Founder of A11y Audits, co-founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and immediate past chair of the GAAD Foundation. I co-host the Accessibility and Gen. AI Podcast and build AI tools that help developers ship accessible software.
- AIMAC, the AI Model Accessibility Checker. It has language models generate web pages, runs axe-core on the results, and scores each model on serious and critical violations. Results at aimac.ai. A GAAD Foundation project, MIT licensed. Coming soon: PACE is the follow-up to AIMAC. It is a peer-reviewed scientific paper that tests form components, and it will be presented at the ASSETS conference in Portugal. Then we will release AIMAC Agents, which is essentially AIMAC on the command line.
- VisionScribe, a skill for AI coding tools that writes alt text and image descriptions using the best advice of accessibility experts. Share an image, say where it will be used, and get text ready to paste into code, a CMS, a blog or social media post.
Global Accessibility Awareness Day started with a blog post I wrote in November 2011, asking why accessibility know-how had not reached mainstream developers. Jennison Asuncion read the blog post, and together we launched the first GAAD in May 2012. It now happens every third Thursday of May, with a social media reach of over 220 million. Along the way there has been a Stevie Wonder concert on the Apple campus, an event at the White House in May 2024, and an address to the United Nations workforce. On GAAD's tenth anniversary we started the GAAD Foundation, and in 2025 GitHub took the very last GAAD Pledge, committing to improve the accessibility of open source at scale.
I have been shipping software since the early web. I was an early employee at Predictive Systems, which went public in 1999, where I worked on the backbone of the Internet and built big data projects before the term big data existed. Later I was a backend developer on AmericanIdol.com at Fox, then co-founded Diamond, an agency that built digital products for a variety of clients, from voting apps for reality TV shows to robots to a project for The Pope. Outside of work I organized Los Angeles developer meetups for over a decade, founded CTO Mixers, a community for technology leaders, and serve on the advisory board of USC's Information Technology Program.
- Accessibility and Gen. AI Podcast, with Eamon McErlean.
- Joe Dev On Tech, my newsletter on AI and accessibility.
- ORCID record, for citing AIMAC and other work.