Good morning! Thank you so much for having me.
If you’d like to follow along, the script and a link to the slides on slideshare is at this link.. This link will be at the bottom of the next few slides, so you’ll be able to catch it if you need it.
Hi! I’m Lacey. I’m a developer at the University of Texas at Austin, and I’m an organizer for Django Girls and DjangoCon, and this is my first ever conference presentation.
It’s going to be fine, though. I’m sure I will make no mistakes, cause I am an expert, right?
Wrong. Let’s clear that up right now. I am not an accessibility expert. So why am I up here? I’m here because when I started organizing my first Django Girls workshop, I realized the organizer’s manual was chock full of awesome information, but didn’t have anything about making the workshop more accessible to people with disabilities. So I emailed a friend of mine, a disability studies scholar named Stephanie Wheeler, and she sent me back this hugely long email with a ton of great information. I turned that into a chapter for the Django Girls organizer’s manual.
And then I turned that chapter into an article in the online tech and diversity magazine, Model View Culture. Now, one word of warning. This presentation isn’t going to be exhaustive; one thing I learned when writing these pieces is that it’s impossible to be comprehensive when talking about accessibility. This presentation is just an introduction into how you can make your next workshop, conference, or meetup more inclusive.
When I was talking to people about this talk, I got the sense that they wanted to hear about how they could make their events accessible on small budgets, and which things were most important. That’s what I’ve tried to do in this talk. So let’s talk about what accessibility means. Most people think about wheelchairs, or people who are hard of hearing, when they think about accessibility. And that’s not wrong, but it’s pretty limited.
Accessibility really means “access.” Django has this awesome diversity statement now, which, by the way, go read it if you haven’t. But part of increasing and supporting diversity in our communities is making sure that our in-person events, like this conference and our Django Girls workshops, are inclusive of the widest range of people possible. We want to make it possible for parents, nursing moms, people using wheelchairs, people who are hard of hearing, people with low vision, people with allergies, people with mental illness, and all kinds of other people to come to our events. And we don’t want to make them work for that access. We want access to be the default for everything we do.
Before we dive into these tips, I want to make one thing clear. You probably won’t be able to do everything we’ll talk about today. That doesn’t mean your event is a failure. There is no event that will meet 100% of everyone’s needs. My main goal is to encourage you to think about accessibility from the beginning of your planning process, though. When you think about it from that very first minute, you’re more likely to do those things that improve access. If you’re thinking about accessibility with regard to your event at all, you’re doing great. That’s Step One.
So let’s talk money. This photo of dirty coins in a bowl sort of represents how important budget is to planning an event. Most Django Girls events are put together on very small budgets, so that’s how we’re going to break this out. We’ll start with things you can do to increase access at your event when you maybe have two pennies to rub together, and then we’ll get to things that would be great to add on if you find yourself a larger budget.
Even when you have a small budget, there is still plenty you can do to be welcoming to more people, and most of it costs nothing. But it all starts with your venue.
The photos on this slide are from a hilarious series of articles in The Bold Italic where they take four-year-olds to fancy restaurants and have them review them, and they illustrate the need to be a little picky, even when you’re operating on a budget. The accessibility of your venue will set the tone for your event. So let’s pretend the little girl in the left photo, the one who says, “It looks really not good,” is planning a workshop. She’s looking for a free venue, and the one she finds is not that great. It’s a 5th-floor walkup with no elevator, and she knows that people with arthritis, heart problems, and asthma are going to have a lot of trouble, not to mention people in wheelchairs. She looks concerned, and she should!
If the budget for your event is pretty low, you’re probably looking for a free venue. But free doesn’t need to mean, “horribly inaccessible to a lot of people.”
Now, the boy on the right, he’s helping her plan this event, and he gets an email from a space that looks awesome. He does a walkthrough, and it’s amazing! It’s like chocolate candy, he LOVES it! What makes this space so much better?
This chocolate candy free space, first of all, is accessible via public transit. The fifth-floor walkup, on the other hand, was in the middle of nowhere and even Google didn’t know where it was.
The chocolate space has accessible, gender-neutral restrooms, and they’re easy to get to. The fifth-floor walkup has one restroom, and it’s for women only. The men’s room is on the first floor, and no, they will not let them put up a sign making the restrooms neutral for the evening.
The chocolate space also has wide doorways, and no stairs. This team is confident that the chocolate candy space will be able to accommodate someone in a wheelchair with no problem. In fact, the owner of this space hosted an event last week that was attended by a couple people in wheelchairs, so she is confident that everyone will be comfortable!
These four-year-old event planners are able to be sure that they’ve made the right choice because they were able to walk through these spaces. Both were free, but one was clearly more accessible to everybody than the other.
This team of picky, opinionated toddlers didn’t accept the first free venue they came across. When the first potential space wasn’t right, they kept looking. Learn from them, and hold out for a free or inexpensive space that meets the needs of your community, and don’t assume that everyone in your community can move about easily. People break their legs or sprain their ankles all the time. You’re the organizer— what if YOU broke your leg the week of your event? Would you be able to attend?
Even without a larger budget, look for a slightly larger venue where you can set aside one room as a quiet room. This room can serve multiple functions: it’s a great space for people to take a couple of minutes to calm down, it can be a lactation room, it can be a space for people to take medication. It just needs to be clearly marked and not have a window in the door, and curtains or blinds that close over any other windows. We’re offering this next week for Django Girls Portland, and we’ve already had some attendees express thanks for it.
