Ather Sharif is a web accessibility rock star

Ather Sharif is making waves in the assistive technology community.
The developer and St. Joseph’s grad student has been racking up awards and scholarships and is now headed to Google to share his latest project with the accessibility team there. Sharif’s passion for web accessibility is personal: he’s been a quadriplegic since a 2013 car accident.
Here’s a quick rundown of Sharif’s recent accomplishments:

• Last month, he won the audience choice award at the annual Web for All Conference, an international conference for web accessibility, held in Florence, Italy this year. His winning project was a jQuery plugin that helps the visually impaired read graphs the way sighted people do.
• He got involved with the conference after being one of two to win the IBM People with Disabilities Student Award.
• He’s a Google Lime Scholar, a program geared toward computer science students with disabilities. That’s why he’s leaving today to visit Google HQ.

Aside from his research, he also founded web accessibility consultancy EvoXLabs.
Watch a video about Sharif’s winning project below, and see his presentation here.