About AlastairC

This is the site of Alastair Campbell, my interests are web usability, accessibility and development. Not politics. I have no connection with any political party or spin doctors. Seriously, no hate mail, and any after-dinner speaking invitations are on a cash up-front basis!

About Me

Alastair Campbell profile picture. White male with brown hair and beard, wearing glasses. Dark red background and looking to the right.

My background is psychology and HCI, the last few years I've been focusing on accessibility and the different interactions that people have with the same applications or content. My role at Gain (formerly Nomensa) is focused on accessibility direction and projects.

Blurb for conference organisers (3rd person)

With a background in psychology and an expert in human-computer interaction, Alastair Campbell understands the bit where humans meet machine.

In 2001 he helped establish Nomensa (part of Gain since 2023), where he is the director of accessibility. Alastair pioneered the use of web standards within Nomensa, led development of an accessible content management system, and supported some of the UK's biggest brands across both the public and private sectors, including the AA, DWP, British Airways, NHS, and Booking.com.

In 2018 Alastair stepped up to co-chair the W3C's Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, helping to shepherd the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and is hard at work on WCAG 3.

Away from the office Alastair enjoys windsurfing racing as part of the UK Windsurfing Association.

The site

This is my personal site, not affiliated with any other entity, company or person. I put up what interests me at any particular time, and speak only for myself.

As someone who uses web standards as part of my job everyday, the site conforms to the usual technical & accessibility guidelines. However, as my personal playground, I will not be doing lots of cross-browser testing. (Except for some of the test cases, obviously.)

What's this kything thing?

Wordpress likes you to have a tagline, and I went for something a bit more esoteric than "blog about usability & accessibility and stuff". I came across the word "kythe" from a Sci-Fi book by David Zindell, where the characters could swoop over an information space, kything (collecting for their own use) certain information. This typifies most blogs for me, they collect bits of information from all over the place to form a useful entity on a certain topic. Therefore I kythe information on 'web interactions' (people using the web).

Apparently the older meaning (going back to Chaucer) is quite similar, To make known; to manifest; to show; to declare.

Quite a bit of web accessibility is hidden from the masses, so that topic appears strongly on this blog.