About
Born and raised in Slovenia (yes the neighbour country of Austria, Croatia, Hungary and Italy) and from
2014 I'
ve been living in the south of Norway - together with my wife, daughter and three two special dogs.
Love to travel and explore the world off the beaten path and love to be creative and express myself through code and other arts.
I am an experienced web developer with a strong passion for digital accessibility. I embarked on my coding journey in the previous millenia and had the privilege of creating my first website back in 1999, for a local cancer awareness association. However, it was in 2014 that my perspective on web development completely changed. I discovered the crucial importance of digital accessibility and realized that making online content accessible is not only the right thing to do but also a fundamental human right.
Passion sometimes lead to interesting things. Getting certified as Web Accessibility Specialist in 2020 was one thing, but breaking out of confort zone and participating in promoting accessibility internally, to clients, via online webinars and in person is worth of every second.
Since, I have been wholeheartedly committed to spread this vital knowledge to as many individuals as possible, both in my professional capacity and through pro-bono efforts.
A bit more about me
What does the electronic circuit tree with oak leaves as a logo and nurturing web trees actually represent?
Thank you for asking. Oak tree is directly related to my surname, Cerovac, as cer (latin Quercus cerris) is a type of oak.
And yes, web actually has a lot of trees that we need to nurture. If you develop for the web, then you know what I am referring to. If you didn't know until now, here is your chance to dive into the technical parts. We have Document Object Model (DOM) that represents a document with a logical tree, similarly the CSS Object Model (CSSOM) for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and besides other trees we also have the Computed Accessibility Tree (based on Accessibility Object Model).
Oh, right, you might have noticed that I care more about the trees than about the visuals (so please don't print if not critical).
Ikigai - a sense of purpose, a reason for living
Ikigai is a Japanese concept referring to something that gives a person a sense of purpose, a reason for living. And what does that have to do with me? Well, I like to believe that accessibility is my Ikigai.
I am forever working on being better at accessibility. It's a journey and there is much more than just the technology to it, so it takes time to really be get it. The human aspect also means that to be good at accessibility, we must know how users actually use their devices and software. We must understand more about disabilities and assistive technologies. We must understand how different people actually use digital products. At the same time technology evolves extremely fast and guidelines often fall behind. It is important to know that main concepts stay the same, but accessibility demands constant improvement. And while we are discussing about japanese philosophical concepts - here you have another one: Kaizen - that is refering to constant improvement, which is really important when working with accessibility (among other things). I do actually love it, as it is the right thing to do and with more than 96% of the web having accessibility issues it's obvious that the world also needs it.
So yes - accessibility is my Ikigai and I am constantly improving (Kaizen) to be better.