Jonathan Hassell, Head of Audience Experience & Usability, BBC Future Media & Technology

Jonathan Hassell is the Acting Chair of the IST/45 committee which is creating the new BS8878 Accessibility Standards (expected in November 2010), having been part of the authoring and steering team for the previous PAS 78 (PDF) Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites from the British Standards Institute.

He is Head of Usability & Accessibility for BBC Future Media & Technology, leading the BBC‘s Usability & Accessibility team to ensure BBC projects and services are usable to all users, including disabled users, by helping production teams engage with those users throughout product development. He has seven years experience in the field of accessibility, setting accessibility standards across web and IPTV for the BBC. He has commissioned groundbreaking projects using innovative new accessibility techniques and technologies to enable a wide variety of groups of disabled children to learn via multimedia and user-generated eLearning. He has a PhD in Human Computer Interaction, and has lead his team to winning many BIMA, Access-IT and IMS-Global awards for accessibility.