This post was motivated by a few things that happened to me recently.
For one thing, I’ve recently joined OZeWAI‘s Mutua11y mentoring program, offering myself as mentor for people interested in a career in accessible design, development, and writing. I was matched with a protégé, and it quickly became apparent that she is already an experienced professional but the nature of her government job leaves her feeling isolated and frustrated at the lack of progress.
So, we turned it into more of a mutually supportive thing, where we both get to talk out our feelings about the industry – which suits me, since I don’t really think of myself as an “expert”.
As it happens, in the past few weeks, I’ve also had three online conversations with people who sought my advice on aspects of the digital accessibility industry in Australia, all of which involved me recounting my journey, so far. Necessarily, that made me reflect on exactly what that journey has been.
To quote Talking Heads, “Well … how did I get here?”
Then there was an OZeWAI Ask The Professionals online session I attended in which a panel consisting of Rachael Bradley Montgomery, Sheri Byrne-Haber, and Amanda Mace, moderated by Jaunita Flessas, addressed the topic of “Accessibility Careers, Recruitment, and Mentoring”. So much wisdom, so many great insights, so much food for thought (the video recording will be up soon – well worth watching).
And finally, I recently decided it was time for me to move on from Vispero and I was fortunate to be offered a position as Inclusive Design Specialist at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The application process was interesting and enlightening, consisting of one interview with a panel of three who asked me broad questions about why I wanted to work at the ABC, my digital accessibility methodologies, my working experience, how I’d advocate for accessibility in such a large organisation, and so on, followed by a second interview three days later that focused on how I’d tackle four technical tasks, like assessing a login page, prioritising three issues that needed fixing, and so on.
I felt confident for the first interview. It did, of course, again make me reflect on my professional journey to this point, but I’m pretty articulate and a confident speaker and I felt I made a good impression. I even asked a few pertinent questions of my own. “Do you have senior management buy-in for accessibility?” A pause, then a positive if qualified response with the note that advocating at that level is part of this job. Fair enough.
I was more nervous about the second interview. It’s so easy to forget things in contexts like that. Login page: um, check the colour contrast, make sure everything’s keyboard navigable, check both visual and programmatic labelling, don’t disable the submit button, check user errors are identified and explained and users are told how to fix them … what else? … don’t use placeholder text for labels or instructions, indicate required fields, think about label placement … this is a pretty simple “enter name, enter email, submit” kind of login so probably don’t need to group fields … um … check tab order matches visual order … I’m sure I’ve forgotten something. I tell you, it’s nerve-wracking!
However, there were lots of nods and smiles, so that seemed to go pretty well, too. To my surprise, I received a phone call that same afternoon offering me the job! There was quick and general agreement I was the right person for the job. When could I start?
My Vispero contract requires 30 days notice to terminate so my stint at the ABC starts on 3 November, giving me time to finish the AI roles-based training curriculum I’m working on.
What really surprised me was that my LinkedIn post about the job move drew almost 9,000 impressions, 200+ reactions, and 59 comments congratulating me. That is by far the most social media attention I’ve ever attracted.
So, since I’ve had to think about it all, this post is an attempt to summarise just how I DID get here.
First, I had a career before web tech. I was an actor for almost 10 years. It started when a group of friends did a clowning workshop in Hobart and an Australian mime artist said we should put together a show, get a van, and take it around Tasmanian schools. I was working at the Tax Office at the time, so TUK seemed like a good idea.
It was the start for me of working in theatre-in-education for eight years, moving from company to company, city to city, usually performing three shows a day, five days a week. One city I moved to was Newcastle, where I met Hazel and decided to stay after my stint with Freewheels.
For two years, I did everything vaguely theatrical in that city: worked backstage for the Hunter Valley Theatre Company, was “Artistic Director” for Fanny’s nightclub (hey, at least I replaced their wet t-shirts competitions with a karaoke contest), got a TAFE grant set up a local Theatre of the Deaf, did radio and TV ads, held nonverbal theatre classes for young adults with intellectual disabilities, busked (both mime and guitar/singing) … I even taught aspiring models how to own a fashion catwalk.
When Hazel got a job with an information agency called Horan Wall & Walker, we moved to Sydney. I did a few auditions without success, and the agency hired me to write capsule reviews of first, movies and TV, and then all kinds of entertainment events, writing in different styles to suit different clients like newspapers, magazine, TV, and radio. I left to join an information service for people with disabilities called DIRC and built my first website for them in 1994.
DIRC started out as a phone-based service, connecting families with sources of information and support, until the web came along. Obviously, making this first website accessible to people with disabilities was a fundamental requirement, but that wasn’t very hard, as all I had to work with was HTML 1.2 (which was never a fornmal standard but it did introduce the alt attribute for images).
After eight years, I went back to HWW. One project I worked on was compiling cinema information – movie titles, screening times, venue locations, etc – a complete guide to what was on in every cinema in Australia.
We had a client interested in subscribing to this information, so we needed a way to show it off. Working with an exceptionally clever programmer, we built a website in the late 90s as a shopfront. It did the job, the client subscribed and then we thought we may as well keeping maintaining the website and it became popular enough to eventually be bought by a major media company.
Not long after that, I decided to become a freelance web developer. At the time, a “web developer” was a jack of all web trades: visual designer, interaction and UX designer, front end (and sometimes back end) developer, content author, and general web product manager, including providing or arranging web hosting and domain name registration.
