The Nordic Accessibility Community Group serves as an open forum to discuss challenges, network with accessibility professionals, and promote the importance of inclusive design in the Nordic countries.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
On sept 19, 2023 I gave an insight into the state of digital accessibility in The Netherlands. Here’s a summary of this presentation.
Law and order
Since 2008 there has been a non-binding agreement between public organisations to be digitally accessible. As a foundation for this, there were the so-called “Web Guidelines”. These are basically WCAG 2.0 A and AA plus some extra requirements, such as friendly URLs.
These Web Guidelines have been superseded by a temporary conversion into national law of the Web Accessibility Directive. This temporary order will become part of a bigger Law on Digital Government. In the current order, there are no sanctions for not complying. This might change when the Law on Digital Government comes into force.
The European Accessibility Act has not yet been converted into national law.
Monitoring and dashboard
There is one monitoring body, Logius, which monitors the accessibility statements and helps public organisations with improving their digital accessibility. Their website is digitoegankelijk.nl.
All public organisations need to publish an accessibility statement in a fixed form with an online tool. All these statements are available at toegankelijkheidsverklaring.nl/register.
If you want to state that a website or app fully or partially complies to the Web Accessibility Directive, there must be a WCAG accessibility audit report as a foundation. This report is valid for 3 years.
An accessibility statement can have one of the following statuses:
E: no statement published.
D: no audit planned.
C: audit planned, but not yet done.
B: audit shows there are still some failures.
A: audit show conformance to the Web Accessibility Directive.
Right now the register of accessibility statements is being transferred into a dashboard: dashboard.digitoegankelijk.nl. This shows even more information about the state of accessibility at the Dutch government as a whole and per organisation.
WCAG audits
WCAG audits need to be done according to the evaluation method WCAG-EM. As a public organisation you can do it yourself, but this usually is outsourced.
It is possible to divide an audit into a technical audit and a content audit. In the technical audit, the auditor reviews 43 success criteria from a technical perspective. In a content audit, the auditor reviews 30 success criteria from a content perspective. There are some overlaps and these numbers are for WCAG 2.1 A+AA reports and will change for WCAG 2.2.
Miscellaneous
There is a national programme for help and support for public organisations.
Most – if not all – public organisations have accessibility as requirement in procurement.
If you are a web agency, designer or software builder and if you have proven that you can make digitally accessible products or services, you can apply to be listed on ddai.nl/aanbieders (Dutch Digital Accessibility Index). This is a commercial initiative for organisations that are looking for accessible suppliers.
Sheets
You can download the PowerPoint sheets from our Slack channel (I cannot upload it here). Please let me know if you run into any problems with this.
Thank you to everyone who participated in yesterday’s group meeting.
During the meeting, the three work groups presented their accomplishments from the past year:
The Knowledge-Sharing group, represented by Sander Nijsingh, discussed their decision to utilize the Nordic Accessibility Community Group Space on w3c.org for hosting shared documents temporarily. Sander also introduced the Speaker’s List, where members can indicate their availability for public speaking engagements related to accessibility, such as talks and workshops. The group also explored the idea of creating a list of accessibility events, although they noted that similar resources already exist online.
The Networking group, presented by Pär Lannerö, highlighted their practice of featuring a speaker during each group meeting. In the previous meeting, Daniel Dersén (founder of the W3C Nordic Chapter) spoke to the group from New York City. The group warmly welcomes all members to join their future meetings and talks. The next meeting is scheduled for September 19th at 14:00 CET. Sander Nijsingh will provide insights into accessibility in the Netherlands. You can access the meeting link here: Meeting Link (Microsoft Teams)
The Accessibility in Education group, represented by Tobias Christian Jensen, shared their progress in arranging interviews with Danish universities. All schools have shown interest in participating in 30-minute interviews over the next month. Those wishing to be part of these interview sessions can reach out to Tobias. Tobias also presented noteworthy findings from a prior survey conducted by the group. Key findings are summarized in this PowerPoint presentation: Accessibility in Education – Survey Results (PowerPoint)
Following the presentations, the community engaged in a retrospective session. Participants shared their thoughts and concerns under categories like “What went well,” “What didn’t go so well,” “What can we improve,” and “Other thoughts or questions.” The group voted on topics for further discussion, leading to the following outcomes:
The suggestion to transition to monthly community group meetings, promoting a lighter format resembling the retrospective. This would facilitate discussions about challenges, task assignments, and progress reviews since the last meeting, and the lighter format could foster more experimentation with the meetings and format. Members can also form work groups as needed. Additionally, efforts will be made to accommodate members to contribute in advance or after meetings for those unable to attend.
