About Richard

I am a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. I have been involved in web design since 1994 and have taught it since 1996 with usability and accessibility as the focus.

We are not a techie department, but have a history of over 50 years in training information professionals. Web design was ‘a natural’ for a department that had been dialing into systems as far back as 1976 and was already using pre-WWW commercial resouces such as Dialog, Datastar and FTProfile.

Our focus on the usability and accessibility of information has allowed a variety of students to enjoy web development. Some develop only the basics of practical skills, but have a good knowledge of the requirements for standards driven web sites. Others develop and refine high level technical skils that are still under-pinned by the understanding of web standards and guidelines. When in the workplace these students seem to often bring a breath of fresh air into the companies for which they work. In the past this has included simple things like getting a company that churns out sites to recognise the impoirtance of the title tag. In another case the student was able to wake the whole company up to web accessibility.

I intend to primarily use this blog to add links, notices, tips etc that I’ve either forgot during the last class, or remembered about after the class. I guess I’ll also use it to add snippets that I discover along the way.

Other interests: http://www.yessiruk.com.