Welcome

Last Updated :: 22^nd April 2010

Hi, and welcome to my homepage. These pages are here mainly to show that with my compsci skills I can write a simple web-page. Feel free to look around, at the least you might see some pretty pictures or find a scrap of code that might help you out.

If you are vaguely interested in anything on the site, please feel free to susbscribe to my Atom feed. Sometimes it gets updated ;) Also, to see the more experimental things I am working on try looking at the Work section of the sitemap, as this is updated automagically regardless of if I wish to release my work to the public!

UPDATED: Home is the most recently updated page on the site.
UPDATED: Parody is the most recently updated piece of work on the site. This might well be a work in progress and is not meant to be of release quality! You have been warned, don't come crying to me if your browser crashes, your CD tray ejects or the power to the building goes out.

NEW! Business card barcodes. Generate a QR barcode containing your contact details, or any other data you want.
NEW! E-book to audiobook converter. Create machine read audiobooks, based from sources in various file formats.
NEW! Fun with robots. Some imagery from my work with laser scanning at IGES.
NEW! Parody text generator. Create nonsense text in parody of your favourite author.

Other Vanity Sites

• Matt Oates @ UoB Computer Science
• Matt Oates @ Bristol Robotics Lab
• Matt Oates @ UoB Centre for Complexity Sciences
• Matt Oates @ Aber Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences

Goals & Aims

Throughout the site I am trying to keep the content as accessible as possible:

• Navigation uses lists, and layout is achieved through use of divs instead of tables, to be screen reader friendly.
• Any use of JavaScript should only enhance default viewing of a page. Or for required webapp functionality.
• The site uses a different style sheet for printing, omitting messy headers and superfluous colour and images.
• HTML source has been kept clean and simple, so that user-defined stylesheets should make a difference.
• All style is designed to scale, no fixed-width and px hacks have been used.
• Where possible I have kept to strict W3C standards, with a few minor exceptions (I hope).

Things that still need to be done:

1. Navigation lists should come at the end of the HTML source to stop blind people having to hear them being listed every time a page is linked.
2. Silly use of JavaScript buttons and popup windows needs to be removed.
3. A stylesheet for screen readers needs to be developed using the latest CSS voice defs.