3dahoy

Who are you?

Welcome / नमस्कार / ਸਤਿ ਸ਼੍ਰੀ ਅਕਾਲ

I'm Gareth, a front end software architect with around 30 years of experience developing accessible, semantic web content.

I started my career in web in the 90's developing online and cdrom based educational content using html, css, javascript and legacy systems like Macromedia Flash and Director. After this I moved into serverside work: os installation, apache, php, perl etc. while continuing to work on the web front end.

Through the 90's I started learning 3d modelling and animation and started integrating these into web sites with VRML and Director (apologies).

Thankfully I moved back into conventional web development and developed a more keen interest in web accessibility and semantics and the methods used to enable people with disabilities to interact with and consume web content.

I've since moved across a few different web disciplines as a means to improve my understanding of all aspects of web architecture and development.

Currently I work as a software architect at a large multinational financial services company but still get the chance to do UI/development work on our WCAG 2.1 AA compliant design system which we have been working on for over 6 years with some incredibly talented individuals.

Interests:

Those who know me will be delighted to see I've kept this section to a minimum, my current interests are animal activism, India (Jai Hind), the "maker" lifestyle and the ever changing landscape of infosec. I make arcade machines and pinball tables in my spare time (see G33cade for details).

Anything else?

I'll be popping on things of personal interest on here if I feel there's any merit. They will relate to anything that's in my current life and any examples of code/experiments will also be available through the usual git repos. If you want an eclectic smorgasbord of technical and ethical tomfoolery you can find me on a few social platforms as garhol.

Notes:

Text and elements on this site should have a contrast ratio of 7:1 barring the big title there which is about 5.5:1. This keeps things within the confines of AAA WCAG compliance. Cookies are not used, client side scripting is not required and will only appear if it's related to a particular discussion or experiment. As a side note, if you score 100 across the board in your lighthouse test in chrome you get a nice little fireworks display.

The site was built in notepad++. Minification, image compression and deployment to an NGINX test instance are handled by a small python script(who doesn't love copy_tree?). Post deploy, selenium runs a11y AXE tests to check for any issues.