Speakers

Aubrey Blanche

Aubrey Blanche believes most organisations don’t fail on their values because they lack good intentions: they fail because their systems were never designed to live up those values.

Blanche is the founder of The Mathpath, a systems design practice that helps organisations govern AI ethically and accountably — attending in equal measure to the technology and to the people it affects.

She is also Director of Ethical Advisory and Strategic Partnerships at The Ethics Centre, a non-profit dedicated to bringing ethics to the centre of everyday life. She was previously an executive at Atlassian and Culture Amp. She is completing a Master’s in AI Ethics & Society at the University of Cambridge, with a focus on how AI impacts and is shaped by queer and disabled users.

Keynote Address - Building Anti-Ableist AI? Crip Theory Meets Automation

AI systems are trained on a fantasy of the “normal” user — someone who moves through the world without friction, whose body and mind require no accommodation, whose output is never interrupted. This keynote asks what changes when AI is built from a different starting premise: one where interdependence, adaptation, and non-normative embodiment are the default, not the exception requiring a retrofit.

Drawing on disability studies and crip theory — including Eva Kittay’s work on dependency and care, and Alison Kafer’s political/relational model of disability — Aubrey Blanche argues that the automation industry’s obsession with “efficiency” and “frictionlessness” is, functionally, a machine for scaling ableism. Fixing this takes more than accessibility features bolted onto ableist architecture.

This talk maps where current AI development forecloses disabled autonomy, where it could genuinely expand it, and what changes when disabled people set the terms of that design rather than requesting access to someone else’s.

Katja Forbes

Katja Forbes is a global keynote speaker and author of Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun (foreword by Gartner’s Don Scheibenreif). As founder of The CX Evolutionist, she defined Machine Customer Experience (MCX) as a strategic category in Agentic Commerce, helping leaders navigate what happens when AI agents become buyers. With more than 30 years spanning global financial services, consultancy, and executive leadership across Asia, Europe, and Australia, Katja brings rare commercial depth to a topic drowning in hype.

Keynote Address - Access for Agents, Inclusion for Humans

AI agents are already acting on behalf of humans. Booking flights. Comparing insurance. Completing purchases. What nobody in the accessibility space has asked yet is what that means for us.

There are two layers here that most people haven’t connected.

The first: machines are becoming customers. They don’t experience your interface the way humans do. They query APIs, parse structured data, and make decisions based on machine-readable signals. If your digital infrastructure can’t communicate with other machines, you’re invisible to a growing class of buyer.

The second: people with disabilities are increasingly delegating to AI agents and an agent acting on someone’s behalf doesn’t make access barriers disappear. It moves them upstream. What happens when that agent hits an inaccessible backend? The exclusion doesn’t end. It just becomes invisible.

This talk will change how you think about accessibility in an agentic world. Not just the interface between human and screen but the infrastructure between machine and machine, and the human who depends on that machine to act for them.

Léonie Watson

Léonie Watson has spent almost 30 years making the web work better for everyone. She is co-founder and Director of TetraLogical, Chair of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Board of Directors, and co-chair of the W3C Web Applications Working Group. In 2026 she became an Institute of Directors Certified Company Director.

She speaks internationally about emerging technologies like AI, agentic systems, and conversational interfaces, and about corporate governance and strategy — always with an accessibility influence. She also speaks about losing her sight and what it taught her about technology, resilience, and design.

Keynote Address - W3C’s Vision for Accessible Innovation and Global Standardisation

This keynote explores W3C’s forward‑looking vision for accessibility and standardisation in an era defined by AI‑driven user interfaces, personalisation, and next‑generation web technologies. Léonie, Watson will highlight how emerging standards can ensure that rapid innovation remains grounded in inclusive design principles, shaping a future where digital experiences adapt to the needs of every user.

Charlii Parker

Charlii Parker is a Senior UX and accessibility practitioner working at the intersection of accessibility, research, and reality. She helps teams design products that don’t quietly exclude people.

With over a decade of experience running inclusive research with people with disability and other marginalised groups, Charlii helps businesses turn ‘we should’ into ‘we did.’ Known for being practical, candid, and gently intolerant of performative accessibility, she focuses on what actually works in the real world, while occasionally overthinking alt text more than is probably healthy.

The Alt-Text Existential Crisis: A Live Therapy Session

Alt text is the industry’s favourite ‘easy win’… until you’re 30 minutes deep, questioning your life choices and trying to work out if the dog is essential to the content (*note – the dog is ALWAYS essential to the content!). Welcome to a group therapy session for anyone who has spiralled over the alt attribute. Together we’ll unpack the tension between description and intent, push past the “just alt=”” everything” and make sense of why this ‘simple’ task feels so hard, with practical ways to approach it without the existential crisis.

Chris Gaulin

Chris Gaulin is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the digital accessibility space.  He regularly brings his experience in digital accessibility, communication technologies, education, and e-learning to government agencies and organizations of all sizes.

Chris is a founding board member of the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) Foundation, where he works to disrupt the culture of technology and digital product development to include accessibility.

