About Me
I'm a Bay Area native and am a former senior animator and Visual FX artist. I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the Art Institute of California - San Francisco back in 2005 and majored in Media Arts and Computer Animation. Unfortunately, I am no longer in the animation field as complications from medical issues I had as a baby took all my vision away in 2014 and I am now fully blind.
I am now working as an accessibility consultant, making apps and websites accessible for people with disabilities. I'm an expert VoiceOver, NVDA, Jaws, and TalkBack user, and can talk people through all the other assistive technologies and modalities that people use to interact with their technology. I love to code websites by hand, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Python, plus am an SVG expert.
I specialize in end-user testing for accessibility, being an accessibility evangelist for all parts of a company, and have instructed and guided Agile teams on how to build and test accessible and usable experiences. I'm a fierce advocate for ADA Rights, fully understand WCAG and Section 508 Compliance, and know how to speak to engineers to help them learn how to make their projects accessible overall.
Ensuring that Accessibility is thought of at the start of a project rather than having it bolted on as an afterthought is a major goal of mine in any role I take on concerning accessible and inclusive design and testing. I work with designers during the feature spec period to help them understand how users with different disabilities and barriers interact with technology. Universal design is extremely important, and educating everyone along the product, app, or site development pipeline has become one of my most strongest suits in this arena.
I worked for Lyft for 7 years as their primary accessibility specialist and gained a lot of knowledge and expertise in native app development. I was brought on at Deque Systems as a Senior Native Mobile Accessibility Coach where I worked directly with Agile teams, from Design to QA, on how to build a successful app, plus grew into an Instructor-Led Training role for our other clients. I'm now contracting as a freelance accessibility auditor and also contracting full-time with Intuit performing native mobile audits and assessments.
I've fallen in love with tactile art, graphics, and design. This medium has allowed me to tap into my artistic background again, and I use tactile embossers and output to render wireframes and screen layouts in tactile and tangible ways to help me interact with design teams when going over a new feature. On top of this, I am also creating commercial and personal art again.
I built BlindSVG.com as a way to teach blind and low-vision people how to build their own tactile and digital illustrations and designs using SVG coding. Alongside this, I volunteer with the NYPL Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Books Library to teach MacOS VoiceOver, tactile drawing, and other skills. I'm also working directly with the Washington School for the Blind and the Center for Assistive Tech Training Northwest team, building the Tangible Art & Design Adventures (TADA!) curriculum to train TVIs on how to teach K-12 students tactile drawing, coding skills, and SVG creation.
I'm also an improvisational pianist and have some samples of both my piano music and electronic music uploaded here for your enjoyment, plus feel free to have a look at my reel from 2012 to get a sense of what I used to do on a daily basis.
Feel free to contact me if you are seeking expertise in native app accessibility design and engineering, have focus group or research studies/interviews about universal design, or would like someone to speak on a panel or individually about tactile graphics and design practices.
- Marco Salsiccia