Practicing Accessibility: Scientific Python Accessibility Events in Summary

Event resources are here! With October over and the end of another year galloping our way, the Scientific Python Accessibility Events have come and gone in a flurry of discussion, ideas, and, of course, many many questions on how accessibility fits into our work. While these events have concluded for now, the information and community we made together will go on documented as event recordings and notes. Whether you couldn’t attend or want to recap the experience, these resources are open to all.

Keep reading for event summaries, links to each resource, and thank yous for everyone involved.

Catch up with event resources

First up is Accessibility in your digital day-to-day, an event focused on common tasks—writing emails and sending fun posts to your friends—with options for the audience to choose how to complete them. We then discussed the pros and cons of each option because how such a choice impacts others is key to making wise decisions in the future.

Quick tip: Be mindful of having overlapping conversations in real-time digital spaces. While video call chats can be helpful for posting links or asking questions, video controls and chat logs can be a pain to switch between with assistive technology or distracting besides. Use them thoughtfully and aim to have one conversation at a time where possible.

You can find more information via the:

-Accessibility in your digital day-to-day recording

• Collaborative notes

Second is the Data visualization and accessibility event. This series wrapped up with one of the most frequently asked questions in the ecosystem: how do I make my data visualizations more accessible? While there is no magical, single solution for all visualization woes, we built up a toolbox of goals for a more flexible data experience. Keeping data visualizations as a way to communicate an argument at the core, we peeled back different aspects of visualizations to identify how they communicate, what you can lose without them, and how to keep the integrity of your argument throughout.

Quick tip: As with many digital creations, an author can’t know exactly how someone will ultimately be reading their data visualization. Make visualizations responsive, or able to scale to different sizes, so that people can experience it regardless of whether they need to zoom in, to need to show it on a small screen, or something else.

You can find more information via the:

-Data visualization and accessibility recording

• Collaborative notes

Thank yous

As with any event, this work would not be possible without the collaboration and efforts of several people. I want to first say thank you to the event moderators who watch the event chat for questions and make sure everyone is getting help; they are Smera Goel, Tania Allard, and Gabriel Fouasnon. Having people to watch what I can’t while presenting at an event is a major help that cannot be overstated. I also want to thank all the attendees for taking time out of their days and for participating so actively at the events.

Even more people helped from outside the events themselves. Thank you to Juanita Gomez who helped me post the event recordings and related Scientific Python logistics. And thank you to the grant team for reaching out to me and giving me reign to schedule these events as well as CZI EOSS grants for funding the work.

A call for action

An equitable internet for disabled people, like security, translation, and related user-facing efforts, is not completed in two day events, a month, or even a year. Scientific Python’s goal of consolidating resources and community cross-project agreements for the bettering of an online ecosystem at large is well aligned with accessibility efforts outside of the ecosystem that have long aimed to do the same. I encourage you to continue the momentum and share these or other accessibility resources with your online communities. Because if one person makes a one change to their data visualizations or other online etiquette, that’s a win. But if ten people, or fifty, or a hundred make that same small change, we have an ecosystem shift. And that’s the sort of change that supports real people every day.

And if this inspired you to run an event of your own with your community, all the better. If you have any interest in running them with myself, don’t hesitate to reach out via Quansight Labs and mention these events.