Did you catch accessibility too?

[jeshyr]

[OK I have been meaning to post this for about a month and I keep putting it off on account of not having the right phrasing, but hey ... wrong phrasing will have to do]

My basic question is to those developers/volunteers/users of Dreamwidth who are NOT themselves users of accessibility technology...

I know that a bunch of folks here have become accessibility converts/evangelists. By which I mean that you're not just "doing accessibility" because Dreamwidth requires you to, but you're really understanding why it's necessary and important and often you're pointing this out to others in other contexts away from Dreamwidth too.

I know that a project can require people to "do" accessibility, but a project can't make people *care* about accessibility... and most projects that "do" accessibility at all are in the first category. So ... how did you come to care about accessibility, especially if Dreamwidth was involved??

I have been chatting to Liz Ellcessor who is writing a book about web accessibility specifically and wants to know about Dreamwidth's accessibility from the inside, but it's also just a thing I have been wondering about more generally too. Dreamwidth is known for "doing accessibility" well and part of that is that we have got a bunch of people fired up about it and that's a really hard thing to do!!

So how do you think you caught accessibility?

Comments

[kaberett]

For me? I suppose I got into it initially via social justice, and then as I started moving towards identifying as disabled and noticing more and more ways in which the world of the flesh was horribly inaccessible to me, I got more and more interested in making sure that people with different access needs than mine didn't get tripped up by 6" kerbs being left all over the shop at "home". So. Yes. Via analogy to my own experiences (I don't use assistive tech myself), largely, but also through Wanting To Make Sure Everyone Can Participate.