Beyond Accessibility Compliance

Sukriti Chadha is a mobile developer turned product manager who currently works at Spotify. She is the only product manager responsible for accessibility across all platforms. Additionally, she works on scalable mobile infrastructure to enable reliable shipping of Spotify’s mobile apps to its over 300 million users globally.Sukriti started as a mobile developer  at Yahoo Finance in 2016. When her father lost vision in one of his eyes due to complications from diabetes, it inspired her to patent, launch and open source technology that allows people with visual impairments to use charts and interpret data using music, haptics, and voice synthesis. She also developed a system for haptic navigation for people with hearing impairments. Sukriti is an invited expert at W3C with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), as well as the Mobile Accessibility Task Force, the industry working group that sets the guidelines that are the ISO standard for accessibility and the basisfor the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Her work has been presented at several conferences including CSUN (the largest annual accessibility conference), A Future Date Conference, Product-Led Festival, Mobile Growth by Branch.io, and MProduct Con. Her project on automated mobile testing for accessibility also won the Product-Led Alliance award for the most impactful project. Sukriti is an active member of Teach Access, a collaboration of accessibility experts, industry leaders and academics with companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Wal-Mart to further the understanding of inclusion and accessibility among high-school and college students. As part of this initiative, she regularly collaborates with university professors who have expressed a desire to have a book like this as foundation for their design and CS courses. She has been invited as a judge for innovation awards at CES (Consumer Electronics Show); Remarkable Accelerator, Australia; and Pursuit Hackathon. She also regularly peer reviews academic papers for HCI and accessibility journals including ICETM, Web4All and the 32nd Annual Australian HCI Conference.  Sukriti has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and certificate in Finance from Princeton University. She is also a private pilot and certified yoga instructor.