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This section is devoted to things I have done on the internet without getting paid for it.

• BBC News Proxy – removing the ticker iframe
• Landmark Trust – making searching available properties easy
• Live Trains Map – displaying current locations of trains to a particular station
• UK train timetable – the National Rail Enquiries site, but without requiring cookies
• UN Secretary-General Twitter — showing what the head of the United Nations is currently up to
• Along the Same Lines, a fun and pointless use of the Flickr API

Accessibility

I am a great believer in accessible websites – websites that are available to anyone using any browser, from a speechreader (a program that reads a webpage aloud), to Opera on a mobile phone, to Internet Explorer 6 on a normal PC; sites that don't require JavaScript or frames or Flash for you to be able to use the site.

Things were slowly getting better, and then “Web 2.0”™ came along and lots of people (though thankfully by no means all) threw out years of accessibility to catch hold of the next wave (I just visited a modern website that greeted me with “We do not support Opera”…).

I see no reason why websites cannot and should not be accessible; in this vein, I have taken some inaccessible websites (ranging from use of frames with no alternative, to a complete site written entirely in JavaScript) used by many people and made accessible and usable versions, to show that it can be done, and easily too:

• Comic Shop Locator UK
• Odeon – this was a complete rewrite of the old Odeon website, without a need for JavaScript, cookies, drop-down menus, or anything else unusable. Odeon made me remove the site in mid 2004.
• The Hutton Inquiry – no need for frames, JavaScript or cookies; plus additional PDF to HTML conversion links