This blog is part of our GAAD (Global Accessibility Awareness Day) series spotlighting members of accessiBe’s Inclusive Product Advisory Board — disability community leaders and advocates helping shape how accessibility is built in practice. Advisory board sessions are moderated by Josh Basile, accessiBe’s Community Relations Manager, C4-5 quadriplegic, and disability rights advocate.
Meet Mike Caprara, Chief Information Officer, The Viscardi Center
Mike Caprara has spent his career at the intersection of technology and disability inclusion. As Chief Information Officer (CIO) of The Viscardi Center, he oversees the technology infrastructure of a non-profit network serving children and adults with disabilities through education, employment, and empowerment programs. He also leads the Center’s Digital Accessibility Services division — a practice that conducts accessibility audits, document remediation, usability testing, and captioning for organizations nationwide.
The Center was founded in 1952 by Dr. Henry Viscardi Jr., who wore prosthetic legs and served as a disability advisor to eight U.S. presidents — from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter. It was one of the first organizations in the world staffed primarily by people with disabilities and wounded veterans. In 1962, Dr. Viscardi added a school — the Henry Viscardi School, serving children with severe physical disabilities from Pre-K through age 21 — at a time when most of those children were receiving instruction at home or in a hospital setting.
Today The Viscardi Center provides a lifespan of services: Pre-K through high school education, youth transition services, pre-employment and employment services, inclusive higher education, day habilitation without walls, and digital accessibility services. It also publishes Able News, a digital news platform by, for, and about people with disabilities, and opened the Museum of Disability History in February.
“From the first moment our founder opened our doors, he was committed to making the world more inclusive. Over 70 years later, we continue his mission as technology has evolved and plays an ever-growing role in our daily lives.” — Mike Caprara
What does accessibility look like for people with disabilities across a lifetime?
The Viscardi Center serves people with a wide range of disabilities — physical, sensory, cognitive, and developmental. Across that breadth, the consistent digital barrier is one that runs through this entire series: a web that was built without the disability community in mind, and that continues to exclude people through technical inaccessibility, language that doesn’t resonate, and design that assumes a standard body and a standard mind.
Mike’s vantage point is unusual in that he sees this across an entire lifespan. From the child in the Henry Viscardi School navigating an inaccessible education technology platform, to the adult job seeker trying to complete an online application, to the organization being audited for compliance — the barriers shift at each stage, but the underlying failure is often the same. Systems built for efficiency rather than inclusion. Systems tested without the people they’re meant to serve.
That pattern is what Mike brings to the advisory board — not just the technical perspective of a CIO, but the institutional knowledge of an organization that has been fighting this fight for over 70 years.
What Mike brought to the table
Mike’s advisory board contributions have a practical, CIO-level clarity to them. When a new AI-powered accessibility feature was demonstrated, he immediately pushed toward user control — the ability to increase or decrease font size, bold specific text, or magnify content directly within a passage. Those micro-adjustments, in his view, are what turn a feature from a shortcut into a genuinely useful tool.
“I think having the ability to read it aloud, being able to increase or decrease the font yourself — giving a little more control to the user — being able to bold it or magnify it right there on that specific text. Those are things that would probably add to that.” — Mike Caprara
He also raised a critical point about alt text, grounded in direct feedback from The Viscardi Center’s clients: that AI-generated alt text is often “very basic” — functional, but not rich enough to convey the full meaning of an image. That input directly informs accessiBe’s roadmap and the ability within accessFlow to generate different alt text options, giving website managers a choice between auto-generated descriptions or the ability to create their own — which remains the best practice.
The takeaway
Mike’s experience is a reminder that deploying accessible technology is not just a website problem. It’s a culture, a mandate, and — at The Viscardi Center — a mission that has been lived out for over seven decades. The organizations that get this right are the ones that build with the disability community, not just for it.
Explore The Viscardi Center’s work: viscardicenter.org
Learn about their Digital Accessibility Services: das.viscardicenter.org
Is your technology infrastructure accessible to the people you serve? Book a demo with accessiBe.
