Wendy Chisholm

Wendy Chisholm joined W3C in October 1999 as Staff Contact for three groups: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, the Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group, and the Research and Development Interest Group. She co-edited several Working Drafts of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 and the first Working Draft of Evaluation and Report Language 1.0 (December 2002). She also served as an interim chair of the Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group. Wendy left W3C/WAI on 3 July to take an extended hiatus to focus on raising her newborn son.

Before joining the W3C, she co-edited the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 while working as a Human Factors Engineer at the Trace Research and Development Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also edited the Trace Unified Web Accessibility Guidelines that were adopted as the basis of WCAG 1.0.

She got her start in accessibility during her undergraduate work in Computer Science and Psychology at Elmhurst College. As a statistics tutor for a student who was blind, she used a variety of media to create tactile teaching tools: legos, pins and paper, sand, and other materials. She also worked at an after school respite program for people with autism and coached them to 3 silver medals in their regional Special Olympics. Juxtaposed with her coursework, these experiences planted a seed of curiousity about the use of computers by people with disabilities. This seed took root in 1995 when she enrolled in the Master of Science program in Industrial Engineering at the University of Wisconsin to focus on Human Factors and to work with Gregg Vanderheiden at the Trace Center on an accessible public kiosk for her Master's Thesis. During this time, the World Wide Web was also taking root and the Trace Center got involved in raising the awareness of issues for people with disabilities. The Trace Unified Accessibility Web Guidelines was a result of this effort.

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