My top takeaways from axe-con 2021

Last week I took some days off and (virtually) attended axe-con, Deque’s conference for building accessible experiences. I picked a few talks to watch and made sketchnotes.

I usually learn a lot from conferences. The problem for me tends to be trimming the list down to something actionable and achievable 😬. For axe-con, I’ve picked three things to do:

• Counter “we don’t have time to cater to special needs” by focusing on the core human need. E.g. “Eating is not a special need!”
• Make an a11y Acceptance Criteria library (maybe using the Given / When / Then format).
• Use the coach model instead of the Subject Matter Expert model: it implies teaching and training, and transferring of skills.

Day one

Here are my sketchnotes:

Day two

Here are my sketchnotes: