Welcome - work, you're welcome to it
Hi, I'm Mike Foskett and welcome to my "work" website. The key to a high-performance website is to focus on improving front-end performance and that, as a front-end engineer, is pretty much what I do.
A good example of my work would be the Tesco homepage which is built to be fast, usable, accessible and very SEO friendly.
My purpose here is to supply help, guidance and small code snippets relating to front-end development issues. Hopefully to gain further employment as an accessible, web standards developer with a high degree of experience in optimisation, accessibility, (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax and a little jQuery. See Services if you're interested. My main aims are to:
- Create engaging web solutions, which are fast, robust, rich and usable, to demonstrate accessible sites do not have to be dull or slow.
- Encourage developers into adopting web standards, developing strategies to ensure a greater compliance with accessible design guidelines and understand the criteria for quick loading websites.
- Direct visitors to information and resources on web development.
- Influence policy within organisations to positively effect web accessibility across the public and private sector.
- Educate and inform managers and programmers of the benefits that optimised accessible developments bring to organisations.
This website was undergoing a major overhaul but time constraints meant little except resources had changed in the last four years. Shame I was half way through adding Ajax delivered content in an accessible manner which is no mean feat given the nature of access technologies.
The site is now in it's seventh year and it's second redevelopment. New resources are added on an ad hoc basis. Many techniques demonstrated here may be found useful to developers please take a look at the full list of resources available.
A few tools I've created also appear here. The most popular being the Data URI image convertor and rather strangely the post code to coordintates converter.
There is an old (2004) online accessibility workshop aimed at beginners but may be found useful if you are training developers or managers in priority one accessibility. It is still relevant as is the rather dry but comprehensive Accessible forms: Guidelines & manipulation.
