Last year I co-ran a workshop on Front-end performance at WordCamp. This year I was lucky enough to be accepted again. Nicola du Toit and I ran a workshop on Inclusive Design (and accessibility).
We made the workshop very interactive. There was only a little bit of us talking and a lot of attendees doing stuff. The content of the workshop borrowed a lot from the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) workshop that I help run every year for the CTFEDs (Cape Town Front-End Developers) meetup group. It’s a bunch of activities that help us gain more empathy for people visiting our sites and apps who aren’t like us.
We also tried to emphasise the idea of disability as a continuum: it’s (just) about completely blind users, it’s also about users with poor eyesight, or users who are on an old monitor, or who are outside on a sunny day.
To make the 90 minute workshop, we took the existing GAAD activities, added some new ones, and spent a lot of time making the activity cards. We wanted attendees to be clear on:
- what to do;
- things to check;
- why to do it;
- things they could change.
Here are the resources (as a google doc) that we provided to workshop attendees: bit.ly/emplab100. That has links out to the workshop activities (bit.ly/emplab101), our slide deck (bit.ly/emplab102), and the bingo board (bit.ly/emplab103) that we gave people to track their progress.
The workshop was great fun and we got some very positive feedback from attendees. I’m planning to use this as a base for next year’s CTFEDS GAAD workshop. I hope to be back at WordCamp again next year!