Monday, 22. March 2021
About me
Hi! I'm Sarah Fossheim (pronouns: they/them), and I work as a front-end developer and inclusive designer. I'm passionate about accessibility, dataviz, and building ethical technology.
I enjoy making drawings with CSS, I write about tech and collect ethical design resources. You can check out what I'm currently working on through inprogress.fossheim.io.
I'm located in Oslo, Norway, and working independently. You can hire me on a freelance basis for accessibility projects, creative coding and front-end consulting. I'm also open to do talks, workshops and training sessions. I'm taking on new clients from January 2023 onwards.
My favorite work projects are those where I get to work at the intersection of different disciplines, and combine my engineering and user experience design background to solve complex problems - all while keeping a focus on accessibility, ethics and user experience.
I have worked in-house in the edtech and biotech sector, where I focused on building intuitive front-ends for data-heavy products. I have also worked as a consultant with both startups, the public sector and large corporations.
Since starting my own business mid 2021, I mainly focus on accessibility and inclusive design.
Depending on the project, this can mean a variety of things: performing (dataviz) accessibility reviews, having training sessions, writing documentation, implementing accessibility improvements and bugfixes, or developing new features with accessibility and WCAG compliance in mind from the start.
I also build user friendly and accessible websites, prototypes and web apps.
Technologies
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- React
- D3.js
- Sanity
- Eleventy
- Next.js
I'm available for
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Front-end engineering.
I'm a front-end, design and accessibility cross-breed. This means I build products and websites that are user friendly, accessible and scalable.
I'm open for ongoing front-end consulting, standalone projects, and accessibility engineering. I can independently build accessible websites and prototypes, make accessibility improvements to existing products, or work embedded in a team building the front-end for new features.
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Accessibility reviews & strategy.
Don't know if your products or data visualizations are accessible? What's needed to move in a more inclusive direction? How to become WCAG compliant?
I can do a detailed or high-level accessibility review, and based on the outcomes suggest fixes and next steps. Often this also includes building internal accessibility documentation & guidelines.
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Inclusive design & accessibility training.
Do you want to learn what goes into building inclusive products? Get your designers up to speed with designing and documenting keyboard and screen reader interaction? Freshen up your front-end team's WAI-ARIA and semantic HTML knowledge? Or dive into the world of dataviz accessibility?
You can book me for one-off presentations and workshops, or recurring training sessions, one-on-ones and Q&As.
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Creative coding.
I build good looking, user-friendly, responsive and accessible websites, blogs, and interfaces. I can run the process from start to finish, and often design directly with code.
I enjoy challenges involving different ways of working and visualising data and content, and have a lot of fun writing creative css (eg. creating photorealistic CSS drawings).
Fun fact: I've been writing HTML/CSS since I was 10 ✨.
Latest Posts
Monday, 8. March 2021
Getting started with trans inclusive design: tools and resources
Monday, 1. March 2021
Excluding non-binary people by design: How sign-up forms can lead to discrimination
Talks
I have spoken at public events and on podcasts since 2021, including:
- Accessible Product Design @ Product Design Meetup, Kortrijk
- Dataviz Accessibility Workshop @ Graphic Hunters
- Dataviz Accessibility @ FINN.no UX Evenings
- Data Visualization Accessibility @ Data Stories Podcast 🔗
- Dataviz Accessibility 101 @ axe-con 2021 🔗
- Are your data visualizations excluding people? @ Outlier 2021 🔗
Book me for a talk
I'm open to do deliver talks or workshops about (dataviz) accessibility, queer-inclusive design, and front-end development. If you're interested in booking me, send an e-mail to collab@fossheim.io. Please include some information about the event/company, dates, audience, and budget in the initial message.