A More Accessible Django Girls

Speaker 1: Please welcome Lacey Williams Henschel.

Speaker 2: Good morning. Thank you all so much for having me. So this works a little less well without Wi-Fi. Initially I was gonna say if you want to follow along or you want to zoom in on stuff, feel free to check out my scripts and my slides at this link here. You can still do that if you you know have cellular data or UTether or something. But that was the initial idea, which works a little bit less well in this environment. That's okay. I'm Lacey. I think a lot of you don't know me, but that's why I'm here, so you can get to know me. As Jacob said, I'm kind of popping up um lately over the past six months months or so things have gotten a little a little crazy with everything I'm doing, which is wonderful. That's this community is so welcoming, which is why I can just kind of jump in and start doing things. So thank you um to everyone who's had me work on your stuff. Thank you, Ola, for letting me do Django Girls. especially. Um this is also my first ever conference presentation and I'm um not at all nervous.

Speaker 2: Totally cool. Um it's it's amazing that my very first talk is here at Django Birthday. I can't imagine um a more special first conference presentation So thank you again for having me. I'm not starstruck at all. I'm up here with like these cool people who I've looked up to for years now and I'm I'm great because I'm an expert. Um yeah. Um I'm not an accessibility expert. Um I'm up here because whenever I started organizing my very first Django Girls workshop I realized that the Django Girls Organizers Manual, which by the way, like when you organize a Django Girls workshop, they give you this huge long manual that is chock full of amazing information and it makes it really easy for you. But it didn't have any information on how to make your workshop more accessible to people with disabilities. One of my really good friends is a disability studies scholar, and her name is Stephanie

Speaker 2: Wheeler. She's at the University of Central Florida. And I sent her an email and I said, I'm doing this thing. This is what it will be. What should I look out for? What should I do? And she sent me this incredibly long email full of all this wonderful feedback, things I should look for, and all this encouragement about what we were doing with Django Girls, which was amazing. I wound up turning that email into an accessibility chapter for the Django Girls Organizers Manual. And then I turned that chapter into the article that Jacob mentioned, which is organizing more accessible tech events on Model View Culture. And so um the Django Girls accessibility chapter is pretty focused on doing something in a workshop on the accessibility things that you can do for that specific kind of event. The Model View Culture article is a little bit more generalized to conferences or meetups or how

Speaker 2: Hackathons, sprints, things like that. And so this presentation is going to be a little bit more general, too. So, and then just one kind of caveat here. It's really impossible to be totally comprehensive when you're talking about accessibility. There are so many things to think about. So the tips I'm going to give you today aren't the end-all be-all. This isn't like if you can check off all of these things, your event is 100% Accessible. That will not happen. So accept that now. But if you start out planning your event with accessibility in mind, you're more likely to make those decisions that will lead to your event being more inclusive to all of your attendees So let's talk a little bit about what accessibility is and what that kind of means in terms of this event and this talk. When I started talking to a couple of different people about this talk,

Speaker 2: I heard that people wanted to hear about what accessibility things you can do whenever you have a really tiny budget. Like a lot of the Django Girls events are planned on very, very small dollar amounts. And also what things would be most important Um the thing that is most important, that's a really hard thing to put your finger on. So just because I start with something doesn't mean this is what you should definitely do first if you do nothing else. There's no such thing as that. Um but these are the things that I'll talk about today that I think are maybe Maybe get you the best ROI. If you invest in these things, you might reach the most people. Um But again, I'm I'm leaving things out because you can't say do all of these things, then you'll be accessible in in 20 minutes. That's just not Not possible. So what accessibility basically just means is access. Django has this wonderful community and this awesome diversity statement now, which if you haven't read the new diversity statement

Speaker 2: You should, it's amazing. But part of increasing and supporting diversity in our communities is making sure that our in-person events like this conference and like our Django Girls workshops are inclusive of the widest range of people possible. We want to make it possible for parents, for nursing moms, for people with allergies, people with low vision, people who are hard of hearing, people with mental illness, people in wheelchairs, and all kinds of people that we can't even think of to come to our events. And we don't want to make those people work for that access. We want access to be the default. We want people to know right up front that we welcome them. And again, I do want to make one thing clear. Um, you probably won't be able to do everything that we talk about today. Django Birthday doesn't do everything that I'll talk about today, and that's okay. You can do a lot. And just because you haven't done everything doesn't mean that your event is a failure.

