Research
Frameworks, papers, and one forward-looking project. Most of this work was developed during doctoral research at Teesside between 2004 and 2013, parked when CNIB and CELA happened, and is being resumed now that the implementation tools the original research called for have arrived — and along the trajectory toward 2029, when more time becomes available for it.
Frameworks
- The CISNA Model of Accessible Adaptive Hypermedia — published at W4A 2008 with Steve Green and Elaine Pearson. Five-layer model for adaptive hypermedia (Adaptation, Navigation, Semantics, Inventory, External Content). Doctoral Java implementation: Carnforth-Java.
- Polymorphic Task Decomposition — multiple ways of manipulating the same data so a capability model can choose the appropriate route. A pre-requisite for intrinsic accessibility.
- Tetris as accessibility testbed — methodology for evaluating accessibility frameworks against a paradigmatically visual, time-pressured, multi-channel game.
- The Shlaer-Mellor lens — recursive design as the structural shape accessibility shares with bridged-domain modelling. The methodological substrate beneath everything else here.
- The 2029 framework — accessibility as multi-agent communities of practice with formal equilibrium dynamics. The next research step explicitly named in the 2013 thesis conclusion, paused because the implementation tools didn’t exist, now resumable.
The Measure of Accessibility
A six-page treatment of the accessibility theory that emerged from the Defining Accessibility thesis chapter. The deepest single intellectual contribution in the corpus: the political framing of what accessibility actually is, the formal distinction between functional and intrinsic accessibility, and the rejection of utilitarianism in accessibility decisions.
Action Language
The original XML notation and execution engine from the PhD, with worked examples that run in the browser via a TypeScript port of the Java reference. The page is interactive: visitors can edit the supplied examples or write their own Action Language scripts in the in-page editor, run them, and watch the execution trace in the same window. Demonstrates the Shlaer-Mellor lens in code: the same threaded-interpreter execution model that started in Forth at Metal Box in the mid-1980s.
Spotlight projects
Three accessibility tools, built across two decades for specific named people, each producing both a working artefact and an insight that exceeded the artefact. See the Spotlight index →