ATTENTION: This event was cancelled!
The event will / did not take place as described below. You can't get tickets to this event (any longer).
⚠️ ATTENTION: Event is cancelled! ⚠️
Due to the current situation around the COVID-19 pandemia we have suspended our plannings for this event. We can't predict anything at this point about the likelihood whether the summit will really take place. To be honest, it's not really likely right now as there might still be travel and event restrictions in effect in June and it's always best to not put anyone at risk. Also, the CSS Day folks already cancelled their 2020 event and we think that it's still best for the Accessibility Club to team up with some bigger mainstream event. Accessibility Club events are all about meeting and exchanging with other enthusiasts and we think that meeting each other in person is an essential part. That said, we are not interested in making this an online-only event. We will keep you updated, thanks for your support!
About the event
After last year's very first and hugely successful summit in Berlin we are giddy with excitement to announce our next summit for 2020! Again, the summit will be jointly run by multiple web accessibility and inclusive design related meetups from all over Europe, and again there will be a premiere: For the first time, the Accessibility Club will meet outside of Germany, this time welcoming you to Amsterdam!
The summit will take place right after CSS Day 2020 and again feature a full-day barcamp a second day with community run workshops. There are still a lot of details to be figured out, but you should definitely save the date already!
Join us for two days of gaining knowledge about web accessibility, exchanging experiences and meeting like-minded enthusiasts from all over Europe and beyond: June 13th-14th, 2020, in Amsterdam, Netherlands!
How do I benefit?
As an accessibility enthusiast, you will meet a lot of like-minded people from various disciplines and with all sorts of skill level. You will be able to share your experiences, broaden your horizon and make new friends.
As a meetup or event organiser, you will get new impulses for your events, put them into a bigger context and just have a lot of fun with your usual attendees who will hopefully join you to the Summit. Take it as a super-social excursion that takes you out of your usual boundaries. ;)
Organising? Join in!
If you're organising an accessibility meetup, inclusive design related event or anything similar and want to get involved with the Summit, please get in touch. So far, a11y enthusiasts from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Finland have teamed up, and we'd love to expand this even further. We'll try to get in touch with as many groups and meetups as we get to know of, but you're welcome to be faster than we are. You don't necessarily have to take an active role but we'd still appreciate your input.
Barcamp + Workshops
We'll run the summit as a 2-day event, taking place at several locations in Amsterdam:
- Day 1 is all about conversation and sharing experiences. Barcamp-style sessions mixed with a handful of pre-planned presentations for all attendees, pretty much like we had at the Accessibility Club Summit 2019 in Berlin.
- Day 2 is for learning, expanding our knowledge and putting things into practise. Visit one of several workshops about developing and designing accessible websites and digital content, run by community members like yourself.
Call for Presentations
For the barcamp day, we'll use a hybrid schedule style with spontaneous sessions and pre-planned presentations. In order to find the most interesting topics we ran a Call for Presentations from January 13th to March 7th. First-timers and members of marginalised groups were especially encouraged to send in their proposals. We received 23 fantastic proposals — thank you! — which we didn't finish reviewing yet. But we'll get in touch with the proponents soon.
If you'd rather like to host a workshop at the Summit, please see our Call for Workshops as instead.
Call for Workshops
At our Berlin Summit in 2019 we organised 8 community-led workshops for the first time and had a whopping 120 people participating in these. We consider this a fantastic success and thus would like to repeat it:
On Sunday, June 14th, we'll feature a couple of workshops around web accessibility topics again. Instead of running the workshops ourselves, we'd rather like to offer you, the community, a platform for sharing your experiences, educating and mentoring each other with your own workshops. Let's complement the listening part of the Summit, the Barcamp on Saturday, by a day of doing and putting things into practice.
Here's the call to action: Please think about it for a moment and send us your proposal for a workshop you'd like to host and run. Everone may submit a proposal — there's only a small set of rules to comply with. Don't worry about a location for the workshop: we'll provide it, along with the registration stuff.
Preferably, the workshops should be held in English language, but that's not an absolute must. We can think of all sorts of design, development and society related topics. If you're unsure please don't hesitate and simply start a conversation. We want to make the Summit an event of knowledge sharing and conversation and we ultimately need your contribution to make this happen! All the workshops accepted for the Summit will be scheduled and published on this website.
A small set of rules
We don't want to impose a lot of requirements on the workshops, but for a start:
- Each workshop must focus on educating about and implementing accessibility topics. No commercially motivated sales stuff, please!
- The workshops must generally be open to anyone and follow the rules of our Code Of Conduct.
- The workshops may be half-day (2-3 hours) or full-day (5-6 hours, plus a decent lunch break).
Each full-day workshop will cost € 50 (incl. 19% VAT) per attendee, and € 25 for a half-day workshop. Registration for the first workshops will open soon. 20% of the fee revenues will be used to support the overall Summit organisation, while the rest will be given to the workshop hosts in case a) they want it and b) they're able to write a proper invoice (or something similarily valid) accepted by German tax authorities.
