My story

I promise I will be using this site to talk more about tech, but I felt it would be a good idea to introduce myself a little more and let you know how I got into digital accessibility in the first place.

My childhood

I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia, specifically in a town called Jeddore. This area is about an hour away from the capital, Halifax, and calling it a ‘town’ is probably not the best description. There are a series of small communities spread out along the shore. It’s really mostly forest and rocky coastline with few amenities where one community sort of blends in with the next.

Unsurprisingly I wasn’t a very social child and I wasn’t into the kinds of things that other kids were into, like fishing or 4 wheeling, but I did spend a lot of time in nature. When our family purchased our first home computer in 1993, I spent as much time as I could also exploring it. This was a 486 running Windows 3.11, there was no internet, and it would take a few more years to learn about the world of online bulletin boards. Eventually I got curious about all of the files I could find on the computer, learning how batch files worked and then discovering QBasic, and how the games that came with it, like Nibbles and Gorillas could be modified by changing the text in the files that were used to execute them.

In 1997, I asked for a Borland C++ compiler for my birthday, a few months later I purchased a book to learn C++ in 21 days, and a few months after that I was building windows applications.

On at least one occasion, I did try building a side-scrolling game (starring my cat), but gaming never really interested me. Instead I spent most of my time building applications that helped me to reduce repetitive tasks like organizing my music library.

Oh, at this time I was also a band nerd (trumpet) and took up the bass guitar and classical guitar. As you could probably guess, I was not the most popular kid in school.

My education

Near the end of high school, I wasn’t sure what was next, my guidance counsellor asked me what I was into and I told him music and computer programming, he said just choose one, so of course I went with music.

Undergrad #1

I only applied for one programme at one university, and luckily I was accepted. I started a Bachelor of Music as a classical guitarist in 2000. I spent the first two years living in a dorm with students from all across the university, and I often found myself helping out the computer science students with their homework as I put off practicing and writing essays.

A few years into my degree I started playing in bands. It began by going to more local music shows and meeting folks, then when some friends lost their drummer I volunteered to take his place (not knowing how to play drums at this point of course). I purchased a drum set and learned as quickly as I could.

After graduation I played in lots of bands, playing everything from banjo to synthesizers, but after some drama in the music scene, and after working as a cashier in a grocery store for a few years, I felt it was time to move on to something else.

Around this time I had also started taking road cycling fairly seriously, mostly randonneuring (long distance cycling). I was mostly solo cycling, doing solo centuries and eventually cycling from Halifax to Toronto in 5 days, but I also joined a club and participated in a flèche.

Undergrad #2

In 2008 I moved to Calgary to start a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. The first thing I did was to build a bike, I found a local shop that let you do this using their tools and used parts. This was my first introduction into bike collectives and it eventually led me to join a small group starting a second non-profit bike shop on campus.

With a few folks who would become friends, I was one of the core members who opened the Bike Root on the University of Calgary campus. This shop is still open today. It was a trial by fire in terms of collective action and consensus based decision making. I helped to teach bike mechanics and helped with the technical aspects, but also participated equally in making decisions about spending and event coordination.

In 2010 I went to Bike!Bike! in Toronto, a conference where members of bike collectives take part in talks, demonstrations, and skill sharing from all over North America. I went back the next year, when the conference was held in San Marcos, Texas, and for the following 10 years, travelling everywhere from Columbus, Ohio, to Guadalajara, Jalisco.

Of course, I got involved with the conference directly by building a new website. I saw that each year, as the conference was passed on to a new organization, the new owners would delete the old website and start fresh. I saw this as an opportunity lost, not only to help reduce efforts by building new websites each year, but also to keep some data about organizations which could be used to better collaborate and raise funds.

My tech career

After graduation, I hopped around a little, eventually working for a design agency in Calgary for about two years. This job really helped to solidify my interests in web development. Working alongside creative designers and finding the right ways to make their visions become reality, got me really hooked on HTML and CSS.