Building Empathy with Dark Patterns

When it comes to motivating your team to embrace accessibility, empathy is the most powerful tool.  We spend our time helping our colleagues understand why accessibility is so important.  While lived experience provides the best results, what if you were able to leverage dark patterns for good.

In this talk, Chris will share strategies for utilizing dark patterns to build empathy internally.  With real-world examples, participants will walk away with lessons from the dark side.

Christopher Hills

Christopher Hills is an entrepreneur with a background in engineering. Studying film and photography at university, he started his own business with a focus on the creative arts. After experiencing several barriers as a quadriplegic, he found himself working for over a decade in software design and testing, with a focus on switch accessibility. Christopher lives in his own home with his three mischievous cats.

Human Stories Behind Hands-Free Drone Control

A first-hand look at a hands-free drone app redefining flight. Through both designer and user stories, this presentation explores how head movement and assistive inputs can replace traditional joysticks: unlocking creativity, independence, and new possibilities for the assistive technology industry and mainstream drone control.

Greg Alchin

Greg Alchin is the Accessibility and Inclusion lead at Service NSW, where he drives agency culture and capacity to be inclusive by design and accessible by default. In addition, Greg chairs Standards Australia’s ICT accessibility committee, co-chairs the NSW Government Digital Accessibility Professional Network and advises the Disability Council NSW on digital accessibility standards. Greg is also a co-author of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Guidelines on equal access to digital goods and services.

Greg’s expertise has been sought around Australia and across the world by organisations such as the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, and the World Food Programme. With lived experience of both visual and hearing disability, industry recognition, and postgraduate studies in accessibility, Greg speaks with both authenticity and authority.

Accessible and Equitable AI

AI is transforming how we live, learn and work. How can Australia ensure it is accessible, equitable and consistently used for good? A national standard can align accessibility, human rights and AI governance to deliver fair benefits, prevent harm, protect dignity and support meaningful choice.

Standards Australia’s IT-040 Accessibility Committee has endorsed Canada’s Accessible and Equitable Artificial Intelligence Systems Standard for adoption as an Australian Standard.

This session explores how the standard involves people with disability across the AI lifecycle – from design and procurement to testing, deployment and review. We will examine requirements for accessible systems, clear information about decisions, accessible feedback, human alternatives and action to reduce discrimination, exclusion and bias.

An inclusive standard enables us all to create AI that is usable, trustworthy, fair and empowering for everyone.

Damian Madden

Damian Madden is an award-winning experience architect, keynote speaker and coach who helps organisations create experiences people remember. Having worked all around the world his work sits at the intersection of human behaviour, design and emerging technology. Drawing on both commercial experience and his own journey with ADHD, Damian challenges audiences to rethink how we design products, services and even our own lives.

Expect a bit of chaos, some uncomfortable truths about decision-making, and a gentle dismantling of the idea that accessibility has a “simple” entry point.

Curation Is Accessibility: Designing for Minds That Don't Filter the World the Same Way

We live in a world that celebrates more. More features. More options. More notifications. More information.

But what if the real challenge isn’t access? What if it’s attention?

After discovering that many of the struggles he blamed on himself were actually the result of environments that demanded constant filtering, Damian began to see accessibility differently. The same design choices that overwhelm neurodivergent minds are quietly exhausting everyone else too.

This talk explores why the future of accessibility isn’t simply adding more, it is designing with greater clarity, intention and care. You’ll leave with a practical framework for recognising cognitive overload, reducing invisible friction and creating experiences that work better for every mind, not just some.

Erin Zimmer

Erin is a software developer with nearly 20 years experience in a variety of languages, from JavaScript to Model204 (no, nobody else has heard of it either).

She is currently a senior engineer at Atlassian, with a strong interest in accessibility and usability. If you see her at a conference, she’ll probably have knitting needles in hand.

Enterprise Grade Accessibility for Everyone

At Atlassian, we take put a lot of effort into accessibility. But not everyone has those kinds of resources available. So what can you do instead? I’m going to talk through a range of tools and processes that we use, and the costs & benefits of each, so that you can figure out which solutions best fit your particular situation, and how you can get the best bang for your accessibility buck.

Karl McCabe

Karl McCabe is the Digital Accessibility Lead at Bankwest, where he works to embed accessibility into products, services, and the design system at scale. His focus is on helping teams move beyond compliance and deliver better outcomes for customers.

His perspective is shaped by a background in design, and experience working in large corporate environments, like Telstra and Bankwest, where progress in accessibility depends on how it is understood, communicated, and prioritised across the organisation.

Backlogged or checkboxed: why accessibility work gets ignored

Too often in large organisations, critically important accessibility work ends up in a backlog, or is reduced to a checkbox exercise. In this talk, I explore how our approach at Bankwest introduces and frames digital accessibility at scale as holistically beneficial in practice. Drawing on my corporate experience, I’ll show how WCAG can be too abstract to drive prioritisation or become the definition of success, and how reframing accessibility in the language of decisions leads to inclusively beneficial outcomes for users.

