Chancey Fleet, who has devoted her career to demystifying accessible technology, is changing the game for the community of people with vision disabilities.
Fleet graduated from the College of William and Mary and has a Master’s degree in disability studies from the City University of NY School of Professional Studies. From 2018-2019, Fleet was an affiliate at Data & Society, where her work centered on discovering the impact that cloud-assisted technology had on the disabled community.
Now, as an advocate and educator dedicated to making tactile literacy easily accessible and available to blind and low-vision individuals, Fleet currently serves as the Assistive Technology Coordinator at the New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. Fleet is the founder of the Dimensions Project at the library, a free open lab that encourages people to create accessible images and explore what’s possible in the world of tactile graphics and 3D modeling.
“It’s a really big field. And there are lots of web designers, lots of app developers who are in organizational cultures where accessibility is not taught,” she told the Partnership on Employment and Accessible Technology (PEAT) in 2021.
”As long as we don’t have a ubiquitous culture that says that accessibility is as important as security and other aspects of usability, we are going to continue to encounter impasses at all levels of professional engagement and we won’t really have true digital equity until design and development culture uniformly embraces and values accessibility as a design constraint,” she added.
Fleet is based in Brooklyn. She was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker in 2017, and is indeed moving the needle toward a world more aligned with the intent of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And, in 2022, she was a finalist for The David Award—an annual award that honors New Yorkers with bold ideas about how to improve the city—for her work with tactile graphics, 3D Models, and Braille.
Read all 35 stories of the New York-based leaders profiled in our ADA 35 edition.