Addressing the uncertainty around joining individual work groups and what to expect from joining a work group. The decision was made to close the work groups’ Slack Channel, centralizing communication in the general Slack channel. New work group meetings will be sent out to the entire Community Group mailing list, allowing the members to decide if they wish to participate. A “How to Get Started” guide will be created for newcomers to the Community Group.
Expressing interest in arranging in-person gatherings for dinner or coffee. A Slack poll will be conducted to identify viable locations and suitable dates/times for such events.
Acknowledging time constraints and time zone challenges faced by some members. The revised meeting format aims to make sporadic attendance more feasible. A poll will also be conducted to identify preferred time zones for future meetings.
A commitment to setting clearer goals within the Community Group, providing direction for collective efforts. Clearly defined goals can also assist members in gaining support from their managers/organizations to participate in the Community Group.
The group has discussed adding accessibility to university curriculums but found this a big and challenging task.
Instead, we decided to start out by providing guest lecturing about accessibility to schools and gaining insight into what knowledge schools lack.
The group has created a list of schools, determining interest, and potentially arranging interviews with schools: Higher Education in Nordic Countries (Google Docs) The next step is to contact these schools to hear if they would be willing to be interviewed about challenges for getting accessibility on the curriculum, and determine whether they’d be willing to pay for guest lecturers coming to talk about accessibility.
The group has also published a survey for designers, developers, and others to gauge the general level of accessibility knowledge and training received: Accessibility Survey (Google Forms) Please share far and wide with your network.
Action items for our next meeting:
Review initial survey responses.
Discuss responses from the schools that have gotten back to us after we contact them.
Then, we will add contact information for each school.
Then, we will clear individual schools’ interests in having lectures on accessibility and determine if they are willing to pay for guest lectures.
We also plan to create a reusable presentation with a script/notes for guest lecturers to minimize workload.
Bonus: Potentially get in contact with employer panels that exist in university structures to push universities to focus more on accessibility.
For anyone interested in joining some of our meetings, you can let the Work Group Facilitator know, tell us in a comment here, or tell us in the Work Group Slack channel, and we will make sure to add you.
The meeting started with a round of presentations and a quick look at the events list and speaker directory.
Event list and speaker directory
These documents are not and will probably never be complete, so we’ll see how they evolve.
One interesting idea that was put forward in the meeting was to document not only upcoming events but also past events, with lists of speakers and topics, in order to provide inspiration for people who will be planning networking events. Especially events that have been recorded would be valuable to be able to find afterwards.
Experiences from 10 years of a11y meetups in Sweden
The main feature of the meeting was a presentation by Ida Franceen, founder and organizer of the T12T meetups. Usually held in Stockholm, but sometimes in other cities in Sweden – or online – these meetups have become very popular. The community today has about 2500 people in its mail list. The meetups usually gather 50-100 people, sometimes several hundred.
It is good to have a group of organizers (approx 5 persons seems to work well) so that the workload can be shared
Much easier to recruit speakers when you have a date set, and ask for a 10 or 15 minute talk than if date is vague and speakers are expected to speak for longer period.
Important to visit the venue before the event, so you know about physical accessibility and practical details, such as microphone availability et cetera.
DO NOT forget to leave time for people to actually meet and talk with each other! The meeting should not end when the last speaker finishes!
Tentative date for next meeting
June 20 at 15.00 CET.
Pär Lannerö volunteers to coordinate this meeting, too.
Here are the meeting notes from the Knowledge-sharing and Co-creating group meeting on March 27, 2023.
Speaker list
We’ve started with a blog post on this community group website with a list of speakers in a table. It’s good that this is publicly available in a tool that’s already being used. The layout is not the best, however. Sander will ask the administrators if there are options available here.
We’ve also discussed changing the layout within the blog post, i.e. not using one big table, but making sections per person and underneath each person a table or list with “Topic”, “Location”, “Speaker fee”, “Contact and additional info”.