Speaker 2: If you start out with your heart in the right place, you'll be able to do a whole lot and that will be wonderful. So let's talk about money. This is a photo of dirty coins in a bowl, and it kind of represents how important budget is to planning an event. Like I said, a lot of events have really small budget, so that's where we're going to break this out. We'll start out by free things that you can do to increase access and then kind of go from there as your budget increases, you can think about adding on these These things. So um the photos on this slide are from a hilarious series of articles in uh a website called the Bold Italic where they send four-year-olds to very, very fancy restaurants in New York City and have them review them. And I thought that these photos were A hilarious and B kind of illustrative of how you need to be picky whenever you're picking a venue.

Speaker 2: So let's pretend that the the little four-year-old on the left is planning a meetup and the the boy on the right is helping her. And the the girl on the left, she has come across this venue. It's a fifth-floor walk-up. It does not have an elevator. There are restrooms, but there's only one restroom. It's right on the fifth floor, and it's for women only. The men's restroom is all the way down on the first floor. Again, no elevator. And they won't let you make the restroom general neutral for the evening. Plus, it's in the middle of nowhere, it's not accessible by public transit, and Google Maps can't find it. This is really not that good. Is what she says. So the venue is free, but it cuts out a huge portion of the community to use this venue. Now the little boy on the right, he receives this email from this venue that sounds pretty good.

Speaker 2: And he's they're invited for a walkthrough and they go through and it's kind of amazing. The restrooms are are gender neutral, the toilets are lowered, they have grab bars for For people that need them. It's step-free access throughout. There is an elevator for the one part that isn't step-free. It's on public transit, and the public transit in this place happens to also be free. And this it's kind of amazing, right? This is the the chocolate candy that we love of venues. So that's what I mean whenever I say to kind of be be picky about your event. If the budget for your event is really low, that doesn't mean that you have to go with the first venue that says that it's free. You can still keep looking around. And if you're not able to find a venue that is again 100% wonderful, you can still kind of keep asking around. If you're in a larger city, you can look at has an Alterconf ever been there?

Speaker 2: Where did they have their event? Because their events make accessibility a 100% priority. So they're a really good example. But keep keep asking around. That's what I would kind of encourage you to do is to keep looking until you find the event event that's right. Even without a larger budget, you can look for a venue that maybe has a little bit of extra space so that you can set aside a quiet room. A quiet room is really, really useful for a huge range of people. That can serve as a lactation space for nursing moms. That can serve as a quiet place for people to go to calm down whenever they're giving their first conference presentation. That's a great place for people to take medications that they need to take privately. And I will just recommend in this space there's a balcony up here that I was able to use whenever I wanted to kind of review my talk. During the break. So if you need a quiet space here, it's not quiet because there's everything down here, but you're still sort of hidden, which is nice.

Speaker 2: So you can be creative with those kinds of spaces. We're able to offer this for our Django Girls Workshop in Portland next week, and we've actually already had several of our attendees email us to say, thank you so much for offering this. I have an anxiety disorder, and I'll probably need that room. So that's it's wonderful to do that. If you're using multiple rooms, spending a little bit of money on some signage and some tape To do some wayfinding is really, really helpful. At PyCon this this last year, they had a lot of really, really great signage, which made it helpful, especially since events were on three different floors. You had to take like two escalators. The escalators weren't right next to each other, they were down this really And it was kind of confusing to navigate, but they had a lot of really wonderful signs which made it a little bit easier. So that

Speaker 2: this is the kind of thing that is helpful for everybody. Whenever you're able to have some really good signs. So people know where they are. A very simple you are here, you are in the right place is wonderful. For those of us not familiar with Lawrence, having Django birthday on the marquee, that's an accessibility thing. Like it's also awesome, but it's an accessibility thing too because then you let people know you are in the right place, you have found us, come in. For the um the painter's tape comes in handy to mark aisles that should remain free So that way people can move around whenever they need to. Someone in a wheelchair has enough space. And again, that's that's a roll of painter's tape, maybe three or four, depending on how much space that you need. And then that's just some time before the event to mark out those areas. that can be really helpful.

