I like doing end-of-year reflections. I like seeing what I did, and what I learned.
Previous years: 2023 review and 2022 review.
New job
In April I joined Intopia as a Digital Accessibility Consultant. Having been a client of theirs for a while, and because the accessibility industry’s quite small, I knew some of the people there already. They are cool cats (by which I mean lovely people) who really know their stuff.
As usual, the first few (maybe six (maybe more)) months were (/are) pretty tiring. Adjusting to new people and places and routines and rhythms, learning new systems and things. It’s nice to be back doing consulting kind of work again. I think the mixing-it-up is a good fit for my kind of brain.
Being part of Intopia also meant that I went to Australia for the first time, for about a week. I was in Melbourne for A11yCamp, and a took a few extra days to hang around town afterwards. I really liked Melbourne, I’d like to go back for longer. I had fun scribbling cheeky little sketchnotes for some of the talks.
Speaking
Just two things, but both pleasing and enjoyable.
In April I was back on my bullshit at Code Camp Wellington 2024, doing a lightning talk about Difficulty levels in Elden Ring and what they can teach us about web accessibility. (The year before I did a lightning talk “Dungeons and Dragons and Accessibility”) Here’s a blog post version of the talk. I hope to be back there in 2025 with another weird lightning talk, using some other peculiar thing to help us people understand accessibility.
I did one all-day workshop in June for the NZ Testing Conf: Accessibility testing: Busting barriers with ARIAs, axes, and audits. I really enjoyed flexing my facilitation skills again. It was a small but keen crowd. They gave me some great feedback, which I really appreciated.
Writing
I wrote a little over 10 posts in 2024. I spend more time than that writing, though: I did a lot of prep work for the conference workshop, pulling together existing bits of work (like the MAP), updating some older ones (like Form and error guidelines and Accessibility audit process), and writing some new ones.
While I was at MSD, I continued to write more about people and process, efficiency and efficacy. Things like:
I’m glad I tried my hand at government work. But/and I think it’s unlikely I’ll go back.
Values
Back in 2022 I took a moment to reflect and write up my values and tasks I like doing, and put them on the home page (values and types). I’ve come back to these quite often over the past year or two. They’ve been a useful compass / guide / navigational heading when I’ve been feeling a bit lost or unsure.
That’s a wrap!
I’d quite like to write a bit more next year. And I’m keen to get back into presenting and facilitating a bit more. Early in 2025 I’ll start plotting and scheming. Let’s see how it goes.