John Rochford

John Rochford is a Program Director and Faculty Member at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. John has spent his entire career serving people with disabilities, especially with intellectual disabilities and/or autism. For several years, John directed residential and respite programs for children and adults with developmental disabilities and their families. Since then, John has led consecutive teams of information-technology professionals to build web applications and online courses, all accessible to people with disabilities.

John is a well-known international web accessibility expert. He is an Invited Expert for the Worldwide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Taskforce, Low Vision Task Force, and Silver Community Group. He is a co-founder of the Boston Accessibility Group, and a co-organizer of its international accessibility conferences. In 1993, John published the very-first website for people with disabilities and has been building accessible websites ever since. John’s passion is web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities and autism.

John researches and develops:

  • artificial-intelligence-driven, mass-scale web-text simplification;
  • a human-curated method to easily and reliably create simplified text; and
  • virtual tutors for online learning.

John regularly presents at national and international accessibility and technology conferences about this work.

John Rochford