About Shawn - Testimonials

Speaking and Presentations

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007

• "Shawn... gave some excellent examples, demos, and personal stories. She was also a particularly dynamic speaker, and engaged the audience throughout the talk." —Angela Dalton blog post
• "Informative, interesting, interactive and practical."
• "... one of the most inspiring and useful talks I attended during this conference."

CSUN 2005

Ratings:

• The information and materials were clear and understandable 4.6/5
• The speaker was knowledgeable in the subject matter 4.9/5
• The speaker was well prepared and addressed questions 4.8/5

Comments:

• Well organized - theory practice, theory practice... & review at end
• Good speed, clear explanations
• Nicely organized
• Well prepared and presented
• Excellent!
• Good explanation

Web Design World

"I had the good fortune to attend Shawn Henry's outstanding presentation on web site accessibility at the Thunderlizard conference in Denver this week. She offered a unique and practical perspective on the web, and was easily among the most effective speakers at the conference. You are very fortunate to have such a talented communicator at Optavia."

UPA 2000

• One of the best Excellent discussion and excellent use of examples/ videos.
• Very good--useful and open to audience participation
• Very practical presentation--many thanks. Really appreciated that you shared with us concrete tips and do's n' don'ts. It really helped to illustrate your points that you used video clips of usability testing with lo-fi prototypes.
• Well done session. Participation was pertinent and well planned.
• Great session. Offered lots of food for thought.
• Excellent participation exercise
• I enjoyed this presentation because of the presenters' enthusiasm for this topic. It was contagious and made the topic very fun.
• Excellent session! Creative, well-organized, well- researched and presented. This session gave me many valuable, practical ideas I can apply in my work. Audience involvement, slides, videos were great. Presenters were very knowledgeable and enthusiastic, great communicators.

WEB2001 International Conference and Exposition

• Good job! This was an excellent session. Shawn was enthusiastic & very informative
• Lots of good information
• Great speaker, I was not aware of how many issues need to be taken into consideration with your sites
• Excellent material
• 5 stars! Inspiring!
• Thanks! Lots of practical info & clarification
• Excellent & informative
• Very specific topic, obviously, but one of the best & most interesting of the conference

WEB2000 International Conference and Exposition

Participants were asked to evaluate the following on a scale of 1-5, 5 being the highest.

Session Average: 4. 73

1. Overall session rating: 4. 63
2. ability to hold a crowd: 4. 70
3. command of the topic: 4. 96
4. visual aids (slides, overheads): 4. 56
5. how prepared or inspired was the speaker: 4. 80

Comments:

• Very knowledgeable! great examples--real life scenarios
• Speaker was great.
• Excellent
• Terrific overview-great for the beginner and medium user
• Interesting topic. isn't addressed in most companies, thanks!
• Good! organized! very important topic!
• Great informative session!

Training Workshops

"Eye opening! The workshop really opens your eyes to whom your prospective web clients are and what we have to do as developers to make applications more useable and accessible. Shawn incorporated several exercises that showed that even the simplest of tasks couldn't be done if the design didn't take into account all possible users. Now I see that with little effort, our applications can become more user-friendly for everyone. Everyone should take this course!"

"Prior to taking this class, I thought that building an accessible site meant watering down designs. Shawn truly impressed me, when she could demonstrate that the accessibility of a site greatly improved the site for all users. Not only can you design sites that are more useful for more people, you can improve your existing sites with this knowledge."

Consulting

"Shawn Henry's background in usability and accessibility provided instant credibility, and the interactive sessions ensured successful knowledge transfer and retention. We're now much more aware of what a person with disabilities experiences when accessing our platform, and how that person chooses to link to content.

Optavia helped us work through some very real problems of accessibility. Not only did they enable us to comply with the basic requirements, they also guided us through the process and helped us discover alternative solutions along the way."

- Ciaran O'Connell, director of Program Management, SmartForce, Dublin, Ireland

About Shawn

"Rated in the top 5 of our 120 presentations"
- Bryan Mason, WEB2000 Program Manager