About

Built by someone who has lived the problem.

TheAccessible.Org was founded by Laura Hopkins — a practitioner who spent years inside a large public university making sure every digital resource met federal accessibility standards, and who built this platform so every organization can do the same.

Laura Hopkins, founder of TheAccessible.Org
  • CPACC
  • MS ITM
  • CAPM
  • CTCD / CTCM

Laura Hopkinsshe / her

Founder, TheAccessible.Org · EIR Accessibility Coordinator (part-time), UT Arlington

Laura is one of the most recognized digital accessibility practitioners in higher education. Since 2018 she has led the Electronic and Information Resources (EIR) accessibility program at The University of Texas at Arlington, working with leadership across every department to ensure that every digital resource — websites, PDFs, videos, software — meets federal standards and is genuinely usable by people with disabilities.

That day-to-day work gave Laura an unusually clear view of where accessibility programs succeed and, more often, where they quietly break down: procurement decisions made without reading a VPAT, remediation projects launched without a way to measure progress, institutions starting from scratch for the tenth time because no one wrote anything down.

TheAccessible.Org is her answer to that pattern — a suite of purpose-built tools that embed the hard-won knowledge of a working accessibility coordinator into software any organization can use, whether or not they have Laura on staff.

In 2026 Laura moved to a part-time position at UT Arlington to dedicate the majority of her time to TheAccessible.Org. She continues to teach at Knowbility's John Slatin AccessU and speaks at national accessibility conferences.

Credentials

Certifications that span accessibility practice, project management, and public-sector procurement.

CPACC
Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies
IAAP — International Association of Accessibility Professionals
MS ITM
Master of Science in Information Technology Management
CAPM
Certified Associate in Project Management
PMI — Project Management Institute
CTCD / CTCM
Certified Texas Contract Developer / Manager
State of Texas Procurement Certifications

Career milestones

  1. 2018

    Joined UT Arlington as EIR Accessibility Coordinator, building the university's electronic accessibility program from the ground up.

  2. 2022

    Created the VPAT® Scorecard — a letter-grade system that translates dense conformance reports into actionable risk ratings for procurement teams.

  3. 2023

    Presented the VPAT® Scorecard at Educause Virtual Conference and volunteered as a speaker at WordPress Accessibility Day.

  4. 2025

    Began teaching "Show Me an EIR Accessibility Program That Works!" and VPAT/ACR workshops at Knowbility's John Slatin AccessU.

  5. 2026

    Moved to a part-time role at UT Arlington to focus full-time on TheAccessible.Org — bringing institution-grade accessibility tools to every organization.

Speaking & teaching

Laura regularly shares what works — and what doesn't — with accessibility practitioners across higher education and government.

  • Knowbility's John Slatin AccessU

    2025, 2026
    • Show Me an EIR Accessibility Program That Works!
    • How to Score a VPAT / ACR
    • Accessible Word Documents (and how to make them an accessible PDF)
  • Educause Virtual Conference

    2023
    • The VPAT® Scorecard: letter-grade accessibility ratings for procurement teams
  • WordPress Accessibility Day

    2023
    • Volunteer speaker

“Accessibility isn't a project you finish. It's a practice you maintain.”

Everything Laura built at UTA — the scorecards, the intake workflows, the remediation pipelines, the program metrics — is now encoded into TheAccessible.Org's tools. So you don't have to reinvent it.