Michael Gower
Senior Consultant, IBM
Michael Gower has been working in the Accessibility field since the last century. He is a Senior Consultant with IBM, and currently works in IBM Accessibility Research, in charge of IBM's global Accessibility Checklist. Michael is an active participant on the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium. He has done public-sector consulting for the British Columbia, Yukon and Canadian governments, as well as advising the Ontario government on the cost of adopting WCAG for AODA.
Michael has carried out over 100 needs assessments for Persons with Disabilities. Non-profit groups include the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and Canadian Council for the Blind. He has presented to help desks on how to support PwDs, as well as to project teams on integrating accessibility into the development lifecycle. Michael is certified in JAWS and has coded JAWS solutions for terminal emulator clients and other atypical or custom Windows applications. He has a background as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, a unix systems administrator and a technical writer.