Introduction

Hello EOWG Members,



I've recently joined the Education and Outreach Working Group. I'm writing to introduce myself and provide a bit about me and my experience.


My name is Laura Keen. I've worked for the Library of Congress for the past 12 years in the web services unit of the Office of the Chief Information Officer. I'm currently the team lead for UI development as well as the accessibility SME for web services. My main focus is UI development and the content migration effort for loc.gov.  As you can imagine the Library has a lot of content. We have been slowly been migrating legacy static sub sites into a relatively new web application using SOLR, etl, python, and Django. Through a global search interface we increase the findability of our objects and are slowly migrating framework materials related to our objects and collections into a unified user interface.

In this role I collaborate with designers, developers, and managers to implement loc.gov user interface strategy. I work with team members to implement responsive design that supports multiple screen sizes and orientations, across a variety of devices. I also serve as the subject matter expert for front-end development, mobile strategy, and web accessibility.



Prior to joining the Library I worked briefly for the Department of Veteran's Affairs Section 508 Testing & Training Lab as their program manager. I provided project management and technical guidance to accessibility specialists for their documentation and testing effort.


I was first exposed to web accessibility during my internship at Macromedia in Richardson Texas.  This is where I met Bob Regan and began working for him for over 2 years.  I met Sharron Rush while participating in the AIR Internet Rally in Austin TX. During this two year period, I was also involved in developing Macromedia's trainingcafe.com educational eLearning accessibility modules. I designed an accessible kiosk demo for the Department of Homeland Security for the MacWorld Expo 2003 highlighting Macromedia Director MX accessibility features. The project included collaboration with TRACE Research Center and the engineering team for Macromedia Director MX.  Other projects included developing Dreamweaver and Contribute templates for the National Federation of the Blind, developing the digital version of the book "Constructing Accessible Web Sites", developing a white paper and demo to aid developers in retrofitting their existing Director content for accessibility. As well as developing VPATs for Macromedia products.
In my previous career I worked in the power generation industry for Stone & Webster in Boston. I performed system stress analysis of suspended piping systems, ensuring compliance with ASME and ANSI codes, for the design engineering of power plants.


Personally, I live in Annapolis MD and I'm the mother of 2 boys ages 24 and 21. My oldest son Nathan lives and works in Portland ME and my younger son David will be a senior at LaSalle University in Philadelphia.



I'm looking forward to working with all of you, and I hope to be an asset to your group.



Thanks,



Laura Keen
Lead IT Specialist
Web Services
Library of Congress
101 Independence AV SE
Washington, DC 20540
(202) 707-4722