Please be aware that this set of rules might be subject to change if we discover it to be lacking something important. By sending us a workshop proposal you confirm to agree with these rules (and our Code of Conduct, of course).
Locations
The barcamp part of the summit will take place at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences where Vasilis is being a lecturer. It's not yet clear which exact building we will be using, but we'll figure this out in the next couple of weeks.
The workshops will be hosted at different locations across Amsterdam — design studios, agencies and other companies. We'll list them here as soon as we got hold of their details.
Accessibility Info
As with all our events, we'll try to make the Summit itself as accessible as possible so that all folks can afford, enter and enjoy the event. We'll make every effort to provide (not only but including; in order of priority):
- a welcoming atmosphere with special attention to visible and non-visible disabilities, privacy, identification & communication preferences as well as neurodiversities
- easy physical access to the venue(s) including public transport and wheelchair accessibility inside the venue(s)
- access and supplies for assistance animals
- live captioning & streaming of at least the pre-planned presentations (including public links to the caption & video streams)
- food / beverages with different options for various dietary needs and preferences
- sign language interpreters in different languages
However, as you can imagine, many of these features come with quite some costs or requirements regarding the venues. At the time of this writing, there are still a lot of open questions, so we cannot yet guarantee that we'll be able to match all of them. We'll do our best to keep you posted about the current situation.
Sponsoring
While the Summit is set to be a community event, run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, we will still need some funding for major matters of expense and to keep the financial barrier for attendees low. If you'd like to support our effort — by contributing money, food or anything else that might truly benefit our attendees — please get in touch. We're very flexible will try to match your needs as much as we can. However, please don't expect us to distribute useless swag or other materials that aren't sustainable or have no association with accessibility matters.
Need help to convince your boss (or yourself) to support the Summit? We've got you covered! Please have a look at our Sponsorship Information brochure in English or German language.
Code of Conduct
As with all our events, we've got a Code of Conduct in place which will be enforced during both days of the Summit. It's there to ensure maximum inclusivity so that everyone can feel welcome and comfortable. Please make sure you read and understand its contents before registering, attending or submitting a presentation or workshop proposal. It goes without saying that our Code of Conduct also applies to our valued presenters, sponsors and supporters.
How do I stay updated?
Slack Team
You can either join the #announcements channel in our newly created Accessibility Club Slack Team. So far, we use the Slack team for organisational tasks only. If you'd like to broaden its purpose and make it an open platform, we'd love to hear your ideas!
Hosts
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Charlie Owen
Front-end developer, writer and speaker
After contracting as a front-end developer in London, and writing code for the front page of BBC News, Charlie is now happily working as a senior FED for Springer Nature in Berlin.
There she helps make the world of scientific publishing a better place by constructing design systems, banging on about inclusive design, and utilising those wonderful web standards.
She rides bikes, drinks beer, and quite often says the wrong thing at the wrong time.
- Internet
- https://sonniesedge.co.uk
- @sonniesedge
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Joschi Kuphal
Designer, programmer, lecturer, event organiser and restless tinkerer from Nuremberg
Joschi is working on the web since the mid 90s and founded the web agency tollwerk in 2000, which he continues to shape to this day. He has shared leadership of tollwerk with his team in an equal, cooperative and self-organizing way since 2022. He launched a couple of event series like the border:none and Material conferences, the Accessibility Club and the CoderDojo Nürnberg. He's occasionally running IndieWebCamps, hosting the monthly accessibility webcast technica11y and used to be one of the driving forces behind the Nürnberg Digital Festival.
- Internet
- https://jkphl.is
- Github
- @jkphl
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Vasilis van Gemert
Lecturer in Amsterdam
Vasilis teaches the next generation of digital product designers how to design things for the web. Preferably things that work for everyone. He does this at the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam. He successfully completed the Design Master program at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. During his research he designed tailor made websites for real people with real disabilities. Vasilis has published over 20,000 books about form and colour.
- Internet
- https://vasilis.nl
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Marjon Bakker
Marjon Bakker is a digital accessibility consultant and researcher. She was trained as a journalist and worked as a web editor. She's been with Firm Ground since 2017, mainly auditing government websites and working with web teams to improve the accessibility of their websites.
- @MarjonBakker
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Sergei Kriger
Sergei fell in love with web development back in high school. He got a degree in Information Technologies at the University of Helsinki and has been spending his professional career working for web design studios in Helsinki and Munich. Sergei's focus areas are JavaScript development, UX and accessibility.
- Internet
- https://www.sergeikriger.com
- @_sergeikriger
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Núria Peña
Inclusive Designer, tech enthusiast and event organiser
Núria is an Interaction Designer based in Munich, currently working at Holidu. Her expertise resides in building bridges between design and accessibility, using the basics of Usability as a foundation and helping others to use empathy before framing solutions.
She is also a core organiser of the Munich Accessibility Meetup, a hub that brings together Munich's accessibility and inclusive design community.
- Internet
- https://noti.st/nuriapena
- @nuriapenya