So, I've been rummaging around on the web, since I was an awful lot younger,
and it was practically new. I turned it into a career in the mid 1990s, and I've been enjoying myself
thoroughly ever since. And when I look back over those 30 years,
I realize, with something of surprise that throughout it all, W3C has
somehow always been there throughout my professional career. It began when
I went to work on the tech support help desk for one of the first ISPs
in the United Kingdom. This was a time when most people were using
Windows 3.1 or NT 4. When connecting to the internet, was those lovely
screechy modem sounds we heard in the video,
of comm port problems and IRQ conflicts, when most people had 28.8 BPS modems, but everybody
aspired to having a 56K modem. Now, for some reason best known to itself, the
ISP decided to this time to open the tech support desk 24 hours a day. An awful lot
of people who were using the web back then, were probably doing it at 3 o'clock in the morning.
They were not the people who needed to phone in for technical support at 3 o'clock in the morning.
And so the night shifts were dreadfully, dreadfully quiet. And I got dreadfully bored until I discovered HTML.
I don't actually remember now what version it was, but I think it was
probably 3.2? Maybe 4? But I'm going to go with 3.2 because that was the first version fully
released by the W3C in its own right. Certainly, my night shifts were full of pointy brackets,
of center tags, and font tags. Oh, so many font tags… Of table based layouts, and just so
many things that meant with incredible ease, I could create something
I could look at in my browser. IE3, if you're curious. Of course, it didn't take me long
to go from there to CSS, and I discovered that I could do away with all those font tags and instead
control things like foreground, background colors, text size and font faces without needing HTML.
You might have thought I'd have been really happy at this advent, but I don't know why, now,
I wasn't terribly impressed with CSS back then. So much so that it became the subject of one of my
two and I emphasize, only, predictions about the web. But first, it was that Google would
never replace Alta Vista, and the second was that CSS would never take off.
[Laughs and applause]
Nevertheless, undaunted, armed with one HTML for dummies book, not a
GeoCities website in sight, sorry Chris, I published my first website on the World Wide Web.
And a couple of months after that, I was looking after the company website.
Of course, I was. It was the dot-com bubble era and, that's pretty much how we bubbled back then.
It was to be a handful of years before I had my next encounter with the W3C, though. As the old
century turned into the new, I lost my sight. That's a story for another time and a place.
But, when I went back to work, in the early 2000s, I met Alistair Campbell who is now co‑chair of
the Accessibility Guidelines working group. I am not sure if I've ever quite forgiven him for this,
but Alistair introduced me to version one of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Released in 1999, and known, on informal occasions, as WCAG. I remember reading it.
And reading it again. Pouring myself a metaphorical large gin and tonic, and reading
it for a third time, and thinking, good grief, three priority levels, fourteen, like 65
checkpoints. What am I supposed to do with this? And what does it all
mean anyway? It took me awhile to get over that shock and in some
respects, I wonder if I ever entirely did. But just when the W3C and I
might have parted company for good an all, something else happened. I sent an
e‑mail to Tim Berners‑Lee, yes, THE Tim Berners-Lee. While I was off work, I had started a course
that later became a computer science degree.
But, the first course I took was ‘You, your computer and the Internet’.
I didn't take it because of the course content, I was quite familiar with the Internet by this point,
but I took it because it gave me a structured way to learn how to use my computer again.
This time with a screen reader and a keyboard instead of a monitor and a mouse. And my first
coursebook was called ‘Why wizards stay up late’ and it introduced me to a lof of the history
of personal computing, the Internet and the Web.
This prompted an awful lot of rummaging around on the web.
And one of the things it turned up was the user manual for Enquire 1.1. If you haven't hear of that
before, it's a program that Tim wrote back in the very early 80s that actually foreshadowed much
of what would become the World Wide Web. The problem I had was that the user manual was a
series of scanned images. Images of text do not work well with screen readers.
So, a bit more rummaging around on the Web turned up a beautiful text transcript of the manual
by Sean Palmer. So, I took a very deep breath, e‑mailed the inventor of the web and said:
‘Could I have your permission to use your user manual please and the text transcript in a project
that I'm working on?’.
And I got a reply. Me. Some ex‑web designer, wannabe accessibility specialist got an e‑mail from
Tim Berners-Lee to give me his permission. I was beside myself with happy astonishment.
And I think that was the moment, pretty much, when I decided I wanted to be part of the W3C.
That didn't happen for a few more years yet, but I did encounter a whole lot more of what
W3C produces. Specs like SVG, SSML, more CSS, which you'll be happy to hear by this time I was
really excited about, as table-based layouts gave away to elastic layouts, and all manner of other things
that have improved the way we can make websites look and feel.
And, not long after WCAG 2 came out, I joined the Protocols and Formats working group as an invited
expert. Protocols and Formats is now the Accessible Platform Architectures working group,
chaired then as now by Janina Sajka with co‑chair Matthew Atkinson these days.
After that, I joined the HTML Accessibility task force, and then joined the HTML working group
properly, but by now, as a full member. At some point, in those years, somebody, you probably saw
me coming, asked me if I wanted to be a chair. And I said yes. Through that all, I became AC rep
for one organization then another and now for my own company. And in due course, I joined the AB
and later the Board. And through that time, I got to know many more people. Steve Faulkner,
Robin Berjon, David Singer, Travis Leithead, Tess O'Connor, too many wonderful people to mention.
And that's the thing for me, as I look back over the last 30 years, and particularly of the years of my
engagement with W3C. It's not the standards and specifications that we produce that I think are our
real achievement. For me, it's the people I have met. It's the
connections I have made. And the friendships that have flourished
through my time in this community. So, what if I look forward to next 30
years? Really? After the whole CSS is never going to take off thing,
you're trusting me to look forward to the next 30 years? I love your optimism.
But you know what? Hang on to that optimism, because I don't know what the next 30 years
is going to bring, but I do know, that although we're here for very, very different reasons,
and that we have very, very different opinions between us, I do believe
that we all share a vision. W3C's vision, and that's for a web for all humanity.
And I believe that if we keep turning up, we keep doing this,
if we keep talking and if we keep collaborating between us,
I think we've got the ability to make that happen. Thank you.