If you have a larger venue, or are using multiple rooms, spend a little money on some signage and tape to do some wayfinding, and mark aisles that should remain clear. The aisle-marking is something that can be done on even low budgets, since all you need is some painter’s tape, but if you have events or spaces in multiple rooms, you should invest in some clear signs, in a large font and with high contrast, to help people find their way. Try to mark where the important rooms are, which direction different events are in if they are far apart, and generally make it easy for everyone to find their way. This is an example of a tip that doesn’t specifically help people with disabilities— this just makes your event friendlier for everyone.
Communication is a hugely important part of any event, and by communication I mean how you get information to your attendees, how you expect them to communicate with you, and how that dialogue will work. Flexible communication is another very important place to spend some time or money, as it will help you include people with a wide range of communication needs and preferences. In a workshop setting, like Django Girls, where people are working in small teams, someone who is hard of hearing might have a difficult time communicating with the rest of the team using speech. This is where free chat apps come in. Text-based communication is an easy way to manage communication in those team or group settings where speaking isn’t always the best form of communication for everyone. Someone who has trouble hearing in large groups, or concentrating when there is a lot going on, could really benefit from being able to switch to a keyboard and a screen when they need to.
For spaces like this conference, where chatting online isn’t really an option, you can ask presenters for their presentations in advance so you can link to them and people can follow along. If your presenters are procrastinators and this doesn’t work out, did any of you catch what I did back there? Ask your presenters to link to their materials in an initial slide, and give everyone a minute to pull that up if they need to. This also works for lightning talks, and is free as in beer. It’s great Accessibility ROI in that it’s helpful to people who are hard of hearing, who have low vision, who wind up sitting in the back, and people who just prefer to be able to read along for concentration.
You can also reserve some space in front in presentation spaces, and have volunteers on hand to escort people who need to sit up front to those seats. That’s as simple as a sign that marks off the first row or two.
With a larger budget, you can look into getting a sponsor for live captioning or a sign language interpreter, which is so much better than following along with a presentation. AlterConf, the diversity in tech and gaming conference, is an example of a conference series that operates on very small budgets for each of their events, and they always have at least one of these options. If they can do it, we can too! The live captioning is really handy for everyone. This is an image I found on Flickr, and it’s a series of photos of hands that are spelling out F-L-I-C-K-R for Flickr!
With a very large budget, hire a professional! Hire an accessibility consultant, or a diversity consultant. Hire Ashe Dryden, who founded and runs AlterConf. Accessibility consultants can help you find the holes in your plan, locate the people you haven’t planned for, help connect you with resources and vendors who can help make your event amazing and inclusive. If you have a larger budget, start out by pricing an accessibility consultant. And this is not a sales pitch— I am not an accessibility consultant, I just think they are amazing.
With some extra money in your pocket, find some real users— preferably who use screen readers or other assistive technologies— and pay them some money to thoroughly beta-test your site. Ask them to let you know of areas they had a hard time navigating, or whether there are parts of your site that were just unusable to them.
The last and arguably most important thing you can do to make your event more accessible to is brag about it: go public with your accommodations! You could have free child care, a quiet room, accessible and gender-neutral restrooms, and complete step-free access, but if you don’t tell anyone about these things, how will people know? Don’t hide your light under a bushel! Not communicating openly about what you can and cannot offer in terms of accessibility means that you’re putting all the responsibility on your attendees to find out if they can attend your event, rather than letting them know up front that you’ve made access a priority.
This is probably too small for you to read, but it’s the FAQ section of the Portland Django Girls website. I don’t know if you’ve ever visited a Django Girls event page, but it’s literally one page. We don’t add extra web pages for accessibility, FAQs, or coaches— all of our data loads onto the same page, so we try to be concise with our information. Despite that, we’ve been able to clarify a lot of details about our accessibility and accommodations through the FAQ section. We have basic questions here about why we’re doing this and whether there will be food, but we also have information about the public transit, about restrooms, about what we will do for low vision attendees, stuff like that. In our case, we’ve specified that we have total step-free access, but that the sinks and toilets aren’t lowered, which someone in a wheelchair might want to know. We’ve also included a way for them to contact us if they need an accommodation that we haven’t specified.
Then we bragged about it! We tweeted and Facebooked things like this that let potential attendees know that we wanted to create a safe environment where everyone could participate. We linked to our website for more information, used this graphic with some information on it, and started to spread the word. Credit to Django Girls Mexico, by the way, for the original design of this poster.
It probably sounds like I’m bragging, and I am a little. But the point isn’t, “Look how awesome Django Girls Portland is.” The point is that we told our attendees that we wanted them, that we were ready for them, that we had made their needs a priority. And as a result, we have some attendees in our workshop who will use these accommodations, who might not otherwise have applied.
I hope we’ve dispelled some notions about how difficult it is to make your event accessible. It’s not too hard to make accessibility a priority for your meetup or hackathon. Most of the tips we’ve gone over aren’t even that time consuming, though some of them certainly can be. It’s also not trivial. It’s necessary to the success of your event that you include people. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot. You can make a lot of progress toward accessibility and inclusivity without spending a dime. Accessibility is for everyone, not just for people with disabilities. A lot of what you can do to make your event more accessible will help all of your attendees have a better and easier time participating.
But accessibility is crucial to the health and well-being of our community. It’s 100% necessary that we go out of our way to include people with disabilities, and to encourage everyone to participate. We want to welcome everyone into our community; that’s what makes the Django community so special. We think our community experience is more important than our technical experience, and that’s directly from the Django Diversity Statement. To be successful in that endeavor, it’s our responsibility to make sure that universal access to our community events is part of that.
There is so much I haven’t talked about, and making events accessible involves so much more than what we’ve covered today, but it all starts with your priorities. If your heart is in the right place, and you’re putting accessibility at the forefront of your planning, your event will do just fine. But if you have questions, I’m always here. Thank you all so much!