Nicholas Freear
Senior Accessibility & Usability Consultant at Open Source Projects
Milton Keynes, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Freear is a Senior Accessibility & Usability Consultant with 15+ years crafting inclusive e-learning and web experiences, currently advising clients at AbilityNet. He blends hands-on front- and back-end development (PHP, JavaScript, MySQL) with rigorous WCAG 2.1/2.2 audits, user testing and accessibility QA, informed by long tenure at The Open University where he helped make Moodle and multimedia tools more usable. An active open-source contributor and pro-bono developer, Nicholas has improved accessibility and internationalization in widely used projects like MediaElement and contributed robust tests and auth fixes to the nlp.js ecosystem. He’s also an author—Moodle 2 for Teaching 4–9 Year Olds—and runs the Accessify Wiki, underscoring his commitment to practical guidance and shared learning. Comfortable spanning research-grade engineering and practical pedagogy, he brings a rare mix of academic rigour (PhD background) and pragmatic product-focused delivery. Colleagues value his attention to screen-reader workflows and his knack for turning subtle accessibility issues into concrete, testable fixes.
16 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Mechanical Engineering, PhD, Mechanical Engineering at The University of Birmingham
Chinese, French
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
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Github Skills (18)
accessibility10
javascript10
expressjs10
testing10
video-player10
html10
nodejs10
html5-video10
internationalization9
css9
natural-language-processing9
nlp9
api8
googlebot8
bots8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
axa-group/nlp.js
Aug 2020 - Oct 2020
An NLP library for building bots, with entity extraction, sentiment analysis, automatic language identify, and so more
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 13 commits, 4 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily focused on improving the `api-auth-jwt` and `express-api-server` packages by fixing bugs and adding unit tests. They addressed undefined property errors in the `api-auth-jwt` module and created test suites for the `express-api-server` package, demonstrating a focus on code quality and testing. Furthermore, the user added user ID functionality to the `directline-connector` and `nlp` modules to enhance plugin input. This included the addition of unit tests for processing utterances within the NLP module.
entity-extractionnatural-language-processingsentiment-analysisnlpnlu
mediaelement/mediaelement
Aug 2014 - Jan 2015
HTML5 <audio> or <video> player with support for MP4, WebM, and MP3 as well as HLS, Dash, YouTube, Facebook, SoundCloud and others with a common HTML5 MediaElement API, enabling a consistent UI in all browsers.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer & Accessibility Specialist
Front-end Developer & Accessibility SpecialistContributions:6 commits, 1 PR, 3 comments in 5 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily focused on improving the accessibility and user experience of the media player. They fixed a missing quote mark, accepted IETF language tags for internationalization, and separated "Play" and "Pause" text for better accessibility. Additionally, the user implemented accessibility enhancements for the slider control and screen reader improvements for captions, demonstrating a clear focus on making the player more usable for all users.
audiomediaelementmp3mp4soundcloud
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