About Martin

It’s very nice that you want to know more about me! I’m Martin and I help companies design and build accessible websites and apps. I’m from Glasgow but live in Newcastle upon Tyne; married with two kids and two cats.

My career in the web

I love the web. It’s for everyone. Anyone can access information and anyone can have a voice.

I first dabbled with HTML in 2002 when I put together a website for the band I played in. Six years later, I was lucky enough to work out that a career in web design was my thing and put all of my energy into making it happen.

Webmaster

It sounds a bit antiquated now, but that’s exactly what I was: a webmaster. In fact, for a select few clients, I still am!

Working with small business to create, establish and improve their web presence made up the core of my work. Planning, designing and building websites, then improving them over time gives me a huge amount of satisfaction. I have had the pleasure of working with some really great clients, and our long-lasting relationships have made their websites fantastic business tools.

Freelance

Over the years, I also worked freelance for larger companies. I’m a very easy person to get along with and have slotted nicely into many teams over the years, forging some lasting friendships as well as producing great websites.

My freelance work normally involved coding accessible interfaces, wrangling out-of-control CSS, or consulting on UI decisions.

Digital product design

In 2016 I made the move from websites into digital products. I worked full-time on a ground-up redesign/rebuild of a suite of web apps for contact centres. I redefined the look and feel of the product, introduced a robust pattern-library-first design system, and delivered components (in production-ready HTML and CSS) to the dev team.

Gov.uk

I worked in UK government from early 2018 to late 2020 on a Scrum team in the Digital Delivery Centre. I was a senior interaction designer, building my designs as working prototypes (in HTML/CSS/JavaScript) for usability testing.

I also got very involved in the frontend code and accessibility testing of the services I worked on, as well as sharing my expertise with designers, developers and testers across the centre.

Sage

Since 2020 I’ve been leading accessibility at Sage, a global tech company with over 11,000 employees. I was brought in as their first accessibility specialist and have built the discipline from the ground up. We now have a thriving accessibility community and a Champions network to increase the core accessibility team’s influence.

From education through knowledge sharing, training, and workshops to working closely with teams to explore accessible approaches to design and code; I’m proud to have helped make accessibility part of the way Sage works.

Sharing

I’m a big believer in sharing. The web community is exceptionally generous and I owe my career to blog posts, Stack Overflow, talks on YouTube, and help from people I’ve met along the way.

A local meetup

In 2015 I co-founded Frontend NE, a monthly frontend web development meetup and annual conference. Across 56 meetups and 6 years, with 82 speakers, we gave over 3,500 frontend web developers a place to learn more about their craft, while the conferences drew folk in from further afield for a day of learning and fun.

Speaking

Although I’m an introvert, I’m certainly not shy! In fact, I really enjoy presenting ideas to audiences, and do so regularly at work, as well externally at tech meetups.

Training and coaching

Accessibility was central to everything I did in Government, and I brought that mindset to my colleagues at Sage. For years now, I’ve given regular workshop courses in HTML and accessibility, which have always been well attended by backend developers, testers, interaction and content designers; even user researchers, business analysts and product owners have also come along and learned a lot!

What about right now?

I love learning and I love my work; I also have a life outside of the web! Find out what I’m up to at the moment on my now page.