Biography

My career began as a Speech and Language Therapist spending eight years as the District Speech and Language Therapist at a group of London Hospitals. The work involved supporting disabled people with a wide range of communication difficulties.Having left the National Health Service, I then worked in schools and colleges, specialising in the support of those with Special Needs whilst encouraging the use of assistive technologies (AT).

A Winston Churchill Fellowship provided the chance to see how centres of AT were set up in the United States.This resulted in ten years work at the University of Sussex, building and running a regional AT Centre, whilst liaising with others to introduce the concepts of equal access to teaching and learning for those with disabilities.I went on to work with JISC TechDis and with Professor Paul Blenkhorn and for the last few years in ECS at the University of Southampton with Professor Mike Wald and the ECS Accessibility Team. I was a member of the committee that worked on BS 8878 and am now on the WCAG Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force and the UK National Contact Person for AAATE and on T4i, AHG, BDA and BCS committees.