I didn’t care about accessibility, now I’ll start.

I have been at an accessibility meetup in Amsterdam and I like to write down what I took away from that.

Eva W during her talk, her slide in the background saying “Ask stupid questions”. In the foreground, her translator and Michiel B in his dinosaur onesie in the background.

So I was at the cssday conference and a day later I visited the role=drinks meetup I never heard of before. I was completely amazed. Luckily I had a co-worker with me and we agreed on doing this. I got to say I’m not super comfortable with spontaneous decisions to go to a place I don’t know where are a lot of people I don’t know, but I think I get better at it.

The meetup was structured in lightning talks which are just talks that are 5 to 10 minutes long.

So there was Job who works on an — drumm roll — text based MMORPG. It’s a sci-fi adventure inspired by older text-based games. He said that there was just no reason that this can’t be used by everyone. How awesome is this?

He also said something like

What is the purpose of beautiful design when it doesn’t embrace the content

Which is just tweetable again and again

There was also an awesome discussion about unit test accessibility which I will totally tell my beloved brother which is obsessed with unit testing. In the audience were 3 peoples without sight and an interpreter for the few deaf people in the audience. The atmosphere was just awesome. Everyone was friendly and super welcoming.

But: I felt out of place.

What all these people had in common was: they’re working on accessibility everyday. There were sentences like “debugging aria tags are a pain in the ass, we all know that right?” and I just thought “nope I don’t”. Or the question: “which tools do you use for testing?”. I just felt off because I’m just here to listen not because I’m actively working on accessibility. And that is the whole thing what it’s about. That’s okay! That’s normal. Léonie uses to name it “the real world”. In the real world the average product is not fully accessible and with everything you want to change it’s pretty important to accept that status quo. It’s the future we can change, not the past.

Afterwards I had such an awesome discussion with my coworker Ben and he compared the whole situation to the responsive topic (making a website work on every device) in the early stage. It’s like you think it’s something that you can do when you have the time to but actually it’s something you have to care for everyday and in every process not something you put on the roadmap as a feature.

I just came up with this one sentence I can’t get out of my mind since then

Accessibility is not a feature, it’s a requirement.

So let me tell you the story how it even happened that I entered the door to that meetup:

I felt like I should step out of my comfort zone and tweeted the following:

“On my way to @cssdayconf yey! Reach out to me if you want to talk about pattern library implementation or where to start! #cssday”

Luckily the conference retweeted it and one random guy responded

“hi :) Are you still in Amsterdam on Saturday?”

I was nervous but decided to go for it and tweeted

yeah! Like to grab lunch together?

and he answered

how about a drink instead ;) There is an accessibility event in the city: http://roledrinks.nl It would be great to have more designers there!

We then met at the cssday conference had a quick chat and he was just the nicest guy every which convinced us to give it a shot and go to that meetup.

When I think about accessibility right now I don’t think about that nasty aria bugs or how I can avoid that flexbox order property, I think about how I can learn about it and how can I connect with people and what that random guy did is the answer to that.

It has to spread like a flu. There have to be conferences about this. We need this to be a topic in the center of our society. And we can achieve this by 1. stepping out of our comfort zone and 2. actively approach people to do that step one. And for me step one was visiting that meetup.

Thank you Michiel.

So if you are interested and want to make your very own step one this is what you can do:

1. Talk about this. Talk with your friends, colleagues or with these people on twitter.
2. Look if there is a local accessibility meetup.
3. If not: be a superhero. Create one. It’s not about the size. It may be 3 people drinking whiskey in a bar. Just reach out to your local peers and ask and I’m pretty sure you will get people together.
4. If you’re located in northern Germany: I want to organise an accessibility event in Hamburg. I obviously need a sponsor and a location but first of all I need people that want to attend. Until now the only way to stay up to date is it to follow me on twitter. The website http://roledrinks.de/ will be the place to go if there is a exact plan.
5. If you’re located in the Netherlands make sure to follow these 3 heroes which organised that awesome meetup that certainly changed something for me:

Job (@detonite) | Twitter

Eva Westerhoff (@evawesterhoff) | Twitter

Michiel Bijl (@MichielBijl) | Twitter

Thanks for reading ❤

The picture in the header is from here