Having started with the assumption that accessibility was part of the job, I stayed with that philosophy and practice. I built myself a website (which made me unusual, even though it seemed an obvious step to me), and initially most of my business came from either established businesses aiming to develop a web presence (from a book publisher to a US personal care products producer trying to break into the Australian market) or advertising agencies wanting someone to turn graphic designs into web properties.
I scored a significant contract with the national peak body for public school parents & citizens associations, and that in turn led to a lot of jobs creating websites for public and private schools. All along, I remained committed to accessibility and was still a jack of all trades, although I started calling myself a web designer / developer.
I made enough of a living to also do a fair bit of pro bono work, which helped to broaden the portfolio on my website.
I spent a couple of years working for the advocacy body People with Disabilities NSW, first as IT guy, then manager of information services, which included redesigning and managing their website.
My idea of professional development was four-pronged: books, conferences, meetups, and online forums. I gave myself an annual budget for the first two and became a regular book buyer from publishers like SitePoint and A List Apart as well as a regular attendee at conferences like Web Directions and UX Australia.
Sydney at the time had a plethora of web tech meetups that focused on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, User Experience, Content Strategy, WordPress, and heaps more, including Accessibility. The talks at these meetups were great, delivering nuggets of tips and tricks and technical breakthroughs, but just as important was the networking. I made friends and colleagues with people I remain in contact with to this day, many of whom ended up bringing me work in one way or another.
I became involved with Web Industry Professionals Australia, joined their committee and was elected President. At one conference, I happened to sit next to the Presidemt of the Australian Web Industry Association, based in Perth, and we agreed it was a bit silly to have two national organisations, so contrived to have WIPA folded into AWIA.
By 2006, Hazel and I, with two young children, decided to move out of Sydney to buy a house and we ended up in Corrimal, just north of Wollongong on the south coast of New South Wales (I’d briefly lived there when I was working for Wollongiong theatre company Bread & Circus in 1984).
Our kids became enrolled in community groups like soccer clubs, scouts, surf club, swimming club, etc and I offered to build them all websites, either pro bono or very low cost. This turned out to be smart, not only because it swelled my portfolio, but also because a lot of those organisation’s committee members were local business people, for whom I then designed and built websites at full fee prices.
I still went to the conferences in Sydney and I started writing blog posts about the ones I attended and that eventually brought me work with both of the conference organisers I mentioned. Again, I learned so much attending and working at these conferences. Both regularly had industry experts from overseas as headline speakers, who I got to know well and again, many remain friends today.
The online community forum I used more than any other was SitePoint’s. I started out asking a lot of questions, then answering them, then helping to manage it, until I was asked if I’d like to tech edit some of their books, then write articles for their website, then edit other people’s articles, and I eventually became the Sitepoint’s website Managing Editor for a few years. Again, a huge learning experience, and a fantastic networking opportunity.
Between all these part-time jobs plus a steady stream of web design clients, I was making a good living. I became involved with the organisers of an Australia annual conference focused on digital accessibility, called OZeWAI, for Australian Web Accessibility Industry. I became a committee member and have remained with them as they evolved into the national peak industry body for digital accessibility professionals.
Because of my experience working with people with disabilities and my ongoing commitment to digital accessibility, I was recruited to a new organisation focused solely on digital accessibility. That agency lasted less than a year but gave me the start I needed to make accessibility my own main focus.
I had some short term jobs with international and Australian accessibility agencies and was eventually hired by a relatively new Australian agency, Intopia, that has since grown into the largest digital accessibility consultancy in the southern hemisphere.
I stayed with Intopia for 18 months, then went back to freelancing, including with overseas clients. I had an established reputation, a good network, and reasonably steady employment.
In 2020, I was recruited by TPGi, a US-based global digital accessibility consultancy with major international clients, a large team of accessibility engineers, and an auditing platform used by both. I became part of the Knowledge Center, initially to write training courses for our clients and staff, then to also write technical knowledge base articles, expand and maintain the rules engine used to conduct accessibility audits, and write blog posts and newsletters.
In 2025, TPGi became part of a larger corporation called Vispero, that also acquired Freedom Scientific, the makers of the JAWS screen reading software, and a couple of other companies focused on assistive technology for people with low vision.
At first, Vispero set out to reinvent itself as the world’s leading provider of products and services to people with vision impairment. That seemed to narrow the aims and objectives of the company, sideline the Knowledge Center work I was doing, and introduce the prospect of increasing the use of AI to streamline operations.
More recently, Vispero has, I feel, turned a corner and is rebuilding itself, including the digital accessibility consultancy and training operations that had been the core of what was TPGi. Now, Vispero seems more intent in taking advantage of the very considerable digital accessibility expertise it has and combining it with its assistive technology products to offer an integrate set of accessibility-focused products and services that is unique.
However, this feels like the right time for me to move on. The ABC presents me with a very great challenge – to advocate for and evangelise digital accessibility from the highest levels of management to the product teams delivering content, to train and support hundreds of designers and developers to make accessibility a fundamental and core part of their jobs, and to identify, address, and resolve complex technical accessibility issues across web, app, and streaming content.
I’m well aware of the enormity of these tasks, but I also feel I’m at the peak of my powers and have both the skills and resolve to build on the great work done by the people who’ve previously held this position, and I believe the ABC itself is moving into a new era of inclusive practices that is both mandated and believed in.
So, here I am, about to turn 67 tomorrow (the official retirement age in Australia) embarking on a new career path in the belief that I can still make the digital world more accessible.
To quote Once in a Lifetime again,
“Am I right? Am I wrong?”
I’m about to find out.