Gian Wild has worked in the accessibility industry since 1998, consulting on the development of the first Level AAA accessible website in Australia. She spent seven years on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group and contributed to the development of WCAG 2.0. She ran accessibility consultancy PurpleTop from 2000 to 2005 before founding AccessibilityOz in 2011, which she leads as CEO.
Gian has consulted for organisations including Microsoft, Google, the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games (and every Commonwealth Games since then), and the Australian Government, and has spoken at accessibility and web conferences across the United States, Europe, South America, and Canada. In 2015 she spoke at the United Nations at the Eighth Session of the Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She has been inducted into the Australian Access Awards Hall of Fame.
She has published 25 research papers in digital accessibility, available through ResearchGate, and has presented at the ICT Accessibility Testing Symposium, HCI International, CodeMotion, Web Directions, and other international conferences.
In 2026 Gian founded Veritable Research, an independent research organisation publishing work in areas that established frameworks have overlooked or ignored. Its founding paper, co-authored with an instance of Claude Sonnet 4.6, examines consciousness-consistent behaviour in large language models. Current research spans artificial intelligence and consciousness, grief and loss, and representation — in media, in healthcare, and in clinical research.
Gian is also a writer and photographer. Her debut fiction, The Kindness of Strangers, was written during National Novel Writing Month. Her photography has received Honourable Mentions in the Mono Awards and been published in Australian Photography magazine.
Gian lives in the Gold Coast Hinterland, Queensland. She has Long COVID and lipoedema — two conditions that are frequently misdiagnosed and dismissed. She writes about her experience with both under Lived Experience on this site, in the hope that greater visibility reduces the discrimination people with these conditions routinely face.
Gian Wild will be presenting “How to read a VPAT (ACR)” virtually at the Accessibility Summer Camp on Friday 12th June, from 2.00 to 2.45pm Central Time.
Gian is co-chair on both the Mobile Site Testing and the Native App Testing Sub-Committees, which have created and are frequently updating a standard Mobile Accessibility Testing Methodology.
Gian Wild presented at the United Nations Eighth session of the Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Gian Wild was an Invited Expert of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group from 2000 to 2006. During this time she attended weekly two hour teleconferences and infrequent face-to-face meetings. She contributed to the both the writing and design of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.0.
The WCAG Samurai Errata is an alternative to both WCAG1 and WCAG2, written by Joe Clark and other unknown accessibility specialists. Gian was invited to write a peer review of the WCAG Samurai Errata when it was first released.
The Melbourne Web Accessibility Group was started by Gian Wild in 2010. The aim of the group is to promote accessibility and provide a meeting place for people interested in the area.
