Thea Eaton serves as the Accessibility Expert for Dooley Design Group. She leads the charge of site accessibility testing for our team. Thea also erves our clients with accessibility coaching, Accessibility VPAT creation, Accessibility Statements, site audits and planning for remediation when needed.
Thea Eaton is a UX Designer with a mission to make the web a more inclusive and accessible place. With over 20 years of experience in creating accessible software for children, she has worked closely with Adobe and the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) team to create new accessibility standards for interactive media. She has won several awards including the Dewey Winburne Community award nomination for her accessible work for children.
Thea’s experience includes re-designing the ATSTAR online program at Knowbility Learning Center, where educators can match up students with appropriate assistive technologies in the classroom. The project included rewriting existing content, conducting student interviews for online videos and additional case studies, designing the conceptual lo-fi prototype design and design elements, and overall look-and-feel for investors. An important part of this redesign included a user analysis and a restructuring of the site tailored to the individual use cases.
Thea Eaton has served as an Equal Access Educational Consultant/ Speaker for Knowbility, an award-winning leader in accessible information technology. She taught classes for Knowbility on accessible media integration in K12 education at Access-U, an accessibility conference held yearly in both Austin, Texas and Long Beach, California, and acted as speaker and presenter at tech venues such as SXSW, Flash on the Beach Miami, Refresh Houston and CalWac on ways to make media accessible to children with disabilities. Acted as a K12 education and media consultant for companies such as: Sesame Street Workshop, World History Project (Bill Gates and David Christian), U.S. Census Bureau, Reliant Energy, Don’t Mess with Texas.
Thea also has experience conducting On-site UI/UX focus test groups with school children in the public school sector on accessible media and technology.
Thea also has extensive elearning experience developing accessible online courses. She worked with Pearson for 10 years and was responsible for the creation of accessible educational modules using Adobe Applications for a variety of different projects, including the design and creation of 100 instructional videos for the 2015 Digital Writer’s Reference©, and the Holt McDougal 2010 Government and Chemistry Interactive Features© to accompany their online textbooks.
In 2010, Thea received the Dewey Winburne Innovation Award for creating some of the world’s first educational accessible interactive experiences for children with a visual and hearing impairment.
Thea’s Capabilities:
- Accessibility – Accessibility audits / assessments; VPAT creation
- Creative Direction
- Curriculum Development
- Client Education
- Web UX / UI Design & Web Content Design
- Instructional Design & Content Creation
- Animation & Illustration; Media Interactive Design
- Video Content Creation
- Audio Design
- Digital Collateral
- Print Collateral
- Photo Editing
- Web Content Management
- Web Development
- Programming & Robotics
Software
- Adobe: Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Acrobat, Animate CC
- Web Technologies: Figma, HTML, CSS, WordPress, Python, JavaScript, JAWS Screen Reading Software, Google Drive, Dropbox
- Microsoft: Word, PowerPoint, Publisher, Excel
Education:
- BA Computer & Cognitive Science | University of Texas, 2000-2004
- 2D Animation | Pixar Studio, Mentor: Victor Navone | 2004-2005
Languages
Dutch (native) ● English (fluent) ● German (6 yrs) ● Latin (6 yrs) ● French (4 yrs) ● Greek (4 yrs) ● Spanish (2 yrs)
