Jason J. G. White is an associate research scientist at ETS until July 2022. His interests while at ETS centered on innovations in web standards and technologies intended to support access to educational materials and assessments by people with disabilities. He holds bachelor of arts (honors) and bachelor of laws (honors) degrees from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and a Ph.D. in contemporary analytic philosophy of language, also from the University of Melbourne.
He has served as the facilitator of the Research Questions Task Force of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group. This task force draws upon research to inform enhancements of emerging Web technologies to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. With Mark Hakkinen, he chaired the Accessible Assessment Task Force of the IMS Global Learning Consortium, which has contributed to accessibility-related discussions surrounding the development of the next major version of the Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) standard. In addition, he chaired the Drag and Drop subcommittee of the DIAGRAM Developers Group, which examined the challenges of improving the accessibility of user interfaces that typically employ drag and drop interactions, particularly in educational applications, such as interactive science simulations.
White's participation in the development of international web standards to improve access for people with disabilities is long-standing. He served from 2000-2004 as co-chair of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) working group of the W3C, and, until June 2005, as an editor of the WCAG 2.0 specification. He now participates in the development of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 specification.