Andrew Hedges is an educator and technologist based in Portland, Oregon. A professional web developer since 1998, Andrew is a Cofounder of and the COO for Assistiv Labs, a web accessibility testing platform. Prior to Assistiv Labs, Andrew provided engineering leadership to Disney, Apple, and Zapier.
During the Summer of 2019, Andrew founded The Collab Lab, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that until 2024 provided remote, collaborative project practice for early-career web developers. The program brought code school graduates and self-taught career switchers together with working web developers to create mobile web apps using agile practices used by professional software teams.
Outside of work, Andrew publishes books with his dad & daughter via Road’s End Press, produces The Slant & Go, a podcast about the National Football League, and plays in the indie rock cover band 🔥hedgefire🔥.
In 2016, Andrew returned to the city of his birth and early childhood, beautiful Portland, Oregon where he lives with his 5ʹ2ʺ wife, poet and book editor Valerie Witte.
Prior to his career in web development, Andrew spent 7 years in higher education administration, managing residence halls and coordinating training programs for university staff. He holds a Masters of Education from the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1995, Andrew wrote his terminal paper for that degree on the potential effects of computer-mediated communication on college student identity development.
Accessibility maturity models help organizations track progress across their accessibility programs. Automated tooling (sometimes called Continuous Accessibility) is a proven way to boost software quality at scale. What options exist to apply Continuous Accessibility concepts to make progress against today’s accessibility maturity models?
The landscape of software accessibility quality tooling automation is changing rapidly. For organizations working to improve outcomes by evaluating progress against one of the several available accessibility maturity models, it can be confusing to understand how automated tools map to the dimensions measured by the models.
At the end of this talk, you’ll understand the following:
Process gets a bad rap. When employed effectively, solid processes are what allow organizations to repeatedly achieve desired outcomes. Web accessibility is no different. Join this talk to learn about the intersection of good processes and automated tooling.
for free. You
can too.