Mike Foskett (retired)

Accessibility Specialist & Front-End Developer – a problem-solving technologist

  • Tel:  available on request
  • Email:  available on request
  • Address:  Welwyn, Hertfordshire Welwyn, Hertfordshire

Summary

Accessibility Specialist and Front-End Developer with over 20 years’ experience delivering inclusive, high-performance digital products. I combine deep technical knowledge of WCAG 2.2 and WAI-ARIA with strategic insight to help organisations embed accessibility into their workflows, design systems, and governance. I have led accessibility initiatives in the banking, education, and retail sectors, raising compliance scores, mentoring teams, and enabling award-winning inclusive experiences.

My goal is to help businesses reach a broader audience by enhancing the accessibility of their digital products, achieving a more inclusive digital experience.

Key Skills

  • Accessibility & Inclusive Design: WCAG 2.2, WAI-ARIA, VPAT, ACR, manual + automated audits (Deque Axe, Lighthouse, Silktide, Wave), JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver
  • Front-End Development: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (vanilla & frameworks), SVG, responsive, mobile-first, semantic markup
  • Performance Optimisation: WebPagetest, Lighthouse, Pingdom, core web vitals
  • Tooling & Architecture: Node, Eleventy, Gulp, Nunjucks, Git, Netlify, Jamstack, CI/CD pipelines
  • Collaboration & Leadership: Accessibility training, team mentoring, governance frameworks, cross-functional communication

Experience

Digital Accessibility Specialist (contract)

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(Remote)

Enlisted to lead Santander along their accessibility journey. So far we've taken huge steps in improving the accessibility of the mobile banking apps, PDF documents, marketing emails, and the main website.

  • Leading accessibility strategy across web, mobile app, emails and PDF touchpoints.
  • Drove measurable improvement in accessibility ranking: from 17th (36% poor) to 5th (82% good) among UK high street banks (Silktide), and an 18% uplift year-on-year on WebAim's top 1 million homepages.
  • Developed bookmarklet-based testing toolkit for self-auditing, reducing dependency on external testing.
  • Contributed to three award-winning accessibility initiatives.

Accessibility Consultant (contract)

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(Remote)

Conducted comprehensive WCAG audits (VPAT, ACR) of digital assets and recommended remediation priorities with code examples.

Accessibility Consultant (contract)

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  • Guided product team through WCAG 2.1 AA alignment via audits, issue triage, and developer training.
  • Embedded accessible components and QA processes into ongoing agile development cycles.

Senior Front-End Developer

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Milton Keynes (Hybrid)
  • Re-engineered sign-in and sign-up flows (Bootstrap 3 → 5), eliminating legacy jQuery dependencies.
  • Enhanced accessibility, UX, and performance while reducing technical debt and maintenance overhead.

Senior Front-End Developer (contract)

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Welwyn Garden City
  • Delivered mobile-first, WCAG AA-compliant experiences across high-traffic pages (Store Locator, Homepage, Campaigns).
  • Optimised site performance to sub-1 second homepage load times; benchmarked industry-leading results.
  • Mentored an international team of five developers, improving productivity by ~20 %.

Front-End Developer (contract)

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Welwyn Garden City
  • Rebuilt homepage and grocery pages to achieve RNIB-commended accessibility standards.
  • Delivered training and support to promote awareness of accessibility, WCAG and performance best practices.

Accessibility & Web Standards Consultant (contract)

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Warwick Science Park
  • Migrated 40+ education and government sites to semantic XHTML and table-less layouts.
  • Delivered training on WCAG and web standards for public-sector developers.

Web Developer & Inclusion Tester (contract)

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Warwick Science Park

Conducted manual accessibility audits and implemented cross-platform fixes for education websites.

Education

Successes

  • Contributed to Santander’s rise in UK accessibility rankings and multiple award wins.
  • Recognised by RNIB Accessibility award for work at Tesco.
  • Achieved Tesco homepage load times under 1 second through performance optimisation.
  • Mentored cross-functional teams to embed accessibility-first principles.