My name is Marco, and I work as an accessibility  engineer and evangelist at Mozilla. I joined Mozilla on December 3rd, 2007. Initially working from within the QA team, I transferred to the newly founded dedicated accessibility team in April of 2011. Before my full-time employment, I volunteered as a community member for a couple of months.

Over the years, my responsibilities also expanded to some accessibility-specific product and release management, as well as influencing user experience decisions and helping other teams at Mozilla gain a better understanding of accessibility in general, and specific guidelines such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

I was previously with Freedom Scientific, now part of Vispero, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of software and hardware products for the visually impaired, including the screen reader JAWS for Windows. All in all, I’ve been in the AT technology industry since 1996, counting also my student days where I already started working for the German distributor for JAWS.

I am totally blind from birth and have been using screen readers of various shapes and sizes since 1991, when I got my first DOS-based PC.

As the accessibility QA, I’m responsible for testing new features and fixes in Firefox and other products from Mozilla. I also work with the community to get people involved in testing all the cool new features of Firefox. I won’t limit myself to the blindness side of things, but hope to be able to help both developers and users with all kinds of disabilities such as motor impairments, low vision (although I might need some sighted help with that occasionally) and others.

Also, I’m always happy to help out web developers who need advice on how to code certain things in an accessible fashion.

I hope this blog will be a good resource for readers on all and any accessibility-related topics. Enjoy the read!

How to contact me 🔗

If you’d like to get in touch with me, there are a couple of ways:

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