So, so before we actually begin, I can just start, I can, I hate way to the bell to start.
So how many people here know anything about it, how many people are accessibility experts
here?
Okay.
Okay, couple.
Okay.
For getting you along, let me know.
Um, um, how many, is anyone here comfortable acknowledging that if they have a disability
or not?
Do not disclose if you do not feel comfortable, but we've got a couple of people who've
disclosed this, this bill is, that's, that's great.
We've got, um, just statistically, it's a quarter of the population that has a, uh, a disabilities,
but we had to, we smoked show out, showing you in a lot of people like how you define
that is, you know, you know, it's, it's, it's definitely a very personal issue.
Um, how many here's the first time it falls down?
Nice.
Good.
Well, is this your, is anyone here, this is the first day it falls down?
Like you're all here yesterday, right?
Okay.
And you survived.
And you made it in the morning.
It's good.
Good.
Um, did anyone have trouble finding the rooms?
Yes.
I think that this is a, a plan that the universities have, it's like, it's not, it's
It's not unique to this university, universities like to go off and build little mazes that
they run through.
But I do think that the whole lettering system of this university seems to uniquely unusual
on weird.
But, yeah, what else?
Also, another thing, just in terms of just a quick thing on accessibility while we're
killing time.
Imagine if I was a wheelchair, how difficult would it be to go off and present in this window,
because I wouldn't be in the speaking zone, it'd be off to the side.
But almost every university has this stage like this, that the assumption is, if you have
a disability, you're on the ground, you're not in front of the podium, you have a lot
of these sort of cultural assumptions in our society.
Was anyone here drinking past midnight?
Excellent, love it.
Okay, I was not, I was doing other things, but preparing for this presentation to some degree.
Great, we're almost there.
So, without not that you've already not introduced yourself, we've practically taken
the job away from me.
So, everybody, Mike's going to talk to us today about accessibility being a core part of
open source.
So, please welcome Mike Gifford.
Thank you.
So, I'm a triple core accessibility maintainer.
I am a WC3 embedded experts, I work at civic actions, doing work to advise governments
and organizations on accessibility, open source, and, in fact, we have sustainability for
that matter as well.
But it occurred to me, it was a problem yesterday that after giving another accessibility
talk in the afternoon, that there's a lot that our community isn't doing to support
people with disabilities.
I'm a part of the reason I'm this talk was to try and sort of compare the four freedoms
with accessibility, but there's one that just, you know, around a really basic scan to see
how accessible is the Faust and Website.
It's not really accessible, like there's pages here with just automated tools or getting
like 11, 10, 9 issues, like this is just a scan of some weight pages that I scan
last night.
We're not doing very much accessibility for Faust and Website.
There's some information around making the facilities, works, or maybe event more, the
Carvestmore accessible, but there's a lot more that can be done, and I've dropped some
issues in the issue queue this morning to try and highlight this.
One of the things I also have done, which I didn't do yesterday, but I should have done
the yesterday, but I didn't.
Now at the bottom, you can also see text, if you have really good eyes, make this a little
bit bigger.
We don't have cart that the speech to text enabled is part of how we build our, there we go.
Thank you.
So we need to be able to go off and support more people who are deaf or hard of hearing
and using cart as a great way to do that.
There's in fact other ways to go off and benefits of having this kind of infrastructure
as well, because how many people here have English as their first language?
Okay, there's a lot of people here who don't have English as their first language.
Sometimes it's easier to read the text.
Sometimes it's easier if you've got the text to convert it into French or German or Italian,
so you can read the content to multiple languages, and if you've gone to the effort of making
something accessible and cart, you can make it accessible and other things.
Anyways, back to my talk, because that's what this is really about.
So I apologize for that initial rant.
So the core premise here is that digital sovereignty is built on the four freedoms,
but without accessibility and that sort of intentional, inclusive effort, it's worthless.
That accessibility and software freedom are the enabling each other at scale.
But we need to be thinking about it intentionally.
Sobrety is the ability to perceive, sorry, sovereignty equals the ability to perceive,
operate, and control.
And if you cannot use the interface, because it hasn't provided you the affordances
to make the site to use it, you can't, you don't have the freedoms of the,
this movement has been working to meet.
We have to work on them together.
So for freedoms, just to go off and to put them in the context of accessibility,
the freedom to use, looking at the assistive technology and accessibility configurations.
That's the core part of that.
The freedom to study to inspect, to verify, to evaluate the, to share,
the ability to share this with others, to learn from others.