Kobi Jae Masterson

Kobi is a Senior Accessibility Specialist based in Naarm (Melbourne), with a decade of experience across all the most traumatic sectors — advertising, banking, education, and utilities. As a recovering UX designer with some (dangerous) coding skills and a cautiously optimistic relationship with AI, Kobi now atones for the sins of their inaccessible past by constantly being “that person” — challenging assumptions, talking about equity over equality, and sparking that “ah ha” moment in others. They regulate their neuro-spicy brain with dopamine doses of colour and enjoy the company of a very soft cat.

I Used AI to Build an Accessibility Plugin. Here's What I Learned

When Confluence accessibility and content checklists weren’t landing with designers, I stopped asking designers to change their habits and started changing their tools.

Using AI-assisted development, I built a custom Figma plugin that brought accessibility and content checks directly into design workflows — no tab-switching, no policing required.

This session covers how I built it, what made it stick, and what I learned — including the things I found out after I’d already left the organisation.

Laurence Lewis

Laurence Lewis began his career in printing pre-press before retraining as a front-end web developer in the late 1990s. In 2012, a chance conversation with accessibility expert Bryan Garaventa sparked a passion for digital accessibility that has defined his career ever since. Laurence joined Telstra in 2020 as a Senior Accessibility Specialist, bringing his knowledge of WCAG, ARIA and HTML semantics to the newly formed accessibility team. In 2022, that same drive led him to create A11y Quick Check, to help with manual testing and continue to grow his technical accessibility knowledge.

Marcus Helvig

Marcus has been a computer geek since childhood. After several decades of desktop development, and a computer jack-of-all-trades, Marcus was given the opportunity enter the world of accessibility at Telstra. He quickly became the team’s data analyst, giving the team the opportunity to better understand the accessibility maturity of the teams they support. His work on A11y Quick Check allowed him to learn accessibility and web technologies through hands-on experience. Marcus is passionate about sharing stories about his neurodiversity, to improve everyone’s understanding, and let others know they aren’t alone.

Our journey to help share accessibility knowledge through A11y Quick Check

Laurence wanted something different from the accessibility tools he was using which tended to report accessibility issues, while not identifying bad code practices. He decided to build a tool to help promote good accessibility coding practice, not just report on broken code affecting accessibility.

What started as Laurence’s personal project to simplify a collection of individual bookmarklets grew into a collaboration and close friendship when Marcus Helvig joined Telstra and offered his development skills to improve the codebase. New to accessibility at the time, Marcus found that working on A11y Quick Check became a journey of its own.

Join Laurence and Marcus to hear how creating A11y Quick Check became a valuable learning experience for them both.

Meenakshi “Meena” Das

Meenakshi “Meena” Das is a software engineer and accessibility advocate focused on making technology more inclusive. As someone with a stutter, she brings both lived experience and a practical perspective to her work. She is Vice Chair of the Board of Teach Access and an active voice in the accessibility community through speaking and writing. Her work has been recognised with honours, including the Disability:IN NextGen Leader of the Year and the DO-IT Trailblazer Award by the University of Washington. Meena is also a contributing author to the upcoming Digital Accessibility Ethics: Disability Inclusion in All Things Tech book.

Who Gets Heard? Rethinking Voice Recognition and Accessibility

Voice recognition is everywhere, but it often fails for people with speech disabilities. This session explores where current systems fall short and why that’s an ethical issue, not just a technical one. Based on the chapter ‘Making Every Voice Heard: The Ethics of Voice Recognition Technology’ from Digital Accessibility Ethics: Disability Inclusion in All Things Tech, you’ll get practical ways for inclusive voice and multimodal alternatives, plus the book’s Ethics Framework for product decisions.

Sarah Federman

Sarah Federman is a Staff Frontend Engineer on the Editing Accessibility team at Canva. As a designer turned engineer, she focuses on bringing her multidisciplinary mindset and systems thinking to tackle accessibility issues holistically. Her background in design systems, experience working on enterprise design tools, and lived neurodivergent experience help to bring a unique lens to the team.

Shapes to Sound: Making a Visual Design Tool Accessible for Screen Reader Users

Visual design tools occupy a strange corner of the web. They’re not documents. They’re not forms. They’re two-dimensional, spatially laid out, real-time collaborative authoring surfaces, and almost none of the accessibility patterns the web has developed over the past two decades are designed to solve for this problem. This talk is a case study in what happens when you decide to tackle it anyway.

Will Soward

Will works creatively in a diverse field of digital media. He’s invested in making online education more accessible for neurodiverse learners and making the Web a better place to learn. Will discusses UX and accessible UI design with communities in the design and education space. He has 10 years as an LX/UI designer, 12 years as an adult educator, and 25 years designing and coding front-end.

The Neurodiversity Design System: Why It Exists and Where It's Going

The Neurodiversity Design System set out to stop treating neurodivergent users as an edge case, building cognitive variation into the baseline of interface design rather than retrofitting accommodations after the fact. This talk covers the origin and reasoning behind the system, why it matters for how we design by default, and what its next evolution looks like.