Email Ryan

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Ryan Duncan, senior front-end engineer

I build front-ends that work for everyone.

Nine years of experience, a master’s in cyber security, and a passion for accessibility. I’m based in Scotland and work remotely.

See my workRead my CV
Ryan Duncan
  • 9 years building front-ends, a Disabled parking app and accessibility consulting.
  • 500,000+ accessible parking locations in Close to the Door, the app I built and run.
  • 2 first-class degrees, one of them a master’s in cyber security.

Work

Close to the Door

A free app for finding accessible parking, built by a Disabled developer with Disabled people.

Role
Founder and sole developer
When
2025 to present
Five phone screens from the app's store listing: a map of London with accessible spaces marked and a list of the nearest; a satellite map of Dublin; a space's details with Park here, Directions, capacity, surface and fee; the Report this space form with reasons such as temporarily unavailable or safety issue; and the preferences screen for theme, language and distance unit.

Personal website concept

A personal site for a CEO, speaker and author, built so that accessibility is measured rather than claimed.

Role
Design and build
When
September 2026

Accessibility audits

WCAG 2.2 audits for European banking and retail clients, for an accessibility consultancy.

Role
Digital accessibility consultant, freelance
When
2025 to present

How I work

  • Accessibility is tested with the people it’s for.

    Twelve Disabled drivers and passengers tested Close to the Door over two rounds, and most of the best decisions in that codebase came from them.

  • Performance is a budget, not a promise.

    Slow pages cost the people on old phones and poor connections first. Every page I build has a size and speed budget that is checked on every change, and a miss is fixed in the page, not by raising the budget.

  • Security is part of front-end work.

    I completed a master’s in cyber security in 2024, and built an internal tool that found vulnerabilities on colleagues’ home networks. On the front-end that means security policies, dependencies checked for known vulnerabilities, and untrusted input cleaned before it reaches the page.

Writing

  1. What mobile development can learn from Disabled testers 

    Twelve Disabled drivers and passengers put Close to the Door through two research phases. What they taught us about navigation, silent failures, text scaling and honest data applies to any mobile team.

    , published on closetothedoor.com

  2. Why I built Close to the Door 

    Close to the Door is now live. I’m Ryan, a software engineer and Disabled driver — here’s why I built an accessible-parking app for us, and how it came about.

    , published on closetothedoor.com

All writing

About

I’m Ryan Duncan, a senior front-end engineer in Scotland. Nine years in: agencies first, then finance and onboarding tools for a marketplace, and lately building for Disabled people, which includes me. I’m a Disabled driver, and Close to the Door started with my own problem: a painted symbol on the tarmac says nothing about whether the space is suitable for my needs.

Along the way I’ve led a team of four and done a first-class master’s in cyber security alongside the day job. Since 2025 I’ve also audited banking and retail clients across Europe for an accessibility consultancy, which taught me to write a finding that an engineer can act on without asking me what I meant.