Speaker 2: So this is a screenshot of um the Django Girls Slack channel. We have um an emoji-only Slack channel, which is wonderful. Um and thank you, Ola and Baptiste for Making that. That's just that's one of the things that makes Django Girls wonderful is to have an emoji-only sla Slack channel. Um but this is all about communication. So in a Django Girls workshop, if you want to include people who have low vision or who are hard of hearing or who are using screen readers, a really helpful thing in that kind of workshop, sprint, or hackathon setting is to switch to text-based communication. Talking is not always the best way to communicate communicate with um with people in a particular setting. And so if you, for example, you have the tutorial, and so you can just link to a page in the tutorial that you don't understand and someone can chat to you their question and someone can

Speaker 2: can chat to you the response. For a lot of your events, talking is totally fine, but in a louder room especially, some people might have trouble concentrating or some people just prefer to, they understand things better when they see them written out. And so switching to chat can be helpful for a lot of reasons if you need to. For um things like this conference, where like I'm not going to chat my entire talk to you. That's not really a A great way to do things, you can do things like this. You can make your slides available in advance. You can make your notes or your script available in advance. And that can be really helpful for people who, for whatever reason, prefer to follow along in a different format. If you're organizing a conference, you could attempt to get your the presentations from your presenters in advance. If your presenters are procrastinators, that might not work quite as well.

Speaker 2: But still you can ask your presenters to do something like that. like this. You can give them a heads up. It doesn't take very much time to put together something like this if you're a presenter. I I put together this link. I just created a gist with my script and then put my slides on slide share, linked those things to each other and then linked it from here. This goes to the gist. So that's a really, really easy thing that you can do. So someone who maybe has low vision or who winds up sitting in the back can pull this up on their on their laptop or their iPad or something and zoom in when they need to They can follow along, and it's it's a really, really easy thing to do. You can also reserve some space um in the front or in the back, just depending on the layout of your room. for people who have mobility needs or people who need to sit closer. And that's as simple as telling people if you need this preferred seating, see a volunteer and they will show you where that is.

Speaker 2: With a larger budget, getting a sponsor for live captioning or a sign language interpreter or both is a really, really neat thing to do. If you don't sign. This is a really awesome um image I found on Flickr that spells out Flickr in the sign language alphabet. So AlterConf, which is again that's the diversity in tech and game conference, they always have one of these options at their conferences and they operate on pretty small budgets. So I feel like our communities too, even whenever we're doing events that are on small budgets, can make this kind of thing a priority priority. And whenever things get a little bit loud, or if the mic goes out or the presenter mumbles, having that live captioning can really help you catch up. Or sometimes someone said something that you didn't quite get or understand and just seeing it typed out will help you have that light bulb moment that says, oh.

Speaker 2: So again, that's another example of of an accommodation that works really well for people who are hard of hearing, but can also work really well for everybody. Sign language is going to be specific to people who um who know how to sign, but that's still a very helpful thing to do. If you have a really, really large budget, you have these diamond and platinum level sponsors who are throwing money at you. Hire someone, hire a professional. Hire Ash Dryden, who invented AlterConf and runs it. She also is a diversity and accessibility consultant. That kind of individual, their whole job is to help you find holes in your planet. It's to help you figure out how to reach those people that you haven't thought of. They'll help you make your website more accessible. They'll help you line up vendors for things like the sign language interpreter and the live captioning. They'll help you figure out for your venue where should you have your aisles, what should the flow be.

Speaker 2: Their whole job is to make your event more accessible and more inclusive to everybody. Everyone. I am, this is not a sales pitch. I am not an accessibility consultant. You cannot hire me for that. I just think that what they do is really awesome. You can also find some real users. Almost every event is going to have some sort of website. If you're not using a website that is pre-made, like meetup. com. or something, then you can have some some real people, maybe even some who use assistive technologies like screen readers, to go through your website, ask them, okay, can you find the schedule? Can you find where you're supposed to be? Can you figure out how to submit a talk? Do you know where this is? And let them tell you what they had trouble finding. Let them tell you if there was a part of your website that was lower contrast than it should have been

Speaker 2: If you don't know anyone like that, you can't find anyone like that, or you don't have the money to hire these real users to do this intense beta testing, there are also some online tools that can help you with that. that. The WAVE toolbar is just a it's a toolbar that works on any website on the web. You click it and it will show you all of the accessibility violations. So things like missing alt text for images or if your your headers are in the wrong places, you have like an H2 where you really should have an H3 or something like that. They'll let you know about that. One of the most important things that you can do though, and that you should do, is to brag about what you're able to do for your accommodation. If your event has a quiet room and a place for nursing moms and free childcare and it has total

Speaker 2: step-free access and the bathrooms are gender-neutral and accessible, if you are doing everything and you tell nobody Then you're putting all of the onus on making sure that someone can attend your event on that person. You're making it the responsibility of your attendees to find out for themselves if they are welcome at your event, if they are able to attend. So take to social media, put a section on your website, do that bragging. So you might not really be able to see this, and that's okay. It's just the FAQ for the Django Girls Portland page. And if you've never been to a Django Girls event page, we don't have a lot of space. We have one page that we're able to put all of our information. Our coaches are there, our location is there, we have this one little section in the middle for FAQ, and Portland was still able to put a whole lot of accessibility information in this very small space.

