Three Decades of Access: A Conversation with Jane Berliss-Vincent, Assistive Technology Manager at the University of Michigan

Part of Every Kid Can’s ongoing interview series, where we speak with professionals, advocates, and educators who work alongside people with disabilities every day — to better understand the barriers they face and how youth can be part of the solution.

Every Kid Can was founded on a simple belief: that social isolation and inaccessible opportunities shouldn’t stand between kids with disabilities and their peers. To understand these barriers more deeply, we’ve been sitting down with professionals across the disability field. This installment features Jane Berliss-Vincent, Assistive Technology Manager at the University of Michigan and 2016 recipient of the university’s Distinguished Diversity Leader Award, whose career has spanned over 35 years in assistive technology and digital accessibility.

What Does an Assistive Technology Manager Do?

Berliss-Vincent’s work centers on evaluation, not invention. Rather than building or testing new products from scratch, she reviews existing software and hardware — from keyboard and mouse alternatives to broader accessibility tools — and makes recommendations to help people find the technology that actually fits their needs.

At the University of Michigan, that means overseeing the Knox Center, a dedicated accessible computing space for disabled students, and providing direct, high-tech accommodation support to students, faculty, and staff across campus. Her work also includes converting textbooks and course materials — including STEM content and materials in Arabic and Hebrew — into accessible formats like braille, and helping pilot emerging technologies designed to make personal assistive tools more portable and available anywhere.

Her career has taken her well beyond campus, too. Before Michigan, she spent over a decade as an independent consultant and researcher, working with state library systems, disability service organizations, and national initiatives on digital accessibility. She’s authored multiple books and guides on accessible library and educational practice, including Making the Library Accessible for All, and has spent years contributing to national accessibility standards and committees. It’s a career built less around any single job title, she suggests, and more around one throughline: translating technical capability into practical, everyday usability for the people who rely on it most.

The Barriers That Remain

After more than three decades in the field, Berliss-Vincent has watched accessibility improve dramatically — and has also watched new, subtler barriers take their place. She described accessibility as existing on several planes at once. Operating systems and mainstream software now build in far more accessibility features than they used to, and the gap between a new software release and compatible assistive technology has shrunk significantly. But she was careful to note this progress is “mixed” — pointing out that some major companies have made it difficult for outside developers to build accessibility tools, pushing good products off the market and locking users into a single ecosystem’s command set.

Cost remains a persistent obstacle. She pointed to insurance providers who won’t cover assistive technology that “might be used for something else,” and charity or government programs that provide a device once but won’t repair or replace it — leaving people stuck with outdated or broken tools.

Perhaps most striking was her point about who gets left out of accessibility planning altogether. She noted that major accessibility guidelines, including recent legislation like the European Accessibility Act, give minimal attention to neurodivergent users and often don’t address neurodivergence beyond cognitive disability at all. That same gap, she pointed out, extends to children, elderly users, and people navigating literacy or language barriers — groups whose needs often go unconsidered in mainstream accessibility design.

Her summary of three decades in the field: “much progress, and far to go.”

How We Can Do Better

Berliss-Vincent’s core advice for young people was about humility: listen before you build. She’s seen firsthand how much assistive technology fails simply because it was designed around what a creator imagined users needed, rather than what users actually asked for — pointing to mechanical ASL-signing hands as a recurring example of a product that keeps getting reinvented despite little to no interest from the Deaf community it claims to serve.

She also encouraged students to think about accessibility as a habit, not a topic reserved for a class or a career. Once you know basic accessibility standards — whether for physical buildings or for websites — she said it becomes hard to walk into a space or open a page without noticing where it falls short, and that noticing is often the first step toward advocating for change.

For students specifically considering this field, she noted that many of her own hires come not from engineering or disability studies, but from information and library science — a reflection, she suggested, of a discipline that blends technical skill with a genuine focus on meeting real user needs.

Every Kid Can is a youth-led initiative working to expand social and sensory inclusion for people with disabilities across our community. This interview is part of a series in which we speak with professionals, educators, and advocates to better understand the barriers to inclusion and how young people can help close them.