Bryan Garaventa

Bryan Garaventa is a web developer and entrepreneur who is fully blind.
Biography
Bryan Garaventa was born in Ukiah, California, in 1979, where he spent his childhood.
After being permanently blinded from a gunshot wound in 1994, Bryan attended the California School for the Blind and Kennedy High School in Fremont, California, where he graduated with honors in 1999.
Bryan attended Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, majoring in Political Science and Creative Writing; he was an active member of the Poetry Society, and developed an interest in accessible development practices after being unable to access assigned media, which he began studying by reverse engineering.
While contemplating a switch in career goals, Bryan was hired by Napster in Redwood City as a QA Engineer specializing in accessibility support, where he continued to work from February 2001 until the company's demise in June 2002.
Between 2003 and 2004, Bryan started working on a non-visual development methodology for the design of visually oriented web GUIs based on spatial ratios and mathematics.
Using these principles, Bryan started building AccDC in November 2009, which went public in November 2010 as a jQuery plug-in, and was rewritten and released as a standalone API in June 2011.
In February 2010, Bryan was interviewed by Kathleen Kenna (Special to the Star) regarding social preconceptions associated with disabled people, and how the signing of the United Nations Convention by the United States will improve the lives of millions around the world.
Bryan founded the startup WhatSock LLC in August 2010, and built the website WhatSock.com, where AccDC is currently hosted.
AccDC was featured as a finalist in the in March 2011, where Bryan's abstract submission "The AccDC Enterprise API for Advanced UI Automation" was published.
Bryan became a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers in June 2011, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in June 2012.
In August 2012, Bryan was awarded the "Above and Beyond Accessibility Award" from the United States Department of Labor for his work on AccDC, which was presented at CSUN, the 29th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference in March 2014.
Bryan currently lives in Pacifica, California.

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