Nicki Rios

About

I'm the Founder and a Web Accessibility Consultant at Nock & Sparrow where I help companies with web accessibility remediation and accessible website builds. I do audits, compliant front-end development, consulting, and training to help companies expand their markets, show their company values, avoid costly lawsuits, and build internal processes to ensure accessibility long-term.

I'm certified by the IAAP with their highest designation of CPWA, which includes WAS and CPACC certifications. I'm passionate about web accessibility, web standards, front-end architecture, code quality, and UX.

My focus in past front-end development roles was creating pattern libraries for ensuring maintainability, accessibility, and consistent designs across teams of engineers, effectively saving significant development time, increasing quality, and bridging the gap between design and development. Previously, I was a front-end project lead and oversaw teams of developers for ecommerce projects.

I love to share what I know, so teaching and mentoring are incredibly fulfilling to me.

I'm currently looking for a remote job that will allow me to contribute in a meaningful way. If you're interested in speaking with me about this, I'd love to chat! Please reach out on LinkedIn.

Certifications

• CPWA (Certified Professional in Web Accessibility)
• WAS (Web Accessibility Specialist)
• CPACC (Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies

Recommendations

• Nicki has deep expertise, and a true passion, towards making the online world both accessible and more engaging to our fellow humans of all abilities. Working alongside her has made me a better engineer.

  Peter Kowalczyk, Full-stack Engineer & Technical Architect

• Nicki has been mentoring me for the past three years. During this time, I have been able to learn invaluable industry knowledge from Nicki due to her years of experience in software development. Nicki has a unique ability to explain technical topics in a way that is understandable and clear to technical and non-technical folks. Nicki has been instrumental in my growth as a software developer.

  Brianna Burrows, Web Developer

• Nicki is an exceptionally well-organized front end engineer. I was impressed with her efforts to maintain and support a UI pattern library for our products, which was the best I have seen from my experience with many other organizations I have worked with.

  Nicki is good at collaboration and optimizing the place where UX designer and front end engineer meet.

  I have all confidence in Nicki's knowledge and experience in the latest front end tools.

  Nicki is friendly and approachable, and is a good team player.

  Jürgen Mantzke, Senior UX Designer

• I was lucky to have the opportunity to work with Nicki. We collaborated on a few projects through our time working together. She was fantastic at explaining complicated systems to someone who didn't know much about development, and always helped when I, or anyone else, had any questions. She was also able to juggle a lot of different projects at the same time, all while maintaining availability to her co-workers. I hope to work with Nicki again in the future, and I give her my highest recommendations.

  Martha Peck, UI/UX Designer

• Nicki is an exceptional engineer she has a deep knowledge of modern frontend development especially when it comes to CSS/page layout. Nicki is also an expert on making web applications accessible to all users, and more generally about accessibility best practices. She worked on my team as a critical bridge between non-engineer designers and engineers. This helped us to ship product that was correct the first time; avoiding over-iterating on features and saved our team a lot of time in the long run. Nicki has a great focus on code quality and preventing technical debt that makes a huge difference in long term product development cycles. She does a great job at dissecting a UI mock up into small actionable user stories and in many ways set the standard on my team for how to break out tickets. Aside from her technical skills Nicki is one of the most effective mentors I've encountered in my career as software engineer. She worked with less experienced engineers and helped them increase their technical capability while helping them ship a great product. Nicki's a highly effective engineer and team builder and I would highly recommend her to any development group.

  James Mategko, Software Engineer

• Nicki is an exceptional developer with a true knack for CSS and accessibility. She is highly organized & sees her tasks through to completion and produces nothing less than high quality work. I have had the pleasure of working with Nicki and through that experience she was an excellent mentor who was eager to teach and excited to share her knowledge. She also has a great ability to communicate effectively and explain things thoroughly. She’s an impactful team player and a powerhouse on any team!

  Kaylyn Yuh, Software Engineer

• Nicki would be a valuable asset to any software development team. She is an incredibly sharp engineer, who draws on her deep base of knowledge about front end technologies to build, review, and push high quality code. She is committed to understanding and implementing best practices, and advocates for those best practices where necessary. Above all, Nicki values mentorship and collaboration; she regularly goes out of her way to help struggling junior devs (not to mention peers) solve challenging problems. I recommend her strongly.

  Rachael Wisecarver, Software Engineer

• Nicki is a talented Senior Front-End Engineer and a valuable asset to any team. Above all else, Nicki is a master of her field. She's an expert at modern front-end methods and advocates for institutionalizing best practices. Nicki is also just really nice to work with, a great mentor for junior engineers, and a positive presence on the team. I highly recommend her.

  Julien Wilson, Software Engineer/Site Reliability Engineer

Contact

If you're interested in working with me, please send me a message on LinkedIn.