We’re starting a new monthly webinar called “A11yAMA” (or, Accessibility Ask Me Anything) where we talk with a guest who benefits from improved accessibility.
People sometimes feel awkward asking about someone’s disability, or worse, don’t feel awkward about it at all and ask inappropriate questions at inopportune times. The reality is that people with disabilities are like everyone else: some welcome questions, and some don’t want to have to answer to anyone, and most are willing to answer respectful questions when they are in the right place and time.
We want A11yAMA to be that right time and place. Everyone benefits from increased understanding of the specifics of another’s situation, especially when that leads to action on improving how you can act as an ally to a11y.
Our goal with the series will be to help our listeners understand the real and specific impact of accessible (or inaccessible) technology, and to showcase the real people who are served by accessibility efforts.
The details
On the third Wednesday of every month, at 11am ET, we’ll have a new guest, and we’ll ask them the questions that you send to us through our A11yAMA form. We’ll announce our guests at the beginning of the month, and prepare the best and most asked questions for our guest.
Our first guest, Nic Steenhout
Because of the upcoming holidays, we’re getting started a little early for our first A11yAMA webinar on January 15, 2020. Our first guest, Nicolas Steenhout, is an accessibility professional and host of the popular A11y Rules podcast. Nic also speaks, trains, and consults about inclusion, accessibility and disability, and writes about it on his site, incl.ca. Nic was our first guest on our Technica11y webinar, back in October 2018, with his presentation on Making a Podcast WCAG 2.1 Compliant, so we were excited to have him back to help us launch A11yAMA.
Nic works in digital accessibility, but he also has a disability himself. He uses a wheelchair and a service dog. Here’s Nic in his own words:
“I’m a wheelchair user. I also have some arthritis in my hands. While my impairments don’t necessarily affect my web use, I also have experienced temporary impairments that had an impact on the web. And I’ve worked alongside many people with disabilities over the last 25 years to get a good feel for that. But ultimately, accessibility is accessibility and it’s easy to illustrate web access with examples from the built environment.”Want to know more about wheelchair use, and how physical accessibility reflects digital accessibility? Want to know what temporary impairments impeded him? Or are you curious about something else? Ask Nic your question on our A11yAMA form.
Get in touch
Join us on January 15, 2020 to hear from the insightful and entertaining Mr. Steenhout. We hope that you’ll enjoy this webinar series, and come away with a new perspective.
If you are curious about a particular disability, or if you have a disability and benefit from accessibility technology yourself, we’d like to hear from you. Maybe you could even be a guest on A11yAMA. Reach out to us at a11yama@tenon.io, and let’s start a conversation.