About Crystal
Crystal is the Senior Accessibility Manager at ITHAKA, the nonprofit behind JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S+R, where she leads efforts to make research and learning resources accessible to everyone. Based in Denver, Colorado, and born in the late 20th century, she’s built a career that spans journalism, web development, and enterprise software, with a consistent focus on disability rights and digital equity.
In 2019, Crystal joined Salesforce as a quality engineer, testing the accessibility of Salesforce.org products such as Philanthropy, Nonprofit, and Education Cloud, and later moved into the role of Senior Digital Accessibility Analyst in the Office of Accessibility.
There, she developed and managed a large-scale internal accessibility program for over 70,000 employees, helping reduce reported accessibility barriers and increase awareness and accountability across teams.
She began her career in news media as a freelance writer, then became Web Editor at Westword and later Interactive Producer at the Rocky Mountain News, teaching herself HTML, CSS, and JavaScript along the way. After the Rocky Mountain News closed, she shifted into front-end development, working with clients in the finance, design, and nonprofit sectors. She later moved into testing and quality engineering in 2013. A seemingly simple Jira ticket to test a product with a screen reader became the turning point that drew her into accessibility work and gave her new tools to navigate her own visual disability. Since then, she has led testing and accessibility efforts at various agencies and product companies, including Ping Identity and Aetna, working across web and mobile platforms to embed accessibility into everyday development and release workflows.
Beyond her full-time work, Crystal serves as a speaker, technical advisor, and contributing author, championing the idea that digital access is a civil and human right. She contributed a chapter to Digital Accessibility Ethics: Disability Inclusion in All Things Tech (Taylor & Francis, 2026), served as project advisor on the Smithsonian Science Education Center’s Zero Barriers! (2026), and was a technical reviewer for the second edition of Reginé M. Gilbert’s Inclusive Design for a Digital World (Apress, 2025). Her YouTube tutorials offer an entry point for people new to accessibility.
Outside of work, Crystal spends her time performing improv comedy, creating historically accurate buildings in Sims 4, and failing to teach her cat, Dominique Deveraux, tricks.