Committee of Volunteers

Committee of Volunteers

Heather Smith

Heather is the Access &biog-pic-heather-smith Equality Specialist for the National Trust for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. She is responsible for advising on access for disabled people as employees, volunteers, visitors and supporters. Previously, Heather lived in Scotland where she worked in a contemporary art centre and completed her PhD, researching provisions in museums and art galleries for blind and partially sighted people. She has also presented at a range of conferences and published a number of articles on accessibility and the historic environment, recently collaborating on a chapter for, ‘Museums, Equality and Social Justice’, published in April 2012 by Routledge.  In 2008, she helped develop the National Trust’s Jodi Award winning virtual tour project.

Katie Durand

jodi-biog-pic-katieKatie Durand is a freelance project manager based in France. After some years working in art history publishing, she went back to university in 2009 to do a postgraduate course on digital project management at the Paris Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers. As part of the course, she spent 3 months at the National Gallery in London working on the accessibility of the gallery’s website and produced a dissertation on the accessibility of French museum websites compared to their British counterparts.

Katie is involved with on-going projects with the Mucha Foundation and BrailleNet, France’s non-profit e-Accessibility organisation. She is currently co-editing a White Paper published in collaboration with G3ict and BrailleNet and coordinating the European e-Accessibility Forum held in Paris each year.