Leadership Team

Rachael has been working in disability-related education, inclusion, usability, and accessibility for over 20 years but when she developed chemical sensitivity a few years ago, she gained insight into just how much of day-to-day life takes place away from the larger organizations she typically supports. Rachael founded Accessible Community to connect people with disabilities to the communities around them.

Rachael is a digital accessibility specialist at the Library of Congress and an adjunct lecturer at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies (iSchool). She co-chairs the W3C Accessibility Guidelines Working Group and was previously a co-facilitator of the Cognitive and Learning Disabilities task force. Rachael has a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an M.S. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Chinmae Deshmukkh is a Project Manager with a knack for bringing people and ideas together. Her background in both international business and engineering allows her to handle complex projects across different industries. Chinmae is passionate about creating a welcoming work environment, and she has led successful initiatives that promote diversity and inclusion.

Outside of work, Chinmae enjoys traveling the world and expressing herself through dance. These experiences allow her to bring a global perspective and a touch of creativity to everything she does.

Ellen has long been an accessibility advocate and expert, serving as the Accessibility Technical Lead at a U.S. Government Agency. She helped to drive change within the Agency to foster an environment where information technology can enable and empower people with disabilities. Ellen helped to build lasting accessibility programs, policies, standards, and training courses. She has spent 20+ years speaking, teaching, and writing about accessibility, and building and testing accessible, inclusive, and usable websites for the Federal Government.

Since retiring, Ellen volunteers with Accessible Community working on the Ta11y Learning Content and mentoring accessibility novices to grow their skills.

As a Software Engineer and Architect with over 20 years of experience, Brian takes pride in his versatility as a technologist and a leader. He has experience in enterprise service architectures; microservice architectures and container orchestration; database modeling and design; web, mobile and desktop client development; and algorithm and requirements analysis. Brian has successfully led teams as a software architect, technical lead and customer interface throughout his career, working effectively with developers, managers and customers to solve complex requirements and challenges.

Brian enjoys teaching and helping others learn about technology. He has mentored and/or taught a number of the up-and-coming developers and interns he has worked with.

Michael has been working in human factors, usability, user experience (UX), and accessibility fields for over 10 years. Currently Michael provides Human Centered Engineering (HCE) guidance and accessibility program leadership to multiple US Government customers. He is constantly trying to educate organizations on the value of incorporating usability and accessibility into their development process, so that their end products will be usable for all users.