Work with me

I'm an independent accessibility advocate, front-end engineer, inclusive designer, and educator. You can hire me on a freelance basis for short-term and long-term projects, accessibility reviews and training.

I am taking on new clients starting January 2025.
Interested in collaborating? E-mail me at collab@fossheim.io.

Accessibility reviews.

Next availability: January 2025

Don't know if your products or data visualizations are accessible? What's needed to move in a more inclusive direction? How to become WCAG compliant?

I can do a detailed or high-level accessibility review, and based on the outcomes suggest fixes and next steps. Often this also includes building internal accessibility documentation & guidelines.

As a multidisciplinary accessibility specialist, I can assist with several different types of accessibility work, based on the needs of the project:

  • High-level accessibility reviews aimed to understand general areas for improvement, find the most important accessibility blockers, and get a first impression of how accessible the product is.
  • Detailed and informative (dataviz and web) accessibility audits and reports, focused on WCAG compliance, best practices, and user experience. These in depth reviews are more than just a checklist, and come with practical feedback, explanations, demos, suggested next steps, and advice on how the team can prevent these issues in the future.
  • Ongoing reviews of new features, code, and designs. Accessibility issues are easier and cheaper to fix when caught early, before they’re rolled out to production. Frequent small accessibility reviews and feedback sessions can help catch them and steer the team in the right direction.
  • Training, workshops, ongoing drop-in review sessions. I’m open to speak at events, companies, or as a guest lecturer in schools.
  • Accessibility strategy and planning.
  • Implementing accessibility improvements, or developing new features with accessibility and WCAG compliance in mind from the start.

During the past years, I have worked on accessibility with companies like FINN.no, WHO (through Kore and Truth & Beauty), Inspera, GreenInfo, and Balansekunst.

I have also delivered sessions for amongst others Hyper Island, Oda, and Graphic Hunters, and spoke at conferences such as axe-con and Outlier. I also contributed with an essay about dataviz screen reader accessibility to the Do No Harm Guide on Centering Accessibility In Data Visualizations.

Example tasks & outcomes

  • Accessibility reviews.
    I can perform an in-depth or high-level accessibility review of your product. This can for example mean: review to discover main areas where improvement is needed, ongoing design and code reviews before launch, detailed feature or full product review, WCAG compliance reports, or a combination of all.
    We set the scope together based on your needs and process. Regardless of the size, my reviews have a focus on educating why something should be improved, and come with actionable next steps and suggestions.
    With some clients I have weekly check-ins to review ongoing designs, with others I have more sporadic full-product reviews. Accessibility reviews can also include topics like internal knowledge, processes, and team structure.
  • Dataviz accessibility review.
    Don't know if your data visualizations are fully accessible? What do they sound like when navigated with a screen reader? Not sure what the requirements are?
    I specialize in dataviz accessibility, and can perform accessibility reviews focused on your charts, tables, and data.
    For this I use a combination of my own set of criteria, chartability, and WCAG. This usually also includes a few sessions with the team with the goal of onboarding them to dataviz accessibility, and going over the outcomes of the review and the suggested next steps together.
  • Accessibility guidelines and documentation.
    When the designers, content writers, developers, and testers all know what to look out for, accessibility and WCAG compliance becomes a lot more feasible. I can provide accessibility documentation and guidelines based on the needs of the product and team. This can be in the form of a custom documentation system, Confluence/Jira documentation, a Notion file, Figma components, or a combination of them.

Front-end engineering.

Next availability: January 2025

I'm a front-end, design and accessibility cross-breed. This means I build products and websites that are user friendly, accessible and scalable.

I'm open for ongoing front-end consulting, standalone projects, and accessibility engineering. I can independently build accessible websites and prototypes, make accessibility improvements to existing products, or work embedded in a team building the front-end for new features.

Technologies

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • React
  • D3.js
  • Sanity
  • Eleventy
  • Next.js

Example tasks & outcomes

  • Ongoing front-end consulting.
    I can assist your team with the implementation of new accessible features, or improve existing ones. I use an hourly rate for this type of project and work mainly remote and in the Oslo timezone. Note that I typically limit long-term ongoing consulting to 2-3 days a week.
  • Improving accessibility.
    Does the accessibility of your product need to be improved? Have a lot of divs that need to become buttons? An inaccessible graph? I can work alone or together with your team on implementing accessibility improvements.
  • Scalable and accessible product prototype.
    I'm fluid in HTML and CSS, and often design prototypes directly in code. If you have a product idea, I can prototype it using HTML, CSS and JavaScript or React. I focus on user experience, accessibility, responsive design, and performance from the very start of a project.

Inclusive design & accessibility training.

Next availability: January 2025

Do you want to learn what goes into building inclusive products? Get your designers up to speed with designing and documenting keyboard and screen reader interaction? Freshen up your front-end team's WAI-ARIA and semantic HTML knowledge? Or dive into the world of dataviz accessibility?

You can book me for one-off presentations and workshops, or recurring training sessions, one-on-ones and Q&As.

Example tasks & outcomes

  • Presentations & lectures.
    I give talks about accessibility, dataviz accessibility, and queer inclusive design. This can either be a generic session, or one tailored to the audience and product.
  • Workshops & training.
    Want to get a bit more hands-on than a presentation? Dive deeper into a specific topic? Learn how to test your features with a screen reader? Give your team a refresher on semantic HTML? I can give one-off or recurring accessibility workshops and training.
  • Accessibility office hours & Q&A.
    We can have occasional accessibility checkins with the team. This is a great time for people to ask for feedback on ongoing designs, discuss how certain keyboard interactions should work, ask about confusing requirements, or get their code reviewed.

Creative coding.

Next availability: January 2025

I build good looking, user-friendly, responsive and accessible websites, blogs, and interfaces. I can run the process from start to finish, and often design directly with code.

I enjoy challenges involving different ways of working and visualising data and content, and have a lot of fun writing creative css (eg. creating photorealistic CSS drawings).

Fun fact: I've been writing HTML/CSS since I was 10 ✨.

View my personal CSS drawings.

Example tasks & outcomes

  • Full product website or blog.
    I design and develop an accessible website based on your brand. I use either markdown files or Sanity for content management, and Eleventy or Next.js for the front-end. I'm open to different solutions too, but don't do Wordpress development.

Contact Information

Want to work with me on a project? Need a talk or training session? Contact me on collab@fossheim.io to discuss. Please include your expected timeline, scope and budget in your intitial email so I can get back to you faster. If you're booking me for a training session, it's also useful to know how many people will be attending, and what their background is.