Digital Accessibility

Hanna Karppi leads Nexer Digital's accessibility business in Sweden, helping expand the company's accessibility practice while advocating for digital inclusion across clients and industries. Originally from Finland, she studied political history, political science, and communications before building a career in change management and digital workplaces that eventually led her into accessibility. Hanna discusses why human-centered thinking is essential to technology, how internal advocates often drive organizational change, and why she is optimistic about AI, workplace inclusion, and the continued growth of accessibility across Europe.

Brittany Palmer, co-founder and managing partner of Adaptation Ventures, discusses investing in early-stage companies developing disability, neurodivergent, caregiving, and diagnostic technologies. Born with a bilateral below-elbow limb difference, Brittany shares how her background in environmental law, her experience founding an accessible virtual travel company, and her caregiving journey with her husband Rich Palmer led her into venture capital. She closes by explaining why the disability market is far from niche and how the "curb cut effect" helps investors recognize that innovations designed for disability often benefit everyone.

Mary Roemmele, Senior Director for Product Accessibility at Workday, discusses leading accessibility across a global software organization. Drawing on a background in banking technology and mergers and acquisitions, along with a lifetime of personal connections to disability through her family, she explains how she found her way into accessibility leadership. Mary describes integrating accessibility throughout the product lifecycle, including acquisition due diligence, and closes by exploring how organizations can scale accessibility by understanding technical debt, educating partners, and making accessibility part of long-term business strategy.

Samantha Karell, who leads Digital Accessibility Services at Allyant, discusses helping organizations build sustainable accessibility programs through audits, VPATs, consulting, and strategic guidance. She traces her path from student services into the University of Washington’s Disability Resources Office, where working with accommodations, Braille materials, and digital access sparked her passion for accessibility. Samantha also shares her optimism about AI, explaining how it can improve internal operations, scale expertise across teams, and deliver faster, more meaningful guidance to customers without replacing human judgment.

Ben Ogilvie, Director of Accessibility Strategy at ArcTouch and First Vice Chair of the GAAD Foundation, shares how a life-changing family events led him into full-time accessibility work. He discusses building accessibility-first digital products, advocating for inclusion with clients, and supporting the accessibility community through GAAD and Accessibility NYC. Ben also explores two future-focused initiatives: AI-powered accessible prototyping that enables rapid usability testing with blind users, and GAAD’s AI accessibility benchmarks designed to push major AI models toward generating more accessible code by default.