality related to accessibility. Their work included implementing features for better reporting of table headers in Microsoft Excel using UI Automation and making search suggestions more generic across different applications like Excel and Chrome. They also addressed issues related to the handling of ARIA roles such as "switch" and corrected how they are presented to the user. Further contributions included fixing a critical bug in the UIA handling of controllerFor and also improving the announcement of sort states within the table headers.
nvdascreen-readerwindowsaccessibilityblind
nvaccess/espeak
Nov 2013 - Sep 2015
Contributions:24 commits, 1 push, 3 branches in 1 year 9 months
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