An issue with this site is that only chairs can publish and edit blog posts and pages. Even the author of a blog post cannot edit it. Sander will ask the administrators if these rights can be changed. For now we’ve solved it by making a note that you can add a comment to the blog post or email Erik for changes.
Speakers should be aware that any info on this blog post is publicly available.
An alternative could be to set up a different website, for example hosted as a Github Page. This adds an extra layer of difficulty and another tool to be using. Not everybody is familiar with using Github and/or has an account.
Events list
First, we need to define what we want to show. If we only want to show accessibility events, then there are already great resources available. For example on the IAAP site. We could link to those. If we also want to list non-accessibility events, it would be hard to manage and to keep it updated.
A good alternative would be to write info by way of “I’m going to event [x] to talk about subject [y]”. That way each speaker can tell something from own experiences and this would not be too hard to manage (if any group member can edit this blog post).
Meeting notes
For meeting notes, this community group website is a great way to publish them. Please be aware that this is publicly available, so do not share any sensitive info, like passwords, in here.
Next meeting
We have not planned a new meeting yet. Please let me (Sander) know if you have any things you want to discuss. The easiest way to do that is to reach out to me in our Slack channel.
Here you can find a list of speakers to contact for talks on accessibility.
If you want to be added to this list, please leave a comment or send an email to erik@axesslab.com and we will add you to the list. Please note that this information is publicly available.
Name
Topic
Location / remote
Speaker fee (if applicable)
Contact information + Additional info
First name Last name
Introduction to accessibility, role-specific talks, etc.
City X or remote
Free for non-profit, contact for other organisations
• Introduction to accessibility • Implementing accessibility practices in an organization (change management) • Training in specific areas such as design (colors, interaction patterns, etc.) or development (WAI-aria, semantics, etc.) • Understanding of WCAG success criteria
Copenhagen or online are preferred, other places can be discussed.
• Accessibility for marketing professionals, UX, and content designers • Embedding accessibility into product development • Building communities of accessibility champions • Automated accessibility testing • Building a business case for accessibility • Legal requirements in EU
Copenhagen, Helsinki, or online. Other places can be discussed. Languages: Finnish, English
I do talks on disability, web accessibility, and WCAG, and I do workshops on evaluating and fixing web accessibility. I’d like to do more talks on why we should stop talking about the formalities of “web accessibility” (no, really) and focus on inclusive design.
This week we met to review the findings of the 4 workgroups that had investigated the following:
How can we ensure meetups/networking opportunities?
How can we get relevant schools/universities to teach accessibility?
How can we host/share knowledge and resources within our group?
How can we identify relevant research that we want to conduct?
It was wonderful to hear all the different ideas! Then we proceeded to find people who would like to continue the work and discussions for each group.
There is still room for people passionate about discussing networking, or education, or knowledge-sharing, and we can always use more brains involved. So my urge to you is to reach out to the coordinator of a group that you would like to be invited to. You can also find a channel for each group in our Slack space.
I want to stress once again that joining is not a commitment to anything but only means you will receive invitations for the discussions for the next 6 months – or until you opt-out.
Our next big meeting as a Community Group will be in 6 months’ time. See you then!
Update: The time of the workshop meeting is now changed from “CEST” to “CET”. We apologize for any confusion around the time of the invitation.
It has now been a few weeks since our last gathering, and I am here with some news.
At the workshop, we agreed to set up some platform for easing communication within the group. As per Jean-Yves Moyen’s suggestion, we have decided to use the official W3C Community on Slack. Here is how you join:
September 22nd marked our first proper session as a group. Thank you to all who joined us!
The intent of the workshop was to get a list of prioritized focus areas to work on. The meeting had 15 attendants participating in a shared workshop document (Word docx).
Outcome
The outcome of the document was a list of suggestions for what the group could focus on in the coming year. We grouped these suggestions under the following categories:
Meetups and networking
Providing feedback on standards and legislation
Co-creating/sharing knowledge and resources
Accessibility on universities’ curriculum
Research
Other
For the next meeting, we can open a discussion about the most prioritized individual activities that were suggested.
Chairs
Jean-Yves Moyen & Erik Gustafsson have agreed to join as Chairs, which brings us to a total of 5 Chairs in the group. If anyone else would like to join, reach out to us.
Internal communication
We agreed to set up a shared Slack space to ease communication and social interactions in the group. More to follow on this.
