About

I’m the person who seems to always have some kind of crazy story to tell about just about any situation or topic you bring up. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a lot of experiences and live to tell about them.

Currently I’m trying to take some of those experiences and make a career change where I can help to make a positive change in other peoples lives. I’ve always enjoyed helping others, and had ample opportunity to touch the lives of people in and around my community as a youth in the Boy Scouts. While the organization is far from perfect, it fostered in me the importance of helping those in need and giving back to your community for the betterment of all. I eventually earned the rank of Eagle Scout, and am proud to have earned that achievement and feel it’s helped shape who I am today.

I started working at 16 years old, managing a yo-yo kiosk inside a local mall. Where I got to perform with world champions at the sport, and sold crazy quantities of yo-yo’s. For context, our small kiosk sold over $100,000 in a single day, Black Friday, which is mind boggling. I later earned a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas @ Austin, and have had quite the varied career since. The one commonality across them though is they all involved leveraging my people skills and ability to put myself in my clients shoes. I’ve been a Project Manager/Engineer, Product Manager/Owner, been a Realtor, started and ran my own business from the ground up, and been an Account Executive. I like to think I excelled and grew in each of these roles, but at the end of the day the number of lives I can touch and improve has always been limited. And the results of my efforts ultimately resolved down to making a business better or more profitable vs improving the lives of the people that make those businesses possible.

My partner’s career is in web development, and I’ve always enjoyed supporting her as best I can along their journey. When they decided to go back to school and get their Masters in Information Architecture to improve their UI/UX, and ultimately Accessibility, skills, I was happy to help with their studies and projects. Likewise when they began using those new skills in their workplace. As a result I got to learn a new skill along the way, and it created a spark of inspiration in me. I realized I could us my business experience along with my technical aptitude to not just better a company, but every single individual that company interacted with, and that sounded amazingly fulfilling to me. It got me excited, and interested in how I too could help make positive change for so many people.

I had been to a few events already as a tag along, but started attending webinars and local meetups as a true attendant, and began taking online coursework to train in accessibility best practices and web site auditing. I’ve recently passed the test and earned my certification as a DHS (Department of Homeland Security) Trusted Tester v5 for Section 508 auditing, and have been reviewing to sit for the IAAP CPACC & WAS exams as well. Between my years assisting my partner and my more focused learning recently, I’ve gathered a rather amazing amount of familiarity with the disability community and the wide range of needs/concerns that should be taken into account when designing/building/updating web site, web applications, or device specific software.

What’s perhaps most surprising to me is the number of businesses, or people in these roles at said businesses, that simply hadn’t thought about the variety of people who would be using their end products. This surprise is for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve always been a very empathetic person so thinking about other peoples experiences is just something that I’ve done naturally. Second, we’re not talking about an insignificant number of users, or only edge case disabilities that you could understand someone being ignorant of. We’re talking about anywhere from 15%-25% of the population has a disability of some sort and may be one of your end users, that’s A LOT of people your ignoring. The vast majority of people know that there are individuals who have vision impairments, or are completely blind, hard of hearing, or completely deaf, have limited mobility, or are somehow cognitively impaired. So if people in these roles know these individuals exist, why not be considerate of that? Surely they don’t think all these people just somehow magically go their whole life without using the internet or a computer right?

The reality is that, whether it surprises me or not, there is a need for people with accessibility knowledge in their toolbelt. Perhaps more importantly, there is a need to educate and inform businesses and employees with accessibility knowledge. A need to ingrain this mentality from the very start, not as an afterthought or bonus kudos, but as a business requirement that you be considerate of your clients no matter their ability. What’s really great though, is that I have the ability and skills to help make that change happen. I have years of experience in business that lets me understand firsthand how something so natural and obvious can get repeatedly back burnered, I’ve been the employee championing for accessibility to management and getting pushback. I also have the technical background and training to speak to and relate how making accessible products is not only doable, but profitable. Perhaps my strongest skill, is my ability to speak to and communicate with people at all levels of an organization. It’s the skill I probably take most for granted honestly, because I’ve always been good at it naturally. For as long as I can remember I’ve been empathetic and great at communicating or talking with others. It’s a skill many people seem to struggle with, but I’m fortunate enough to be a natural at it. I’ve dedicated lots of time educating and growing myself as an engineer, business professional, and now accessibility specialist; and I’m really excited to now be in a position where I can merge that with my communication skills to spread that accessible mindset as far as possible and make a positive impact on literally millions of lives.

Outside of work, I enjoy talking with my neighbors, having friends over for dinner, playing board games, working on my truck, learning new skills, spending time with my partner, and giving lots of love and pets to our four cat babies. My partner and I also love camping, and we like to volunteer with Texas Parks & Wildlife’s – Texas Outdoor Family program. Where we get to introduce families that may have never been camping before to Texas state parks and teach them the basics of how to camp. The program reserves campsites and supplies things like tents, stoves, cots and lanterns for a reasonable fee. The families bring themselves, their loved ones, food and bedding; and we get to show them how to have fun outside together. We don’t just teach the logistics of camping, but also plan events and teach people how to geocache, fish, kayak, and hike. It’s great to give back and help teach others new skills, and every campout we end up with multiple families thanking us and being amazed at some of the stories we share from our own adventures.