Speaker 2: So the FAQ includes things like do I need to bring my own laptop? Will there be food? Stuff like that. But we also have questions here about is the venue accessible? What if I'm low vision or or hard of hearing? Am I able to participate? How do I get there? Is there a quiet room available? And we're able to answer that. And we were able to say, for example, that we have total step-free access and the restrooms are gender neutral, but although the restrooms are gender neutral have grab bars, the sinks are not lowered, the toilets are not lowered, so it's not 100% accessible. But we're able to be a little bit specific about what we were able to do. And this has made our application process a lot easier because whenever we asked people if they needed an accommodation to participate, we were able to say, these are the accommodations that we already have, so tell us about anything else that you need.

Speaker 2: Then we we bragged about it. This graphic, by the way, was originally created by someone from Django Girls Mexico, and they have a representative here in the room, so shout out to those ladies for making this amazing graphic, but we said like hey you know you have a question is this event accessible and we're like we think so we want it to be we're we're trying really hard we put this out on Facebook we put it on Twitter we got a lot of response from it people retweeted that and we got a lot of application but we let people know. Now it probably sounds like I'm bragging on Django Girls Portland. Like how awesome we are. We're so accessible. And I am. I'm really proud of that. But that's not the point. The point is just to illustrate that we told our attendees that we wanted them, that we welcomed them, we had planned for them, and we created space for them. And that really paid off. That it it was really important to do that. We have some attendees

Speaker 2: In our workshop, who have told us that they will use these accommodations who might not have otherwise applied. And I don't even know how many attendees who applied who didn't tell us, hey, I'm going to be using this accommodation that applied just because it was there. So, in this talk, I really just wanted to dispel some of the notions about how difficult it is to make your event accessible. It's not too hard to make accessibility a priority for your hackathon or for your meetup. Most of the tips that we've gone over aren't even that time consuming, but some of them certainly can be. It's also not trivial. It's necessary to the success of your event that you include people. And it doesn't have to cost a lot. A lot of what we've talked about here doesn't cost any money. It just takes a little bit of planning. You can make a lot of progress without spending anything And accessibility is for everybody, not just for people with disabilities.

Speaker 2: So much of what I talked about is helpful for everybody in this room, like letting people know where they are, keeping aisles clear, that kind of thing. But accessibility is completely crucial to the health and well-being of our community. It's necessary that we go out of our way to include people with disabilities and to encourage them to participate. We want to welcome everybody in our community because that's what makes Django so special. We think that our community experience is more important than our technical experience, and that's a line that's almost 100% from the new DSF diversity. Statement. To be successful in that endeavor in increasing diversity in our community, it's important that accessibility remains a top priority for events like this too. This hasn't been comprehensive. I told you it wouldn't be.

Speaker 2: There's a lot that you can still do to make your event more accessible, but I've been up here for 19 minutes and 46 seconds, so my time is up. Um, thank you so much. And there's I if there's time I can. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Um so I I if you have any questions, I will I can take some questions. Eric has a question back there. I thought my time was up and I was like, well I I won't take questions, but Jacob says I have time. So

Speaker 1: we we failed. Yeah, we fail at that to write the docs and that was super Useful, so thank you.

Speaker 3: Um do you have any thoughts on kind of the accessibility of online spaces, not just physical space?

Speaker 2: Um so I think it's it's incredibly important to um make your online spaces accessible. Um That is not my area of expertise, mostly because like I'm I'm able to kind of use a lot of online tools to do that. So like the Wave Toolbar, there's a new one from Khan Academy that's just a little JavaScript bookmarklet Um that will make sure that like your website, it looks for those contrast issues, those header issues, et cetera. And that's nice. Um I know that Google, their tools do a pretty good job in terms of being accessible like via a screen Screen reader, for example. Um I asked my my friend Stephanie specifically if Django or Django, if Google Forms was accessible in terms of like taking our application. At the time, um Django Girls didn't have a built-in application system. So all of the events just use Google Forms to take applications.

