I am a self studied web accessibility practitioner with 18+ years of work experience.
During my vocational training as dress maker, I discovered my interest in graphic design and learned how to use Photoshop, Pagemaker and later InDesign. After an internship I decided to refocus on web design. That quickly lead to me learn how to write HTML and CSS.
My career started as a freelance web designer and translator. After moving to Japan in 2007 I began working in several start-ups and large companies. In the beginning as web designer, later as UX designer and Front-end Developer.
In 2008 I was first tasked with considering accessibility and included it in my work at every step of the way. And in 2019 I first held the title Accessibility Evangelist, since 2023 Accessibility Specialist.
I am a self-taught web accessibility practitioner with over 19 years of professional experience. I now work as an accessibility specialist with a focus on the US market, having worked as an accessibility advocate, senior UX/UI designer and front-end developer.
I taught myself HTML and CSS coding in 2006, after spending a year learning Photoshop, Illustrator and other graphic design / page layout tools.
I started my career as a freelance web designer and translator. After moving to Japan in 2007, I started working in various start-ups and large companies. First as a web designer, then as a UX designer and front-end developer.
In 2008, I had my first encounter with accessibility concerns and began to incorporate it into my work at every step. And in 2019, I first held the title of Accessibility Evangelist, since 2023 Accessibility Specialist.
Since April 2024, I have been the MC of the A11y Tokyo meetup.
In the following you can find a list of project highlights by company, starting with my Curriculum Vitae or resume.
If you want to see a list of projects, they can be found below this.
Company: Outbrain
Position: Accessibility Advocate, Senior Implementation Engineer
Time frame: 2018 to 2023
Company: Qurate
Position: Lead Front-end Developer, Operations & Project Manager
Time frame: 2016 to 2017
I created a set of accessibility guidelines to foster better understanding of accessibility needs and rules. These are made up of a set of documents that are part guidelines and part checklist for practical application.
This section also considers risk management.
Here I describe my efforts to make a growing design system accessible. This includes auditing design and code, writing documentation and influencing the ongoing design and development process.
For 4 years I worked on improving the accessibility of Outbrain's products. In this time I lead a team of implementation engineers interest in accessibililty. Together we worked on our internal tools, layouts Outbrain provided and trainings.
A common request by Outbrains customers was to have customised, modern layouts. The publisher described in this project had requested a layout where 2 small image would be shown next to a larger one. While this is easy to do with CSS grid, the layouts Outbrain provides offered some unique challenges.
This project describes a full redeisgn across several websites of one publishing group in APAC. The design shown in this project took a lot of CSS engineering to present the exact layout that was requested.
My very first project at tripla was a rebranding, including renewing the logo and using a royalty free font, new app logo's and the art direction of a mascot.
tripla's main offering was an AI driven chatbot. It was my task to make a modern design, that offered space for widgets inside the chatbot interface, like answer selection, room selection, calendars etc.
In hindsight, I made many mistakes in the design and code as far as an accessible product is concerned.
My last project at tripla was concerned with creating a design system, as tripla was planning to expand its offerings.
This was my first attempted at creating a design system. While I was designing colours and components, I also coded the components in html, to be later used in a vue.js environment.
I was tasked with creating an event site for Slush Tokyo 2017. It was build on Qurates proprietary PaaS (Platfrom as s Service) and featured social media posts from visitors as well as original content from the Slush team.
My work started at pre-sales and planning to design and stakeholder management of the local event team, the parent organistion in Finland and Qurates own team.
I worked on a re-lunch of Qurates corporate website.
This was the first time to work with the then still new flex-box, icon fonts and webkit-background-clip.
While my accessibility knowledge was not as in-depth at the time, I took accessibility into consideration.
After successfully speeding up the mobile Ichiba's top page, I was tasked with a full renewal and A/B test of the mobile search page. This was the 3rd most valuable page in all of Rakuten at the time.
My tasks included everything from planning, designing, front-end development, to managing the A/B test and stakeholders across 5 department. This was a very good lesson in paying attention to detail, understanding and managing the needs of different stakeholders, some of whom did not want to make change at all and how to run an A/B test with a 10.000+ users in a day.
After the semi success of the Smartphone search, I was tasked with reforming the product comparison page. I tried to apply the same rigor as on search, but the project finally was given up on and I moved to more developing focused tasks.
What was left was my basic design language, with a focus on simplifying the intrface to not overwhelm the user.
The personal website of author and musican Annette Katharina Hildebrandt. This project began life as the website of her culture project management office, named Projektbüro Hildebrandt in 2008.
The ABC Barrierefreiheit was a project by Projektbüro Hildebrandt studying the accessibility of stations along the Lutherweg (english: Luther Path) in Saxony-Anhalt.
I supported the project by checking the relative accessibility of the websites of stations along the path.
The personal website of educator, theologian and author Lothar Tautz. I took over the development of the website in early 2008 and transformed it from a political campaign site to an archive of speeches, essays and other publications.
