Nicholas Freear Email & Phone Number

Milton Keynes, Gb

Milton Keynes, England, United Kingdom

* Audits: scoping and conducting accessibility audits of websites and mobile apps against WCAG 2.1/2.2.* Diverse user testing: design, moderation, note-taking, analysis, report writing.* Training: delivering a wide variety of off-the-shelf and bespoke webinars and workshops.* Quality Assurance: checking audits performed by colleagues.* Ad hoc Consultancy: responding to client queries on standards and techniques.

I occasionally get involved in free/open source and pro bono software-related projects.

Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

I contribute Web and software development to the Institute of Educational Technology's Learning & Teaching, and Research & Scholarship portfolios. This entails liaising with stakeholders, requirements gathering, front-end and backend development (PHP, Javascript, MySQL and Apache), testing and support.Projects: ADMINS, Our Journey, IDO-Moodle, TeSLA, APPLAuD, LACE Evidence Hub, Open Media Player/ OU embed/ multimedia accessibility, Tricky Topics/JuxtaLearn, Track OER, How Nature Works, E-PD, JIME, Cloudworks/CloudEngine, OLnet.org, DISCO, SocialLearn, OpenSurvey, Mulberry Bear Nursery site.Web accessibility: I continue to help the OU meet it's legal and moral obligations, by helping with evaluations, and contributing to the development of student, public and staff facing sites and services that are accessible to all.Tools: Angular.JS, WordPress, Symfony, Drupal, Git, Composer, Travis-CI, WAI-ARIA, Linux, Apache, Nginx...

Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

I was a Technical (Web) Developer in Learning and Teaching Solutions, working on the Virtual Learning Environment project.Tasks included:• Development to accessibility guidelines in core Moodle 1.6-1.9/ OUVLE - to help the OU meet it's legal obligations,• Re-developing groups in Moodle including schema,• Integration of QuickForms and a PHP unit-testing framework (Simpletest),• An internal authentication plugin for Moodle, merging between repositories,• And deploying software/databases on production servers.I am also active on the Moodle.org forums, and in general bug fixing.

Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

I was approached by Packt in about May 2010 and started preparing a book outline with my acquisition editor, Sarah Cullington. I wrote the book in my spare time from about September 2010 to June 2011.The writing process was tough at times, but I had great support from the team at Packt.The book is aimed at teachers of primary/elementary school children, contains loads of practical examples, and has had mostly positive reviews.

Birmingham, United Kingdom

Web accessibility audits, and development using PHP, Perl and SQL. Projects included:• Audit of the Teachernet Web site and sub-sites (Department for Education andSkills, UK), and DGCommunity (Dumfries & Galloway Council) for compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Usability testing with screen-readers including JAWS.• Medium size Web site, including an archive of more than 100 documents generated using Perl scripts. Contribution: all development (http://headstar.com/eab)

Malvern, Worcestershire

I joined this small speech technology company as a Software Engineer and gained experience in all parts of the software development process: requirements specification, design, implementation, user documentation, automated build, test design and user testing.Projects:• Aurix tts, speech synthesis SDK. Contribution: module development, ATL/ActiveX control, porting to Pocket PC.• Alignment Studio product, to align media with transcripts. Contribution: programming plug-in interface/ MFC, plug-ins, DOM/ schema design, user guide, automated build, installers and testing.• Aurix aligner SDK. Contribution: programmed COM interface, programmer's guide, build system, software protection, installers and testing.C++/STL, Win32, COM/ ATL.

Birmingham, United Kingdom

I was employed as a Research Associate on a European Commission funded project, Intelpadprint. This entailed working with partners including Philips, LEGO and Maastricht University to research an industrial printing process. My role included designing and developing process control including a machine vision system, for a product prototype. I learnt MATLAB and C++, and programmed for Windows and 3rd party software (frame-grabbers).

Phd, Mechanical Engineering

Activities and Societies: chamber choir, choir, cycling, cycling club, BOCCWhile working on the Intelpadprint project I researched.

Beng, Mechanical Engineering, 2.1

Activities and Societies: rock band, band, drummer, chamber choir, choirFinal year project: Applied Gerontology/ ergonomics/ product.