Jim Byrne

Jim Byrne is a multi-award-winning accessible website design specialist. Jim has been designing websites, doing accessibility audits, and providing website accessibility training for nearly a quarter of a century. As the director of the Guild of Accessible Website Designers, Jim gave feedback to the WCAG 2 guidelines. Jim has been running his Accessible Website Design business since 2003.

Jim was the founder of The Making Connections Unit in 1996: one of the UK’s first web accessibility consultancies.

Publications

Joint author of Twitter for charities, non-profits and the voluntary sector with Jeremy Webb, published by Echo eBooks in 2012

Joint author of Standards for Disability Information and Advice Provision in Scotland: Making Websites Accessible (March 2011) Second edition co-written with Eva Bolanders, first edition published in 2007 by Scottish Accessible Information Forum.

Author of 60 Accessible Web Design tips and two other e-books related to accessible web design.

Author of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers accessible web design training course which covers every Priority 1 and 2 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines checkpoints.

Author of Jim Byrne's Guide To Accessible Website Design (111 page e-book)

A member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP).

A founding member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS): a world-wide association of organisations and accessible web designers and developers set up in 2003.

Awards

Winner of ‘Best Charitable Website Design Specialist 2019’.

The developer of the award-winning not-for-profit project, The Making Connections Unit (MCU). The MCU won an award in the equal access category of the Global Bangemann Award; a challenge by the City of Stockholm for cities of the world to show their finest information technology projects. The award was presented by the King of Sweden.

Identified as one of Scotland's movers and shakers in e-commerce in Scotland for work in the area of Web accessibility (NB Magazine, 2001).

Breakthrough Award for The Lothian Centre For Independent Living online help service.

Developing a passion for accessible website design

Jim is one of the few people around long enough to have done every task related to web design: installed, configured and managed operating systems (Linux, Apple, and Windows), installed a web server and all the required software, (e.g. Apache, Perl, PHP), wrote the required ‘cgi’ scripts, designed the web pages, hand-coded the HTML and designed and coded one of the world’s first content management systems.

In 1990 as a ‘mature’ student at Glasgow Caledonian University he was shown Tim Berners Lee’s first website by lecturers David Donald and John Culbert; it didn’t look like much (just text with links) but it did look like the future. He also embarrassed himself by being tongue-tied when he met Tim Berners Lee at a conference in London after shouting him over with the words, ‘Hey Tim!’.

Jim is also an experienced trainer and a former Lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University. In the mid 90’s he worked as a Trainer with The Wellbeing Initiative; an organisation set up to help disabled people get back into work. While working with The Wellbeing Initiative Jim became acutely aware of the extent to which disabled people were being discriminated against. This had an impact on the work he has done since. It directly leads to the setting up one of the UK’s first website accessibility consultants and the setting up of The Guild of Accessible Website Designers.