John Rochford

Director, Software Engineer, and Public Speaker in Worcester, MA

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My Passion

I help make the web usable by people with disabilities. I focus on people with intellectual disabilities and/or Autistics. I research and develop artificial intelligence (AI) powered web text simplification on a mass scale. Easy-to-understand text is great for people with cognitive disabilities, non-native language speakers, people with low literacy, seniors, and really everyone.

My Dreams

Make it easy for people to login to websites. Done! I am the first author of a new web accessibility guideline. (See Accessible Authentication, published on 2023-10-05, and the issue paper I published about it on 2014-09-02. Yes, it took 9 years for my wonderful W3C colleagues and I to do it, but we did it!)

Make web text so simple we understand it the first time we read it. (See EasyText.AI.)

Help everyone be safe and healthy. (See EasyCOVID-19.)

My Positions

My Work

Discover more about my work via the 14 icons below.

Accessibility Note

This page has a few accessibility errors I cannot fix. (See WAVE report.) However, About.Me is the most accessible profile website I have found.

  • Work
    • UMass Medical School
  • Education
    • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    • Northeastern University