Shawn Henry
Director, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolShawn Henry is a veteran accessibility leader with over two decades of experience shaping inclusive web standards and education, now directing the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Based in Madison, WI, he has led WAI’s outreach and program teams since 2003, blending policy, technical guidance, and hands-on advocacy to make the web more usable for people with disabilities. His work spans academia and research—including MIT and the TAdER text adaptability project—and practical education through uiAccess, where he has taught accessible UX and technical writing for years. Known for translating complex accessibility requirements into actionable guidance, he combines deep standards expertise with a long track record of community-driven innovation. A subtle but telling detail: his career began in technical writing and usability in the late 1980s, giving him a rare longitudinal perspective on how accessibility practices have evolved with the web.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
MSc. Digital Inclusion
Github Skills (109)
mobile-web10
italia10
google-tag-manager10
relationship10
atag10
gulp10
semantics10
lucee10
audio10
clarity10
wcag10
lighthouse10
netlify10
wai-aria10
policies10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
w3c/wai-arrm
Feb 2021 - Jun 2021
Contributions:34 reviews, 40 commits, 34 PRs in 4 months
w3c/wai-authoring-tools-list
Mar 2019 - Dec 2022
List of Authoring Tools
Contributions:3 reviews, 83 commits, 67 PRs in 3 years 10 months
securityauthoring
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