Speaker 2: And my friend said, yeah, that actually, they get really high marks. There are also a couple of, if you're looking for tools or for web spaces that are accessible, there are a couple of um of spaces that are linked to from like the W3 schools. And I didn't my resources list isn't up here anymore. But I didn't link to Plug back links to I can do that. That's yeah, pro tip there. Open your laptop again and things will appear. But no, the the biggest thing that you can do in terms of finding those, there we go, those spaces is to go to the organizing more accessible tech events. And pretty much everything that I linked to there is an amazing resource. And there's one specific that's this forum where people talk about, is this thing accessible?

Speaker 2: And people can give feedback on that. And so and I don't remember what it's called, but it's It's it's it's through um Web Web AIM, I think, that they have that for him. Yes. So I d I didn't include that slide. Um so the the question was what does live captioning look like? Um so I will just kind of describe it. Like let's pretend that there is this like extra, you know, thing here like that. And it would just be um like at the bottom of your TV, it just goes across. PyCon had it this year and it was wonderful. I found it very useful Again, for those those times whenever what someone says is a little bit confusing, and so seeing it written out is what you can do with that, but

Speaker 4: about using Google Docs and like lab of editing. For talks of work we often have three people taking notes and editing in Google Docs. It means you can catch every word presenter says because one person can type it really hard with like spelling mistakes. And the next person goes through to like work behind and fixes the money. I'm kind of loving that idea. I've never I've not seen that before, but I I think that would be really cool. Like if it like if it had accessibility benefits. Yeah. Yeah. It

Speaker 2: it really, really would. Um

Speaker 4: but it's not cheap. Yeah. Three people.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it it it takes three people who are just one hundred percent dedicated to reproducing what comes out of somebody's mouth. Um but yeah, so the suggestion was to maybe use um if you can't afford like actual live captioning, to just use Google Docs and have maybe Three people that are totally devoted to trying to catch every word the speaker says, and maybe like one person in there is fixing spelling mistakes or um that for PyCons there were some sort of hilarious flugs because the um the live captioning software didn't recognize some of of our our terminology , which was really funny in a couple of instances. But yeah, but there's if you wanted to see, if you go to the Model Uh culture article, the organizing work tech events, I have a screenshot of the um well it's not a screenshot, it's a photo from from Twitter that backgrounds we get out of the lab

Speaker 2: caching and so you can kind of see what that looks like. Anything else?

Speaker 5: So Anytime there's a focus on any one of these issues, it tends to uncover a lot more that nobody was thinking about yet. So for example, a couple years ago, big focus on just getting diversity of attendees gender-wise at conferences. Now, the last year or so, a lot of push for accessibility, accessible spaces. What do you think is the next thing over the horizon that's not on our radar yet but should be?

Speaker 2: That is like a really important question. I feel like I'm not really qualified to answer it. But what I can say is I would really like to see more racial diversity. I would like to see more Latino and Latina developers. I would like to see more black developers. I I think that, and I think that is on our radar. I think that it is. So it's not something that's not on our radar yet. But it should be in a greater focus on our VR. I think that we're doing we're doing an excellent job with gender diversity. We have a long way to go. This this room is still I'm overwhelmingly male, but there are lots of women here, you know, which is great. Um but whenever you look around, a lot of the faces are still pretty white. And so I I think that we should And a lot of things look for accessibility, a lot of you can't gauge that by looking around and seeing like, well, how many people here are in wheelchairs? Okay, we need more diversity specifically for people in wheelchairs.

Speaker 2: That doesn't really work. A lot of things that you do for accessibility wind up including people in an invisible web Which is a wonderful thing. You know, like you want to make people welcome and so they know that they have a particular need and you want to be able to fill that need without them having to ask you specifically For that. But in terms of like what is the next thing that we should focus on, I think that we need to and I think our diversity statement is a great first step in that. But now like we have a lot of women in tech events and and organizations like Django Girls, but we don't have um these organizations that are devoted to um increasing that diversity for like women of color in tech. So for example, there's the the the um hashtag the WOC in tech. If you haven't seen that on Twitter, Stephanie Murillo um started that hashtag a

Speaker 2: about a month ago I think but there's like a every two weeks there's a Twitter chat and um It's all for women of color who have tech tech jobs and they just they kind of chat on Twitter about it. And it's wonderful. There's a website for it now. They have a newsletter. So yeah, I hope we hear more from things like that

Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you so much, I say.