And also to improve, to fix those by some push them upstream, to address that as part of that.
Or make it perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
These are the WK principles, and we're trying to go off and say, like, we need to,
to line this up so that we, we're thinking about the four freedoms and accessibility
at the same time as part and parcel of the same challenge of making sure that,
that either our future selves, or our colleagues, or our friends,
or people we don't know, are able to go off and use these tools that we're working so hard to build.
So accessibility predates the idea of software freedom.
We look at so many of the innovations and technologies that we, we benefit from,
like the keyboard, the keyboard is something that was, was built,
because for blind, just to try and support blind users, to help them communicate.
There's other things that we're, we're benefiting from, like,
imagine how, how well, Siri, or Alexa home, or these, these other devices,
would work. If we didn't have years of screen reader users engaging with technology,
trying to build a semantic web so that they can engage with the technology.
And I think that that, that accessibility is, is how people actually exercise sovereignty.
If you don't have that, that connection between what the technology allows you to do
and how the site and the technology is built, for not taking advantage of that,
we're not really able to go off and to meet our goals.
But it's also that by thinking about accessibility and sovereignty together,
we're building more, more robust, more durable solutions.
Because everyone should have the right to inspect, fix, and share the technology that they're
using. And if we believe that, we have to do a much better job of things like this.
This should, this is just an automated accessibility tool. This is easy. This took me
less than five minutes to run. And this has been an ongoing issue for phosed in for ages.
In fact, if we go back right here and go, sorry, if you've got to, what the QR code
about hand out so this is well. So definitely, you can take a look at some of the handouts.
All of the slides are available online as well. They're reasonably accessible. I haven't done
a full check of them, but I've done certainly the full automated tests of them. And I'm building
on a library that was built by the WC3. So they've done some reasonable testing with it as well.
So that doesn't work very well. So,
there it go. So 10 years ago, at Phosetown, there was a group called Liberty.
Liberty is your own. Does anyone, anywhere remember that? Anyone there?
So they tried to go off and engage with the Phosetown community to try and say, let accessibility
has to be part of this movement. We have to build it in. So we're thinking about how we're
including people with disabilities in this movement. And by the way, how many of you are human?
Okay, good. Because all of you are going to have disabilities. It is a part of life. If you're
lucky enough to get old, you will have disabilities. That's because our bodies
were down. Their eyes get weaker. Their brain skips. Harder to go off and navigate.
It's just part of life, but we don't want to talk about it, but it is part of life. Anyways,
the liberate folks got together trying to have to try to ensure that we're bringing in accessibility
as part of how our community works. People like us do things like this. That means including
everyone. And not excluding people because it's inconvenient. So early leadership from
our many Christoph and Samuel, I don't know what the getting them are here, but they're
certainly all three of them are available online and easy to access. So communities what keeps
free alive. Phosetown thrives when you have a group of people engaging together, learning from each
other, finding bugs, putting them in future was like that is how our communities grow and are able
to remain relevant and accessibility thrives when people care about them. When we care about
each other, when we're able to understand and think about how does somebody else perceive what I'm
trying to do? How do they interact with it? Just making it real and trying to pull people into the
process of thinking about the practicalities of how people engage with this, this
technology. And we have to have the freedom for people to participate, which means investing in
the time of making these tools accessible. So by the little icons, if you can see them are from the
Microsoft's inclusive design toolkit, it's a Microsoft is on some really fascinating stuff on
accessibility, including their accessibility insights web extension, which uses acts, which is
a, in fact, really interesting model of accessibility. So if we think about inclusive design as a
multiplier participation, because there are deafening people who have permanent disabilities,
and, again, the Microsoft inclusive design research, their report has a lot more information
on this and how they've broken this down. But there's certain people with permanent disabilities,
but there's also people with temporary disabilities. Anyway, here, broken our arm recently,
it's really hard to go off and use a mouse if you've broken in our arm or to navigate
you through keyboard like these technologies, like this is just a normal part of life.
