Hey, yep, Hi — it’s me again! Your friendly neighbourhood accessibility advocate.

In this talk, I’m gonna take a break from aria-labels, alt-tags, and screen-reader demos.

Don't get me wrong, that stuff is still important and needs to be shared as widely as possible, but, you see, I seem to have uncovered bigger problems. One of them is that basic human rights is hard to assign story points to, and we all know what happens to un-estimated stories during Sprint Planning!

There seems to be a bit of a misconception that the responsibility of accessibility falls on the shoulders of the front-end engineer or UX designer. In reality, true accessibility, and inclusivity, goes much deeper than text size and colour contrast.

In this talk, I’m going to show you how accessibility helps you print money. Nope, we’re not going to launch a new cryptocurrency, but you are leaving money on the table by locking potential customers out of your product.

I am going to talk numbers - how measurable and tangible returns can be made from an investment in accessibility and inclusion. Plus how to think about accessibility at every layer of your stack and how to build it into your workplace culture.

Since January, we have RSVPd “yes” 26,610 times to tech Meetups in Brisbane*. That’s a lot of pizza.

Every Monday, I run a script which posts in the #meetup channel of the Brisbane Developers Slack group. It's a simple Node script that calls the Meetup API, and lists every tech event in Brisbane for the following week. The script was conceived from curiosity, a want to share information, and because I'm a stats nerd.

Apart from writing code, I also co-host two Brisbane tech Meetups: Women Who Code and CTO School. In 2018, these user groups have grown from a humble handful of regulars, to almost standing room only.

I will share with you a statistical analysis of a years worth of Brisbane tech Meetup data (updated for YOW! Data 2019), the secret life of a Meetup organiser, and how the transparency of information (such as speaker gender ratio) has started to affect change in this community, for the better.

*data from Jan 1 to Sept 30, 2018

“That’s not good enough”

That was Larene’s response to when Damian told her “you’re doing a great job, keep doing what you’re doing”.

This talk is about the journey of a grizzled industry veteran and a young ambitious engineer thrown together in a small startup environment.

Forced to establish fast feedback cycle, not just iterating on the product we were developing, but also how we worked on it together. We were both pushed out of our comfort zones to create a productive collaboration.

We’ve distilled some of our lessons from this process into a handful of tools you can apply straight away, whether you’re seeking mentoring, or are in a tech leadership/manager position.

We’ll share how we give and receive feedback, how mentors can grow the technical skills of more junior people, how men can mentor women more effectively, and how even the most hardened “seen it all” of us can grow individually.

Creating inclusive and accessible apps is easy using React Native! Javascript developers can have a working app on their phone in less than an hour. Join me to see a working demo of how to plan, develop, and test for accessibility in the mobile space.

I will also be talking about resources and guidelines you can use and share with your organisation to develop apps for everyone - including what the bare minimum looks like to help you prioritise your requirements!

Mobile accessibility guidelines are still immature, but I've always hated checklist-driven-development anyway! Let me demonstrate how easy it is to create apps for everyone in React Native, a native mobile app framework create by Facebook. Each member of a software delivery team plays a vital role when it comes to creating inclusive mobile products. I'll be demonstrating what it looks like to plan, design, develop, and test an accessible native mobile app for iOS and Android, and I'll be asking you to test your own apps using your built-in screen reader!