What is Accessibility?

An Offline Camp passion talk from Jesse Beach

As a Front End Engineer at Facebook, Jesse Beach specializes in accessibility and improving the platform’s user interface. She attended Offline Camp California because she sees offline functionality as a form of accessibility, which treats network disruptions as one of many forms of temporary disability which we can help our users overcome.

“What I’m trying to do in my job is to think about the abilities we have, and the disabilities that are either temporary or congenital, as just access issues. There’s no single human who’s perfectly capable in every way, at every point in time. And when we think about how we provide information offline, we have to think about how we provide information to humans in all the conditions that they’re in.” (Jesse Beach)

In her interactive passion talk at camp, Jesse asked us to brainstorm limitations to access and limitations to accessibility, then helped us connect the two concepts:

What is Accessibility? (Video of Jesse Beach’s passion talk from Offline Camp California 2016)

Here’s a peek at our brainstorming notes from Jesse’s session:

Brainstorming notes from our session. (Left column — Limitations on Access: connectivity, money, geography, location, time (leisure), physiology, political/permission, proficiency/literacy, infrastructure/404/305. Right column — Limitations on Accessibility: accessibility, noise, body position, font size, contrast, low vision, no vision, mobility, money, brightness, role/permission, physical size of device, default, language, distractions, cognitive ability, vocabulary.)

For more on access and accessibility, have a listen to Jesse’s chat with New Builders podcast co-host Jim Young, which starts at 22:47 in this compilation episode of camper interviews:

The New Builders Podcast, Ep. 24: A Hodgepodge at the Lodge — Live from Offline Camp California

Jesse also wrote a fabulous article recapping a camp discussion on the unique design patterns needed to keep users informed about the state of their content under spotty or unavailable network conditions:

My biggest takeaway from the second Offline Camp in Santa Margarita, CA — plus toast!

Editor’s Note: Participants at Offline Camps have diverse backgrounds and interests, ranging far beyond the Offline First approach that we come together to discuss. Through short passion talks, campers share with us some of the hobbies, projects, and technologies that excite them. We offer you this taste of that passion as a preview to our upcoming events. Learn more at the camp website or follow us on Twitter for updates.