situational disabilities, like I was in rooms earlier earlier this week that the
the bulb was dying or that was too much too bright so they couldn't see the screen. Well, you know,
we can, this is just a normal part of engaging with modern life. You know, so many of us go outside
and look at her phones and it's like, wow, there's too much glare because there's just a gray
overcast day or it's too sunny or whatever. Like, this is just life. But we have to be thinking
about it and not thinking about it as a regulation or something that we have to do. The other thing
is in terms of a curb cut effect, if we go off and make things easier for people,
then it will improve not only search engine optimization, but also performance. There's a lot of
ways that it's that thinking about accessibility is just thinking about making your technology
better. It's about quality control. It's about doing a good job. And on that note,
I have a book announcement to that. So I was one of 30 authors that was involved in the disability
ethics book, the first book of its kind, and it's disability inclusion for all things tech. So
there's a bunch of us who looked written on different angles and the chapter that I took on
was looking at open source and accessibility, trying to line this out and expand this out to a
greater degree. So if you're interested, it'll be available in March. And there's so many other
in the accessibility field. So many of the greats are involved in the writing chapters of this book.
And I'm a low in moderate or a low contributor to this, but did it chat for an open source.
There's also looking at, say what I heard about GitHub's accessibility day in
all things open and rally earlier this year or last year. So they had a whole day workshop on
accessibility, where they were trying to to think about how to expand, how do we get open source
and accessibility, like part of open source projects? How do we engage with that?
And again, it was an interesting way to go off into to bring people together and to learn about
raise awareness, to think about government issues, to think about testing and
tool difficulties to learn from so many of the leaders in the accessibility space and the open source
space. And it will be happening again this next year. And GitHub has really done some amazing
work recently to go off an invested accessibility in this great to see the leadership that they've
had and the opportunity to push the open source community ahead. So governance is a huge issue.
So often it's trying to, we have to move beyond checklists, we have to move to actually
shifting the culture, but checklists are a good place to start, so we're looking for good libraries,
so we're pushing your fixes upstream, so we're thinking about how do we build in these
these workflows so that we don't have to think about it. It's just something that, oh, if you want,
it's like spell check. If imagine what our workflows would be like if
you have spell check, if your documents were spell check, two or three months after you had written them,
that's how our accessibility is. We shouldn't, it shouldn't be that way. There's lots of tools to
make it so that if you make a commit, you can't make a commit and tell it's accessible. That's
something we could all do. It's not that hard to get up to go off into run tests to ensure that
your tools have been evaluated for accessibility before you push them. But it's not something that
any, well, almost no projects do that, because it hasn't been a priority. But
we're in an article a while back and GitHub's magazine read me and part of it is just from
my experience in Drupal. Instead, if we treat accessibility issues as bugs, if we have leadership in
the organization, talk about accessibility, if we have the releases of major releases delayed,
because of accessibility fixes, not being addressed, it really demonstrates the community cares
and is pushing this forward. Most organizations don't prioritize accessibility. And again,
that means that the messages are clear. This is something we can push off. It's not a series
as security. It's not a series as performance. It's not as per, a series has so many other issues
we prefer prioritize, at least that's the message. But if you're cutting out a quarter of the
population, because you're not thinking about accessibility, that's a huge thing.
And yeah, if we're going back to the four freedoms, if we're excluding people from contributing,
we're limiting their sovereignty. So we need to be thinking about how do we, how do we
try and ensure that people are not being left as passive consumers, because there's no way
for them to be engaged. And again, it's nice that GitHub has done an amazing job recently
of improving the accessibility of their site. As being part of the WC3, I know there's a lot of work
that's being done to ensure that GitHub is as accessible as they're able to make it right now,
and that there's continuing to push it forward to be, it's not about being accessibility isn't
about being perfect. It's about being more accessible today than you were yesterday. How do you
push it forward to your proving progress over time? So it's definitely that we can see,
having open accessible collaborations is a great angle for sovereignty, a great key for
sovereignty, both personal and organisational and national for that matter. And we can start thinking
about how do we raise the culture of organisations to be including accessibility as part of that.
Having an accessibility issue queue that's open really does help to let people learn more about
the issues and see exactly where your where the accessibility problems are. So if you see an issue
in any project that you use, do take the time to report it. On the Boston website, there's been
very few reports of accessibility issues. I did a search there to see what was there.
There haven't been that many people who reported it, reported anything. Terrace Eden did
in a little while ago, but that's the only other thing that I've seen.
So sustainability requires the ability to improve. So let's try to make things that are lightweight.
Let's try and work with tools that work for everyone and try and engage with that.
