The Nordic Accessibility Community Group brings together participants from across the Nordic region to exchange knowledge, discuss accessibility challenges, and collaborate on improving digital inclusion. The group provides a neutral space for sharing practical experience, comparing approaches across countries, and learning from the diverse perspectives of people working with accessibility in different roles and sectors.
People may join as representatives of a company or organisation, but participation must stay focused on supporting the group’s discussions and activities. Per the CG Process, advertising, product promotion, and sales-driven contributions are not allowed.
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.
Chairs, when logged in, may publish draft and final reports. Please see report requirements.
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.
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.
This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2022-02-03 by Tobias Christian Jensen. The following people supported its creation: Tobias Christian Jensen, Kristian Kristoffersen, Daniel Dersén, Inka Taagehøj, and Jean-Yves Moyen.
Nordic-Accessibility-Community-Group
