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 co-chair of the W3C Web Applications Working Group, and also involved in several other 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 speaks English, French and Spanish, and is trying to improve his Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Russian to be good enough to use them at work.