My background

After giving up on studying civil engineering due to financial reasons I decided to help my mother out as a temporary receptionist at a private computer collage. Within a few weeks I had moved up to reception/general admin/general dogs body… Oh the joys. I did however get to sneak into the night classes and started to learn a few of the applications. Starting with Flash 3, DreamWearver 1, PhotoShop 4 (?), FreeHand 7(?). Unbeknown to me this would turn out to be the start of my future…

What is interesting and totally different to most of my geeky friends is that before this I had never really had any access to a computer. I spent my childhood spending as much time outside as I possibly could: cycling, horse-ridding, swimming and enjoying the wildlife by travelling about South Africa.

I quickly shedded the roll of reception and moved into instructor and after a few years I moved into head of research and development. I moonlighted for the training centre bug fixing work for corporate clients. Life was good. I was passionate and I worked hard. I loved it. Then one day the last of the company was injected into the arm of the MD who had a little problem with drugs and there went my job, my passion and pretty much all I had come to know over the few years.

I bounced around South Africa but never really settled into a company and by the time I was 24 I had lost my passion and needed to move on. Due to a selection of reasons England was my final destination. One of the primary reasons was my father had moved back after many years in South Africa.

Shortly after landing I got a job at a small company in south London. This was the first real development company I worked with and they got me into standards based dev and pretty much forced me to get into CSS for layout. Painful but for the best. I worked there for 6 months before going freelance. Within a few weeks I was lucky enough to get onto Grant Skinner’s ActionScript 2 course.

I worked for a selection of training centres teaching a selection of products from Flash to Director, got involved with the London MMUG and even did a bit of writing. I had a few development projects but got hooked into a rather large e-learning project for the NHS Spine. During the course of my 9 months up in Leeds I took a team of classroom teachers and turned them into an e-learning dev team. They were great guys and really passionate. It was good and bad times and for me the first time I got hit with accessibility.

We failed the “tests”. Really? Confused me when to spend time with the testing team to work out who, how, why and what we could do to get it working. I discovered that although it was not perfect in Flash it was a combination of poor standards and uneducated testing team that failed Flash. Just because it was Flash. No question. No research. No testing…

After giving up for a few months I realised that I had let peoples ignorance and lack of tolerance get to me. I got really annoyed. Not only was it getting to me but it was getting in the way of so many disabled people. So I decided to focus on proving ignorant people wrong and then my two main goals: Get developers thinking about how to make sites more accessible and to educate ignorant Flash haters.

I dedicated a lot of time to this topic and have spoken at many conferences, written a bit and spoken to as many people as I could.

Three years on I feel like there has been a huge change in the attitudes of people across the UK and also the general internet and web standards people. I see more and more Flash developers considering accessibility in their every day projects. There are new standards available – WCAG2. There are a few more people who are really passionate about accessibility in Flash and Flex. I think they know more than me and should be the ones we are following in this area.

My current thoughts

So now I am going to move on. Sorry to those who want me to carry on with accessibility. I’m not going to delete any of my past posts or samples and in fact will try to post some things that I never got around to.

So in the next chapter we will see what happens. I am going to try to play more and have some fun. Flash on the Beach 09 inspired me beyond belief. There are so many areas that I feel I could really get into and some areas I would like to discuss more. Not sure where I will end up.