Introducing myself to EOWG

Dear EOWG,

I'm very happy to be the newest participant in the EOWG.  Here's a bit about my background....

My long-time passions for technology and accessibility both derive from my father. 
http://www.faithandweb.com/2007/05/01/my-fathers-daughter-blogging-against-disablism/

The quick summary is he battled with post-polio all his life and I was profoundly affected.  He also had the wander-lust, and so I was raised in Washington DC, London, Florida and what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

In 1971, when choosing a major, I decided against computer science because I believed women weren't welcome.  (What was I thinking?  ;-)  Instead I became a librarian and did that for 20 years -- until I discovered the Web in 1994.  It was love at first site.  Initially I created websites for librarians, but then moved into Web development full-time in 1997.  

Since then I've been a jack-of-all-web-trades, but recently had a wonderful opportunity to focus on a specialty.  My first choices were accessibility and standards.  So I reached out to Shawn, and was amazed and excited to have an opportunity to join in your wonderful work.  

For the last eight years I've been at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.  It has an awesome mission (cancer is the competition) and I love working here.  However, speaking more broadly about healthcare, I've been surprised at how little understanding and interest there seems to be for accessible websites.  My best guess is it's a combination of the Web being a young upstart compared to healthcare, staff being unbelievably busy saving lives, and the business case not being made clearly enough (if at all) to senior management.

The non-Web part of my life is my amazing family. My husband is an environmental attorney who loves climbing trees and photography.  And we both have a recent interest in Nonviolent Communication (cnvc.org).  I wonder if these skills I'm learning will help in communicating with healthcare management about Web accessibility?  But back to family.... Our older daughter works at the Pasadena Museum of History, and our younger daughter is in the Peace Corps -- teaching English on the island of Kosrae in Micronesia.  I plan to learn to scuba dive for when we go visit her next summer.

I look forward to our calls and getting to meet each of you in person.

Warm regards,
Anna Belle

Anna Belle Leiserson
Health Systems Software Engineer
Research Informatics Core
Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center
vicc.org

Received on Thursday, 29 November 2012 18:21:43 UTC