On Wednesday 27 September, me, Nate Langley, Becky Arrowsmith and Katherine Wastell are holding our first accessibility meetup, ‘Open’. We want to challenge the way we think and talk about accessibility.
Aptly, the meetups are open to everyone. Accessibility is something each member of a Digital team should be thinking about and we’d like attendees’ roles to reflect that.
We want to encourage people to come together and talk about how they approach accessibility and begin to share what they’ve learnt when writing, designing and building services for people.
More than screen readers and colour contrast ratios
A lot of the time when we talk about accessibility we focus on visual impairment but, although an important thing to consider, there’s so much more that can affect how someone experiences something we build. There are any number, and combination, of barriers someone could come up against that we should consider. This could be visual, audible, cognitive, contextual, cultural or something we haven’t even considered before.
Let’s talk. It’ll raise awareness
Nobody sets out to purposefully make something inaccessible but a lack of awareness of accessibility issues can lead to us alienating huge groups of people. With Open, we aim to challenge current attitudes towards accessibility and begin to raise awareness of the many ways we could be excluding groups from our products and services. We’ll also be talking through ways we can reduce those barriers and make things open to everyone.
Cooperating to make things better
In the future, we hope to partner with organisations throughout the north west. We think that by cooperating, we can raise standards and bring accessibility to the forefront of what we do.
If you have an interest in accessibility and making things better, get in touch. We’ll be looking for speakers for future meetups.
You can follow Open on Twitter.
Jack Sheppard
Open
Open 01 will be at Federation House at 6.30pm on 27 September. Get your free ticket now.