TAVIP Career Talk with Léonie Watson

Léonie Watson has been a longstanding member of TAVIP and was Chair of the organisation between 2010 and 2014 when it was called BCAB (British Computer Association of the Blind).

Léonie is an accessibility specialist with a curiosity for web and web-adjacent technologies like AI and the agentic web, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, and voice/conversational interfaces.

She is a co-Founder and Director of TetraLogical; Chair of the W3C Board of Directors, and co-Chair of the W3C Web Applications Working Group.

Our Career Talk covers how she first got into technology, how she has overcome challenges when starting new roles and the assistive technologies she uses today. We then go on to talk about her current role and interests, including voice interfaces, the agentic web, how she uses AI in her current role and on her own web site. Along the way we touch on some relatively recent developments such as WebMCP, OOrion and ScribeMe.

The session was hosted by TAVIP’s current Chair of Trustees, Tony Stockman. Tony has over 40 years’ experience of using various forms of assistive technology to study and work in education and industry as a visually impaired person. Much of his research as a university lecturer was in the area of Human-Computer Interaction, often with a specific focus on accessibility for visually impaired people, ranging from access to spreadsheets through to improving interfaces for visually impaired audio engineers.

You can access the recording on AudioBoom or as an mp3 download.