Meet Your Microassist Higher Education Team
Hiram Kuykendall is Microassist’s technical leader with over 25 years of in-depth accessibility experience, including application development, training development, and organizational governance. His expertise extends to public and private institutions comprised of a diverse set of organizations such as federal government, state government, school districts (K-12), institutions of higher education (private and public), and the private sector. Hiram is an avid speaker and frequent contributor to LexisNexis, Mealey’s Litigation Report: Cyber Tech & E-commerce.
Kathy Keller has over 20 years of experience working with Texas government on advanced technical and administrative accessibility initiatives including planning, developing, and implementing ICT accessibility programs, developing and maintaining agency policies, procedures, guidelines, and tools that align with state and federal guidelines. She has served as Accessibility Coordinator and Accessibility and Disability Rights Coordinator for Texas agencies under TAC 206 and TAC 213. In addition to her public sector experience, Kathy was Director of Accessibility for PearsonVUE, who specializes in providing high stakes testing for licensing and certifications, as well as instructional services and products for educational institutions.
Jeff Kline is the author of “Strategic IT Accessibility: Enabling the Organization” and is a recognized subject matter expert in key areas of IT accessibility that includes policy, rulemaking, process integration, procurement, and risk mitigation. He currently serves as Microassist’s Strategic IT Accessibility Consultant and was recently the Program Director of Statewide Electronic and Information Resources (EIR) Accessibility at the Texas Department of Information Resources. In addition, Mr. Kline consults on IT accessibility policy matters for federal agencies, NGOs, and accessibility certification bodies. Prior to his position in public service, Mr. Kline managed IBM’s Worldwide Accessibility Consulting and Business Transformation initiatives and held other management positions in research and product development during his 26-year IBM career, including industrial design, operating system UI development, and system usability.
Jack McElaney is Microassist’s vice president of sales and marketing. Jack’s focus is digital accessibility and consulting within the corporate, financial services, and educational markets. He curates “Accessibility in the News,” a widely read industry newsletter that is a compilation of articles, blogs, conferences, training, announcements, tips, job listings, and a listing of accessibility pages. Jack has held executive management roles at three Thomson Reuters companies and at Sheshunoff Consulting & Solutions where he was the managing director of risk services and was responsible for compliance and audit products and services.
Soheil Varamini Soheil Varamini is Microassist’s accessibility expert. He is a CPWA – Certified Professional in Web Accessibility by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). Soheil is responsible for accessibility audit, testing, VPAT authoring, ACR evaluation and remediation across multiple types of digital assets for clients in the education, ecommerce, corporate, and public sectors.
Leslie Janek is Microassist’s document accessibility specialist. She has remediated, or otherwise made accessible, specialized content ranging from higher education coursework, K-12 science, technology, engineering, art, and math, and other public and private sector content. In addition to PDF document remediation, Leslie consults with clients on remediation strategy, and creates and delivers training on how to create accessible PDF files and remediate inaccessible PDFs.
