Opera

Speaker: Charles McCathieNevile

Position: Chief Standards Officer

Areas of expertise: Web standards and architecture - HTML, SVG, CSS, Semantic Web, Mobile Web, WAI, etc. Accessibility, usability

Educational background: First Class Degree, Medieval History (University of Melbourne)

Languages: English, French, Spanish, (Italian)

Biography

Charles McCathieNevile (better known to the world as "chaals") has been Chief Standards Officer at Opera since 2005, and is responsible for Opera's leading role in ensuring that the best of Web development is available to the world in the form of open standards. With more than two decades of experience in both commercial and academic hypertext systems, his personal interests are broad but include accessibility of the web to all people from all devices, and better ways to make information help people reach more of their goals more easily. He is chair of the W3C WebAPI working group, and involved personally in several W3C working groups. Before joining Opera Charles worked on the Staff of W3C. In his spare time he is Vice President of the Iberoamerican Web accessibility group Sidar, tries to learn languages, and cooks.

A constant traveller, he currently speaks English, French, Spanish, Italian (but not very well), and is still learning Norwegian. Originally from Australia, he would like to see every country in the world and eat dinner in them all, but has so far only managed about a quarter of them.

Back to speakers home page