Rich Schwerdtfeger
President And Creator
Austin, Texas, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRich Schwerdtfeger is a veteran accessibility technologist and software engineer who served as IBM’s CTO for Accessibility and helped pioneer the first GUI screen reader for the IBM PC. He has decades of leadership in standards and community efforts—chairing W3C WAI-ARIA work, co-chairing SVG accessibility, and contributing to W3C specs that improved SVG and ARIA semantics for assistive technologies. Now based between Austin and Bonaire, he channels his storytelling and videography skills as President and Creator of the A Diver’s Life channel while also leading heritage preservation efforts for Bonaire. Known for bridging deep technical architecture with industry-wide collaboration, he uniquely combines standards-level impact with hands-on content creation aimed at helping people live by the sea.
13 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Software Engineering, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Software Engineering at The University of Connecticut
Github Skills (5)
accessibility10
svg10
wai-aria10
html9
documentation8
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
w3c/svgwg
Jan 2013 - Apr 2016
SVG Working Group specifications
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer & Accessibility Specialist
Front-end Developer & Accessibility SpecialistContributions:70 commits, 23 pushes, 1 comment in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Rich primarily contributed to the SVG specification by focusing on accessibility enhancements. Their work included adding support for the `tabindex` attribute and integrating WAI-ARIA attributes to improve keyboard navigation and semantic meaning. They also updated the documentation to reference the new ARIA Graphics module and made changes to default ARIA semantics for various SVG elements, ensuring compliance with accessibility guidelines and WCAG 2.0.
svgrsvgosvgwavemorph
w3c/aria
Jul 2014 - Aug 2017
Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)
Role in this project:Front-end Developer & Accessibility Specialist
Front-end Developer & Accessibility SpecialistContributions:161 commits, 23 PRs, 154 pushes in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Rich primarily contributed to the SVG Accessibility API Mappings specification, focusing on the accessibility of SVG elements. Their commits modified the role mappings table, including the addition of default mappings for missing attributes and adjustments to the handling of various SVG elements. The user also added new test cases to verify accessibility attributes and included editorial changes related to text alternative elements to enhance clarity.
accessiblewaiwai-ariainternetaria
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