Chris Smith, Ed.D.

Dr. Chris Smith is a nationally recognized digital accessibility strategist and instructional design leader with more than 25 years of experience across K–12, higher education, and public-sector digital environments. His work focuses on translating accessibility standards into sustainable institutional systems that integrate governance, procurement, CMS workflows, design systems, testing practices, and training infrastructures.

He led the development of North Carolina Virtual Public School’s first organization-wide Digital Accessibility Plan and has collaborated with state agencies, higher education institutions, and national organizations to strengthen accessibility governance and operational maturity aligned with WCAG, Section 508, and ADA Title II requirements. His work emphasizes distributed responsibility models that embed accessibility across web teams, content creators, developers, marketing units, and executive leadership rather than centralizing compliance within a single office.

Dr. Smith regularly facilitates workshops and conference sessions at the state and national levels, including ATIA, NCTIES, and higher education digital forums, where he focuses on automation limits, manual testing integration, institutional risk interpretation, and scalable training frameworks. He is known for bridging policy, implementation science, and technical practice, helping institutions move beyond reactive remediation toward sustainable accessibility capability.

In addition to his strategic consulting work, Dr. Smith teaches graduate courses in instructional design and educational technology, integrating accessibility evaluation, governance alignment, and digital workflow design into advanced coursework. His approach centers on building long-term institutional capacity rather than one-time compliance responses.