Last week my mother died. After we put her urn into the ground next to my father’s we went back to their flat to talk about next steps and dividing up their belongings amongst us three children. One thing I immediately called dibs on were my father’s two books. Both…

It is possible to accidentally open the developer tools in browsers. Either by pressing F12, selecting the “Inspect” option of the context menu or hitting one of the many keyboard shortcuts that open different tools. These tools can look intimidating and as if someone is hacking your computer. Especially when…

Webaim.org releases an annual report called the WebAIM Million. This is a deep analysis of the one million most visited web sites how accessible they are. And every year the result is pretty grim. Across the one million home pages, 50,829,406 distinct accessibility errors were detected — an average of…

I like noise cancelling headphones. Using them, I can sleep better on planes and find much more detail in music I enjoy. In the office, they are a visual clue that I am currently unavailable for feedback as I want to concentrate on a task at hand.

After 25 years of working for, on and with the web, I am looking at the current state of it and I don’t like it. There is still a lot of beautiful, creative and amazing work out there, but on the whole, we lost an amazing opportunity. …

This is a talk that I’ve given at CityJS this September. I am a principal product manager for developer tools in Microsoft Edge and these are things I encountered during working on the tools, documenting them and going through user feedback. You can watch the recording of the talk on…

Today the World Wide Web is 30 years old. I’ve worked on it since 1997 or so and I saw a lot of technologies and design trends come and go. I’ve also seen a lot of “this is much better and will replace the web” solutions come and go. What…

Over the course of my career I’ve seen a lot of excellent accessibility presentations and learned a lot. That’s because I worked in the accessibility space and went to specialist conferences. Web development conferences also have accessibility talks and their number is rising. But often these don’t go past the…

The other day, I mulled over the problem of bad user experience resulting in more usage of products. And I followed up with wondering how we could get to a “happy user” metric. When measuring the success of software products, data is king. When I moved from DevRel…