The Office of Accessibility is excited to announce that Andre Magallanes will be joining us for the summer from the State of Washington. Andre is helping with many projects, such as recording and organizing data submitted by our eLearning participants and redesigning and testing our internal SharePoint site for accessibility. You are probably asking yourself: why would someone come this far to do a summer internship? We asked him!

Where do you go to school and what are you studying?

I go to the University of Washington. I want to study Informatics, a tech degree that deals with the study of information. There are things like UX, Universal Design, development – it is broader than just computer science. Informatics deals with how information is communicated to the user or between systems. The intersection of people, technology, and information.

When I got to the University of Washington I wanted to do computer science because when I was growing up my father was into computers. This is how we bonded. We built a computer together one time for fun! Something memorable. However, I took my first JAVA class and I didn’t like it. I got the worst grade I’ve received in any of my classes. I would not want to write code every day of my life for a career. I took another course that was the introduction to informatics, and I completely fell in love with the class. There was a portion on accessibility, discussing how to design for people with different abilities. My father has a disability, and I find this approach interesting because it focuses on what people can do instead of what they can’t.

What did you do just prior to starting the internship?

Three days prior I was in Peru, visiting my family. I had been in Peru for about two weeks. My grandma is 92 and I wanted to visit her before I join the military.

Why the Office of Accessibility all the way in Minnesota?

Next summer I’m going to Officer Candidate School for the Marine Corps, so this summer I had nothing to do! All my friends said it was important to do an internship. I was looking for accessibility internships and there were only 2 that I found! I thought that it was interesting that there were internships at all, because in school it was often presented like an extra thing, not that people were actually in charge solely of something like accessibility. When I looked at my own state, there was nothing there. Minnesota is one of the few states that actually has an Office of Accessibility, and that’s a model.

I feel so strongly about accessibility and its importance, I wanted to take the opportunity to work in the field itself rather than just practice it in theory. What will it look like when I enter the field? And, how is that different from now?

What are you looking forward to learning/doing?

I wanted to do a lot of hands-on stuff and I’ve been able to do that, even in the first week! It has been amazing to learn from people who are knowledgeable about accessibility. For someone to be such a professional in the field itself, it seems to be really cool. Coming here and seeing people who are so passionate about accessibility is such an eye opener because it is something that is out there and being worked on to progress.

I am looking forward to seeing the results with people with disabilities, and others that do not have disabilities, to see how it works in their daily life and work, and how I can help improve this system.

What has surprised you most about the work done by the Office of Accessibility?

I didn’t know what to expect, so everything is a surprise! I don’t want to sound like I thought you guys didn’t do anything, but I honestly had no idea what to expect. I thought about documents, for example, but to what extent I wasn’t sure. For example, I didn’t know there were accessibility coordinators, coming up with new ways to teach other people the various kinds of assistive technology.

Anything else you think our readers would like to know?

I have this view in mind that technology is a popular sovereignty – made by people for people, and that is something we have to keep in mind when we innovate. If it is for people, then everyone should have access to that.

To read more about Andre’s adventures in Minnesota, and the work being done by the Office of Accessibility, subscribe to our newsletter!