Author: Tom

This chapter starts from a different assumption than the previous one. The people on an accessibility committee already know a lot about accessibility, so there is no need to start from scratch. I will not explain what captions are or why documents should be accessible. Instead, here are the few things that actually come up in accessibility committee meetings, the ones worth calling out precisely because everybody in the room assumes they already know them.

If you are chairing an accessibility committee, you already know how to run a meeting. You have run plenty of them, in different jobs and different rooms, and this chapter is not going to teach you the basics. Think of it instead as a roundup of what tends to work in the particular context of an accessibility committee meeting, collected from committees that worked and from ones that quietly fell apart. Most of it applies to meetings in general, and you will recognize a good deal of it from your own experience. But there are many kinds of meetings in life, and this chapter is about this one.

Most likely your first meeting will be rather informal, but this is the time to establish that you mean serious business, there will be an agenda, and expectations however little it would be.

Alright, let’s get the accessibility committee going. We can talk so much more about structure, funding, lifecycle, challenges, etc. But before you get bored reading about the details, let’s get one going, and we can talk more about details later.