Elizabeth Simister

Ms. Simister's primary focus is working with companies to get them to the point where all their products are as accessible as possible. Her passion is spreading knowledge about accessibility best practices. Ms. Simister got her start in accessibility in 2005 in what is now the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Institute on Employment and Disability Institute at Cornell University. One of her biggest responsibilities was understanding how to take scanned journal pages and make them in accessible PDFs.  After Cornell, Ms. Simister spent a number of years working as a contractor helping different organizations figure out what they needed to do to be accessible, including a stint at the Department of Homeland Security where she was a DHS Truster Tester before the program started. In November of 2022, While at Blackboard (now Anthology), Ms. Simister lead a small Diversity, Equity and Inclusion project to help her growing team learn more about each other during the pandemic. Ms. Simister finally took the exam for and received the Internation Association of Accessibility Professionals Web Accessibility Specialist certification.