Category: Accessibility committee

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.

In the first chapter I gave you a few examples of what an accessibility committee can do. We will expand that in greater detail later, but for now, let’s talk about why it is relevant.

In a nutshell, I would say that the accessibility committee is the bridge between what is now and what is ideal. But it is not a real bridge, maybe a path rather, because the ideal is a moving target and if things are done well, the what is now is also changing dynamically. Therefore, it is not just the matter of crossing the bridge, rather, it is about always aiming at the direction where we want to be while it changes over time.

I think you will read many more times in this guide that it depends, or each organization is different. But let me give you some ideas about who should participate in an accessibility committee. For now I won’t worry much about the size of the committee, as it will have to be its own discussion.

The following is the first part of a longer series I am planning to write about accessibility committees. In this first part I will explain what it is.

However, before I get started, if we haven’t met each other yet, you may wonder what qualifies me to write about the topic.