Accessibility

I have been building accessible websites since 1997.

And yet the great potential of the web's democratizing effects has yet to be reached. It is my great hope that accessibility will be built into the very structure of every site and platform.

This website is designed to be accessible to most people, regardless of their individual abilities.

To the greatest extent possible, this site conforms to WCAG2.2 Level AA guidelines, which means that its content (text and images) is perceivable and operable by people with disabilities.

All content should be accessible to those with disabilities. And yet, we are a long ways from that. A study by StatCan in 2022 revealed that 27 percent of Canadians live with a disability. In the United States, about 25 percent of all people (70 million people) report a disability.

As someone who has designed and built websites for 30 years, I have seen how the web can be an inclusive place – if we just care a bit more. There is no better quote than this one in 1997 by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee:

"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
  • Web accessibility means real social inclusion for everyone, including those with various disabilities.
  • The web is a radical approach to information and knowledge sharing: it removes barriers to communications by its very nature.
  • Accessibility for websites means that disability matters, period.
  • Web accessibility provides a means for your ideas, your services, your products to reach as many as possible.
  • Accessibility happens to be good for all users of the web by increasing usability, readability and comprehension.
  • Society is aging and we all will increasingly need easier access to information.
  • Those in rural and remote areas of the world also greatly benefit from web accessibility, as pages and systems are built with usability and speed in mind.
  • Access to the web is considered a human right in Article 21 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

This website aims to be accessible to most people

Creating a website to be accessible only requires a little extra effort. (I designed a resource website with the RGD called AccessAbility that shows how designers can build more inclusive products.)

Here is what I did as of this writing to make this site accessible.

  • Code and structure conform to Level AA guidelines of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2.
  • Content adheres to the Four Principles of Accessibility or POUR (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust).
  • Text alternatives are provided for all images so that people who are blind can read what the images contain.
  • Text content is large and clear.
  • There is sufficient contrast between text and background to make sure content is legible and readable.
  • A visitor can use a keyboard to navigate the site.
  • The site features no animation or flashing and navigation is consistent and clear/
  • In general, content is written to be easily understood and it is created semantically so that elements like headings, paragraph copy and captions work as expected by visitors.
  • The site is viewable easily on all kinds of devices, including desktops, laptops, mobile phones and tablets.

If you have any questions about this site's accessibility, any suggestions or recommendations about making it more accessible, or any issues with accessing the site's content, please don't hesitate to letting me know. I would appreciate your feedback.

All visual materials on this site are used in accordance with the Copyright Act of Canada (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42). Images are sourced from one of the following:

  • Public domain repositories, where copyright has expired or does not apply;
  • Original works created by me (photographs, drawings, illustration); or,
  • Licensed materials from third parties, used with explicit permission.

In some instances I may rely on the principle of fair dealing, as outlined in Sections 29, 29.1, and 29.2 of the Copyright Act, which permits the use of copyrighted material for the purposes of criticism, review, news reporting, education, parody, or satire without prior authorization. Where this applies, I reproduce only as much material as is necessary for commentary and provide attribution where applicable.

If you are a copyright holder and believe that any material has been used in a manner inconsistent with fair dealing, please contact me with a detailed request for review and I will assess the matter promptly.

My intent is to engage in ethical and responsible discourse on design, art, technology, and history while respecting the intellectual property rights of designers, artists, and content creators.

Privacy

My personal site collects aggregate data about its visitors but no information about you or your individual visits here.

About one half of all websites today use Google Analytics, a system that places a cookie on visitors' computers to follow you. Google and other culprits of surveillance capitalism, including our social media frenz at Meta (you know, Facebook, Instagram) and TikTok, know more about us than us than we like to think.

This website uses a privacy-first, Canadian-based analytics platform called Fathom that collects general site traffic but it does not place a cookie on your computer and therefore does not follow you around the web. Fathom is GDPR compliant, it does not sell or resell analytics data, and it doesn't taste bad.

In all honesty, I barely look at site analytics. It's kind of in bad taste. But it can be fascinating! Who knew I had so many fans in Russia! If you have any questions about digital privacy or this website, please reach out.

Sustainability

This is a low carbon website, designed and built to use less energy and fewer resources.

On a daily basis, I think of digital products as clean, energy-less objects. They are smooth and slick, polished like shiny rocks and flat front sides. The process of making them is hidden from us. They don’t look like they emerged from the dirty, messy murk of mines, machinery and masks.

But it takes a tremendous amount of energy to make the devices you are using to read this on — phones, desktops, laptops, tablets, and wearables. And it takes a lot of energy to power them, too.

The homepage of this website uses up 1.4g of CO2 equivalent every time it loads, receiving a carbon rating of B from my colleagues who run Website Carbon. The site shrinks image sizes with Ghost and I'm using as little code and other assets as possible. The net outcome is a fast, easy-to-use and green website.

As someone who very early started thinking about the digital — and carbon — footprint of personal and business work, I created the website Serving.Green with my team at Manoverboard along with partners Mightybytes and Third Partners in 2016. Low energy websites, digital sustainability and digital responsibility are increasingly important factors in conversations about design.

Websites, social media, AI, and web platforms and apps use a tremendous amount of energy. From the Sustainable Web Manifesto:

If the internet was a country it would be the 13th largest emitter between Mexico and Brazil.

Here’s what I did to reduce the energy footprint of this site.

  • Images are converted from JPEG and PNG format to WebP (with smaller file sizes) automatically through the Ghost platform.
  • A minimum number of typefaces are used.
  • There is very little fancy animation or video on the site.
  • I delete old files from this site to prevent servers from backing them up.
  • The site is hosted in European datacenters through Magic Pages, which runs on 100% renewable energy.

If you have any questions about sustainability or this site, please contact me.

Updated: 8 September 2026