Graham Armfield

Accessibility Consultant

Graham has over 10 years experience in accessibility and is an experienced website developer and trainer of developers in web and mobile accessibility. With a background in development in large and small organisations, he upskills developers through our developer training, provides embedded accessibility support to help teams avoid and fix accessibility issues, and provides demonstrations of accessibility tools and assistive technologies to enable everyone to understand the user experiences people with disabilities have with websites and mobile apps.

How did you get into accessibility?

I got into digital accessibility almost by accident 20 years ago when working for a financial company as a web developer. I was helping to build the main flagship websites when someone from an agency showed me how a screen reader worked and how you could change the underlying code to get it to work with it -  which was a revelation at the time.  When my manager saw my interest and implementation of what I had learned into my work, he made me responsible for making sure that our digital products were all accessible after that. I started to build up my knowledge from there as the web, for me, is about enabling access to information by everyone.

What’s the one thing you’ve done in accessibility you’re most proud of?

I am an active member of the Make WordPress Accessible team, working to improve levels of accessibility within the most popular web CMS in the world.  I am proud of the impact of my contributions to improving the accessibility of the front-end and admin areas of WordPress, and of my influence in encouraging developers to act on them.