We’re excited to announce that the schedule for WordPress Accessibility Day 2024 is now available, and registration is open!
What to Look Forward To
Like in previous years, WordPress Accessibility Day 2024 will be a single-track event. We have put together a fantastic lineup of speakers on various accessibility topics targeted at people with all levels of technical abilities and accessibility experience.
Topics
This year, WP Accessibility Day Board Treasurer Bet Hannon will kick off the conference with opening remarks at 14:45 UTC. Following opening remarks, our keynote presentation will be given by Lainey Feingold, a renowned disability rights lawyer, author, and public speaker. Lainey’s presentation will be Accessibility is a Civil Right: The Digital Accessibility Legal Landscape for the WordPress Community.
Throughout the day, there will be presentations on:
- Building accessibility into product road maps
- Accessibility for content creators and designers
- Page builder accessibility
- Accessibility and coding: from Gutenberg blocks to CSS to single-page apps
- Accessibility testing
- Accessibility remediation
- … and more!
Speaker Diversity
We’re proud to have a diverse speaker lineup, providing voices and expertise from around the world. Here are some stats interesting stats on this year’s speakers:
- Speakers from 12 countries. (1 more than last year!)
- 4 people are first-time speakers (for any event, not just WordPress Accessibility Day).
- Gender identities: 38% male, 55% female, 7% Nonbinary, 17% LGBTQ.
- 36% non-white identifying.
- 24% of our speakers identify as living with a disability.
Speaker diversity is important to us because we want to ensure that WordPress Accessibility Day provides sessions that share diverse viewpoints. We want to have global voices because we’re creating a global conference for a global audience.
Representation from the disability community
As an accessibility event, we’re especially interested in ensuring there is representation from the disability community. A well-known disability rights phrase is:
Nothing About Us, Without Us
Disabled People’s Organizations have used this motto throughout the years as part of the global movement to achieve full participation and equalization of opportunities for, by, and with persons with disabilities. (Learn more on the UN website.)
Numerous organizations around the world, from the World Health Organization to the Centers for Disease Control in the United States, estimate the number of people with disabilities to be around 20-25% of the population. We’re pleased that this year’s speaker lineup matches that percent of the population.
Speakers include people who identify as having these disabilities:
- Blind or low vision
- Deaf or hard of hearing
- Epilepsy or seizure disorders
- Limited mobility or mobility challenges
- Traumatic Brain Injury, cognitive or memory disability, attention deficit disorders
Event Accessibility
We’ll again be holding the event via Zoom Webinars, which includes some amazing accessibility features. Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, accessibility at the event will include:
- Live captions typed by a certified captioner.
- American Sign Language interpretation.
- ASL and captions can be positioned and resized individually to fit your needs or preferences.
- Ability to control how large the slides/shared screen is versus the speaker video.
Over the past few years, Zoom has put much effort into accessibility and compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA, Revised Section 508 standards, and EN 301 549 Accessibility requirements.
For additional information on the accessibility of our event platform, please see Zoom’s accessibility FAQ and the relevant Accessibility Documents for your Zoom app.
Register Today
Wondering how you can get access to all these fabulous presentations? You have to register!
Registration is free, or you can choose to make an optional donation. You must register to be invited to the Zoom webinar. Want to save your spot?