What does your role involve?
I do front end development work to help create websites and applications. My development work typically involves working with HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build the elements on a webpage while ensuring that it works seamlessly with the backend. This part of my role involves making sure that the website is functional, aligns with the designs and maintains a high-quality standard.
In addition, I also offer web accessibility services, such as conducting audits on websites to assess their compliance with web accessibility standards. WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the international standard for web accessibility — it provides a set of requirements and guidelines to ensure that your application is accessible to all users, regardless of disability.
What does your typical day look like?
My day-to-day usually varies, but a typical day might include a mix of both development and accessibility-related work. For instance, the morning may involve attending standups, writing code and debugging. This could be followed by an accessibility audit in the afternoon for a client. The auditing process usually involves a combination of automated and manual testing (for example, checking whether a web page is screen reader friendly), resulting in a comprehensive report of identified issues and suggested solutions.
Tell us about a recent problem you helped solve.
I recently encountered an unusual issue during an accessibility audit, which proved to be quite a challenge as there weren’t any clear or straightforward solutions. Usually, problems are common enough that some standard solutions are already readily available, but this one seemed to be quite unique. To tackle this, I leveraged the skills from my frontend role and in combination with my
accessibility knowledge proposed some technical solutions to resolve the problem.
I’m currently working across multiple projects for my frontend work, including Tourism NZ which involves multiple phases of redesign work for their website. At the same time, I’m also assisting with various accessibility audits, ranging from comprehensive site-wide assessments to minor upgrades looking to meet the latest WCAG criteria. There is always a lot of variation in the work that I’m currently doing which helps keep things exciting!
What do you enjoy about working at Catalyst?
What I love the most about working at Catalyst, first and foremost, are the people. The people here are amazing at what they do and all the teams I’ve worked with have been incredibly competent and supportive. We embrace an open and inclusive culture and I’m grateful to be able to work alongside such great people.
Join the Catalyst team
A career at Catalyst gives you the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects, collaborate with industry experts, and continuously grow both personally and professionally. Check out our available positions.