The interview

Working for a company of about a dozen people total felt like the right place to be for someone who was now into collective organizing, but in 2014, Amazon asked me to come in for an interview. I didn’t take the interview seriously, I was not interested in working for a corporation, especially one of this size and reputation. But… I thought the interview might be interesting.

So I took the day off work, the only preparation I did was to better understand the social issues going on in the company at the time. I had six rounds of interviews that day, all in a hotel in downtown Calgary. I genuinely failed to solve one or two of the coding questions but I also asked each of the interviewers about what they knew and felt about the issues going on in the fulfillment centers and how they themselves were treated. From that, I got a lot of kind and genuine answers.

Shortly afterwards, I got an offer. I took some time to consider it, but the opinion that I formed during those interviews stayed with me. The corporation has a lot of issues that need to be resolved, but most of the people who work there are good folks who also want to see a more positive future for everyone, and, being on the inside, I would have more opportunities to make change myself.

Amazon

So we moved, from ultra conservative Calgary, to liberal Seattle. The woman who was going to be my wife at the time was out of the country on a Roman archeological dig which made things more challenging and difficult. She wasn’t into the move at first but decided to join me anyway.

We fell in love with Seattle.

The team I started working on was focused on driving customers from the web to the app. I realized rather quickly that this wasn’t what I wanted to do, I love the web after all and the team itself didn’t have a lot going on in terms of front-end. About two years in I joined a team who was more front-end focused, working on the seller experience. This was better, it allowed me to use more of the skill I had, but it also didn’t challenge me.

At the time I was getting more and more into both browser automation (for testing) and accessibility. I began to realize how much could be tested for customers with disabilities by automating their experience. One day I decided to check the internal job board at Amazon and found that there was a team who was hiring someone to do just that, the Retail Accessibility team.

Retail Accessibility

I joined Amazon’s Retail Accessibility team in 2017. At the time, the team was about to rebuild its scanning software which had started as a static HTML analysis. I stepped in to help rebuild the concept into a more holistic approach, by analyzing the running product of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Eventually I helped to build this product to a point where it was comparable in coverage to tools like Deque’s Axe and went well beyond in some aspects, particularly in keyboard accessibility testing.

In 2024, my colleague and I gave a talk at the 39th annual CSUN Assistive Technology conference about how we were successfully able to test for keyboard accessibility where other tools have not been successful in the past.

In October 2025, I was one of 14 000 corporate employees who were laid off from Amazon. All but two of the engineers on the retail accessibility team were laid off. More on that in Repatriation below.

W3C

In January 2026, I began volunteering my time with the ACT task force in the W3C. While the time that I can generally put into this work each week has been limited, it has been a blessing to me to have an outlet for my engineering skills and the ability to stay connected to the accessibility community.

My son

My wife and I gave birth to our son Frank in late 2021. In 2023 we discovered that he has a rare disease called Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease (PMD). I’m going to write more about our family’s journey through the diagnosis of rare disease in the future.

Until Frank came along, I was passionate about accessibility because I was passionate about equity and social justice, but it didn’t affect me personally. Now things are different.

While my son isn’t using the internet yet, his challenges comprise an intersection of many different disabilities and it has made me approach accessibility using a different lens.

Since August 2025, Frank has been participating in a clinical trial for a treatment for his condition. The trial currently has no end date, it will go for at least four years but likely longer. It requires us to travel to Salt Lake City every six weeks, some visits are just a day, others are a week.

Repatriation

After doing our best to raise Frank alone in Seattle, with our closest family in Calgary, once the news of the layoff hit, it made it clear to us that moving back to Nova Scotia was the right thing to do. We decided that we would aim for September of 2026 and just take the time to prepare for the move, volunteer, and enjoy one last Seattle summer. (Not that NS summers are worse, but we’ll have plenty of those to come.)

Where am I now?

As I write this, we’re coming up to mid-June 2026. We have completed most of the major projects in our yard including a flagstone patio, a second patio built from pavers, a fence, and lots of garden work. We are now beginning to get serious about organizing, packing, and getting rid of 12 years of stuff we have owned here in Seattle. I have also begun applying for a select few jobs, I have the room and privilege to be picky right now.

Discussion

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