Let's try and make sure that we're setting up the ability to repair our technology by everyone,
not just people who don't have disabilities. I also just like all at highlight that we are in
a climate crisis. It seems like a bit of a tangent, but it is something that we need to be thinking
about in all of our meetings and all of our work is that we are in a climate crisis. So how do we
try and address that? And people with disabilities are so often overlooked even in climate situations
or crisis situations. So like how do if there's an emergency, how do people with disabilities
get out of the building safely? What are the ways that they can deal with with our crisis
situations? It's so often an afterthought, which is problematic. So I think it's also useful to
try and think about prioritizing community. How do we ask for help? How do we ask for engagement?
How do we find ways to contribute what we've done upstream, to share with each other?
I have shared the issue queue for Fossdom, some resources that the Drupal community has done.
The Drupal community has built a handbook. We have a lot of resources available on Drupal.org.
Around how to build a more inclusive community. And it has helped us build a stronger community
both with government, educational sector and with other places because it's clear that we do
want to bring people in. We want to include people because we're a project that drives on innovation
and smart people and there's a lot of smart people with disabilities. I also like to see that
we're looking at what you're shipping. Like our goal should be that we ship the most accessible
tool by default. So how do we try and default to to open for sure but also default to accessible?
So that we're not doing this as an afterthought, but it's something that we're building into the
process as well. And I have a little bit of time for questions I think. I can talk for a
lot longer but just to try and because I have put this challenge out to the community because
anyone have any thoughts? Yes. Hi Mike. Thank you for the presentation. I'm at it. I'm a black
Caucasian male, wearing a black hoodie and jeans. My question is more than afterthought.
While we talk all about this, I think a bigger challenge is always how do we put ourselves in
these people's shoes? Right. How would you suggest or where do you suggest we start?
Because unless we lose some eyesight for temporarily, we don't really understand what these people
go through and this is not necessarily physical disabilities but more mental disorders as well.
So where do you suggest we start? Well there's a couple different ways to start. One is that
you're with Penn Pot, right? Yes. Excellent. Wonderful tool. One is you can start as
by educating yourself. There's lots of resources out there. There's lots to read. There's movies
to watch as well. But even better, it's to ask people to be involved in the community. You're
asked people to identify and bring people in and make it clear that you're trying to involve
them and that you're trying to make things better. And with visual tools like Penn Pot,
that's especially challenging if you want to involve the blind users and the blind community.
But there's also just reaching out to people who have disabilities who are around and
just unusual because you're, yes, that question but the person who's sitting behind you,
I was chatting with earlier and yes, as a game, something with the disability,
who's part of this community and volunteering in this community, talking with them and engaging
with them and learning from them. There's so much more you can learn not from talking to me,
but talking to people with disabilities and engaging with them and learning from their expertise.
So how do we find ways to hire them? How do we find ways to ask them and take,
give them leadership and learn from them about what they, what will work for them?
Oh, yep. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you. And my name is Kavanaughy and I work
at the European Disability Forum, which is a disability organization and we actually have
inclusive AI project and to answer the last question, I also think that asking people with disabilities
as you said is really important. We're trying to actually bridge the connection between the disability
community and developers have a few infographics for people who are interested. It's about building
better AI, but really it's not that you can always imagine how it is to have a disability. If you
don't have one, there is a likelihood that you might miss some important things. So I'm hoping
that we could somehow build some kind of organization where you can connect developers with
people with disabilities because it is through testing and that you will grasp most things.
So lived experiences really? Well, except for goodwill.
And you're going to be bringing those pamphlets up here at the end of the session and also
I have stickers of people on stickers, stickers. And I think you're going to have to read it out.
The next falls them, shooting flute, a dedicated AI track focused on digital accessibility.
So this is called Kurt and it's it's I installed this on my laptop
between 1145 and 1202 last night because I realized that there's a good chance there might be
useful, but it really is not that hard to do.
The next falls them. We should have a track dedicated for
AI accessibility. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I think we're on time.
We have another minute for last question. That's quick.
But thank you. The question is about government laws about accessibility and how can those
be enforced on free open source software if and if it could be at all. For example, the web
accessibility directors that are in various countries in the EU, the US, Canada.
It's really a question. I could definitely talk about this for hours, but
the way Europe has decided to go off into do things is to focus much more on the delivery.
So the government organizations who are going off and implementing it, they're responsible for the
accessibility. Whereas the US, they tried to go off and put the accessibility on the producers,
the products are of making the services. So and that's with a lot of the litigation comes in.
But with the, and they're also the hope that the, like European accessibility act would go and
provide a, if everyone who's selling services in the EU has to make them accessible, then they don't
have, then that also solves the problem. But the challenge is that that all depends on enforcement.