Instructor

Instructor

Jon Gunderson, Ph.D.

Coordinator of Information Technology Accessibility

Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES)

College of Applied Health Sciences (AHS)

University of Illinois

Phone: (217) 244-5870

E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu

Vita for Jon Gunderson

Biography

Dr. Gunderson is the Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology Accessibility in the Division of Disability Resources and Education Services (DRES) at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana, Illinois. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Industrial Engineering with an emphasis in Human Factors.  He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from UW-Madison in Electrical and Computer engineering.  He is currently responsible for computer and information technology accessibility issues for students, faculty and staff with disabilities at UIUC.  Before his present position at UIUC, he was a visiting assistant professor in an Rehabilitation Services Administration sponsored rehabilitation engineering training program at DRES. As a graduate student he worked at the Trace Research and Development Center. While at the Trace Center he worked on a number of R&D projects and the evaluation of a number of technologies for people with motor impairments and visual impairments.  His continued research interests focus on how to improve the design information technologies for people with disabilities to achieve maximum performance and greater independence in their use of computer based technologies. He is working on number of projects related to the web and information technology accessibility that are part of the Illinois Center on Information Technology Accessibility (iCITA). He is the past chair of the W3C User Agent Working Group and currently involved in making dynamic HTML more accessible as part of the W3C Protocols and Formats Working Group work on the Accessible Rich Internet Applications. He has given numerous presentations, workshops and courses related to web accessibility. He leads the development of the Firefox Accessibility Extension and the Illinois Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator Tool. These tools help verify the use of the iCITA HTML Accessibility Best Practices techniques to implement the requirements of the Section 508 and W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. He led the development of the Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft Office to help authors create accessible HTML version of Microsoft Office documents and is now a commercial project from Virtual 508. . He also developed the PC Talking Typing Tutor a software program for Microsoft Windows to teach people with visual impairments and blindness how to touch type.