Bruce Lawson's personal site

Hire me! Accessibility and web standards consultancy services I offer.

I’m open to offers of part-time/ short-term consultancy or a retainer to help you make sure your products are accessible (and therefore more likely to be fast, performant and rank well with search engines). I’m at a stage of my life when I don’t need to flog myself to death to earn a fortune, so am more than happy with a more ad hoc working relationship that gives me more time to work on composing and recording my music as the cruellest months or working through my shelves of unread books.

Project planning and foundation building

It’s a cliché, but also a truism, that a building needs good, solid foundations. 67% of accessibility issues originate in design, and getting it correct at the start of a project is an order of magnitude cheaper than correcting it later. So I could help you with any (or all) of the following:

• Annotating Figma designs to tell the developers how to implement interactions accessibly
• Evaluating your component library, whether it’s your own, or a proposed off-the-shelf third-party libraries. (Don’t take vendors’ claims at face value). You won’t have much joy trying to make an accessible project if the building blocks themselves are flawed.
• I can advise you on a Progressive Web App strategy, using the mature open web technologies that have largely solved accessibility over the last 25 years, instead of using third-party vendors’ proprietary middleware.

Training

I can help train your staff on how to think about accessibility, how to translate that into the code they write, and how test their own work early in the process using some free tooling – ideally, before it’s ever merged into the main site. I’m a skilled educator, having been a teacher and spoken about web standards at over 120 conferences.

I’m also available for traditional speaking gigs – that is, prepared presentations about a subject you want your team to know about.

Auditing

I can test and audit your products. I can do it on your preferred template, or my own in which I generally report on how any problems affect real humans. (The reason for this is that after many decades on this marvellous blue marble of ours, I’ve discovered that 99.9999% of people are not actively evil. And if you show them why something might be problematic to someone with abilities different from theirs, they tend to be motivated to fix it and this sticks in their heads).

I’ll also report on which bits of WCAG the errors come under, if that’s important to you. We can prioritise the errors in a manner that makes sense for you and the stage in the project lifecycle (for example, by low-hanging fruit/ biggest bang for the buck/ stomp on the bugs that affect the largest populations first, etc).

Where appropriate, I’ll suggest fixes that I know work and have worked for me. Please note, I can read code and work with your developers to locate bugs, but I don’t write React, JavaScript, Flutter, Kotlin etc. I was a very good programmer, but that was the late 80s and early 90s. (I write semantic HTML and CSS highly proficiently, of course, as those are the bedrock of accessible web products.)

If you need the services of a jolly good chap who can write very good performant, accessible, maintainable and well-documented programs, I can recommend my old friend Stuart Langridge with whom I’ve collaborated on many projects (and I can subcontract him if that makes it easier for admin purposes).

I’m also happy to audit pages while your team watches. That way, they’ll learn how to test and what to look for. Of course, it takes longer if I’m explaining as I go and answering questions, but it will be cheaper in the long term, as they’ll be doing the testing themselves soon enough. This way, you also give your team useful skills and training. (Don’t worry about me doing myself out of a job; there are more than enough inaccessible sites to keep me employed for the next hundred years.)

OMG LAWYERS?!?!?

Have you received a letter from some lawyers because you’ve been sued by a customer you’ve inadvertently barred from accessing your app? Grim, isn’t it? I’ve been called in a few times to help rapid remediation to try to reduce the punitive damages you’ll have to pay. As this tends to be an all-hands-on-deck effort, I can clear my schedule (put bookmarks in books, hang my guitars back up) so it’s my most expensive service. But I’m still a damned sight cheaper than lawyers.

Whereas accessibility is tech agnostic (the techniques apply whatever tech stack you’re using), for the last 3 years I’ve mostly been digging people out of the holes that React and React Native can swiftly excavate if your tech team weren’t thinking about accessibility from the beginning.

If you’re new here so don’t know me, I have a boring LinkTin C.V. where real past clients don’t insult me. I have a registered company, a W-8BEN that means you don’t have to worry about tax if you’re an American org, and I have public liability insurance.

Now the tedious stuff is out of the way, I’m a bit of an old hippie pretending to be an old punk rocker, so I will do you Mates’ Rates (AKA a “discount”) if your organisation is actively trying to make the world a better place with the project. I am always happy to have a confidential no-obligation chat; email bruce at this domain.

Testimonials

People I’ve worked with over the last 15 years have said nice things about me. Surprisingly, these are all real – you can check them on LinkTin!

Bruce went above and beyond to provide an immersive experience for all users, including auditing our Unity elements, of which accessibility is still fairly novel. His meticulous approach, technical knowledge, and clear communication was outstanding. Bruce provided review on each UI element, screen, and even reviewed the UI framework we selected prior to any code being written, identifying barriers for accessibility and specific recommendations.

– Mandy Upshaw, CEO and Director of Creative at Touch To

Bruce is the entire package. He is not only highly skilled in accessibility and inclusive design. His technical skills are superb – so you are not only hiring someone who understands how your experiences can be better, he makes it happen with pragmatism and efficiency. He is also a great chap, fun to work with and with loads of experience in web, mobile and documentation.

– Daniel Souza (boss at Babylon Health)

Bruce has been a fantastic colleague and mentor for the past 3+ years. Joining the accessibility and inclusion team at Babylon, I was new to digital accessibility and Bruce was always willing to take time to train, share resources and help me practice different aspects including: laws and regulations, accessibility testing (web, app, and prototype), and fundamentals of semantic HTML.

– Taylar “Stinky” Bouwmeester (colleague at Babylon Health)

Bruce lives and breathes the World Wide Web. He was key in helping us shape our product to match both the standards of the web and the ever-changing Front End community.

– Tom Raviv, Head DevRel for Codux.com (colleague at Wix)

Working with Bruce is a truly unique experience. I was part of the team that hired Bruce to help us make our open source contribution stand-out, and reach the right people. I cannot imagine how we would have done it without him.

– Arnon Kehat, Product Manager, Wix.

Bruce was an excellent ambassador for the Opera brand and its products. As a self-starter, he did what was necessary to fight fires, regardless of formal job description, and worked across the organisation with many different teams and products. His ability to work with competitors and other organisations allowed him an excellent understanding of where the web is heading, which informed Opera’s strategy and products

– Lars Boilesen, CEO Opera Software