Bruce Lawson's personal site

Here’s the video of my talk.

The slides are available.

Since my last employer decided just before Xmas that it didn’t need an accessibility team any more, I’ve been sporadically applying for jobs, between some freelance work and finishing the second album by the cruellest months (give it a listen while you read on!).

Two days ago I was lucky enough to receive two rejection letters from acronym-named corporations. Both were received only a couple of working hours after I eventually hit submit in their confusing (and barely-accessible) third-party job application portals, which makes me suspicious of their claims to have “carefully considered” my application. One rejection, I suspect, was because I’d put too large a figure in the ‘expected salary’ box; how am I supposed to know, when the advertised salary is “competitive”? In retrospect, I should have just said typed “competitive” into the box.

The second rejection reason is a little harder to discern. As I exceeded all the criteria, I suspect admitting to the crimes of being over 50 and mildly disabled worked against me. But I’ll never know; no feedback was offered, and both auto-generated emails came from a no-reply email address. (Both orgs make a big deal on their sites about valuing people etc. Weird.)

Apart from annoyance at the time I wasted (I have blogposts to write, and songs to record!) I remembered that I hate acronymy corporate jobs anyway. So, if you need someone on a short-term/ part-time (or long-term) basis to help educate your team in accessibility, evaluate your project and suggest improvements, give me a yell. In answer to a question on LinkTin, I’ve listed the accessibility and web standards services I offer.

Mates’ Rates if you’re a non-acronymy small Corp who are actively trying to make the world better rather than merely maximise shareholder value. Remember: every bunch of tech hippies needs a touch of Bruce™.

I’ve released my second album “High Priestess’ Songs” by the cruellest months, the name I’ve given to the loose collaboration between me and assorted friends to record and release my songs.

Please, give it a listen and consider buying it for £5 so I can buy a pint while I’m looking for a new job.

(Last Updated on 1 June 2023)

• The Fugu project: priorities, Mozilla and Apple, support realms, Web vs native, and future plans – Vadim and I interrogate Thomas Steiner on Te F-word
• Scoped CSS is back (in Chromium, behind a flag). Great news for ending CSS-in-JS abominations.
• Add the WAI-ARIA Usage bookmarklet to evaluate document conformance requirements for use of ARIA attributes in HTML and allowed ARIA roles, states, and properties.
• Meeting WCAG Level AAA – Pattypoo cascades his wisdom
• The ongoing defence of frontend as a full-time job
  – “You can hire frontend developers to build your product, or make it happen somehow and later on hire performance and accessibility consultants to fix what doesn’t work properly.” – @codepo8 on why “frontend developer” is a real, and vital, specialism.
• Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90% – The move from a distributed microservices architecture to a monolith application helped achieve higher scale, resilience, and reduce costs.
• How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide – “People often ask me how to use AI. Here’s an overview with lots of links.”
• Small Penises and Fast Cars: Evidence for a Psychological Link – “We found that males, and males over 30 in particular, rated sports cars as more desirable when they were made to feel that they had a small penis”. Thanks, Science!