Katie Haritos-Shea is an information and communications technology architect with Deque Systems, an accessibility products and services company. Since 2015 she has been on the board of Knowbility. She is fascinated with science and emerging technologies and with their potential to improve the lives of all, particularly people with disabilities, the under-served, and the elderly.

Based in Oakton, Virginia, near Washington, DC, Katie contributes to Knowbility’s mission in a variety of ways. In addition to serving as a board member, she represents Knowbility on the Advisory Committee of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards-maker for the web. She also helps at various online and in-person events like the OpenAIR accessibility competition, our annual AccessU conference, and the newly-launched Knowbility Accessibility Leadership Symposium.

In 2015, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, appointed Katie chair of the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative Interest Group. Before working at Deque, she worked at JP Morgan Chase where she was responsible for planning, training, and executing a firm-wide strategy for quality assurance teams to verify web and mobile accessibility. As one of the first Section 508 Coordinators for the US Federal Government, she ran Section 508 programs for various agencies for more than 10 years before working in the private sector.

In her free time, Katie loves riding motorcycles and horses. She is ferocious about interoperability on the web and its ability to support human rights around the world.