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.
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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.
1 CommentMost 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.
2 CommentsLike every component of an organization, meetings serve a central purpose. It brings people together to discuss, strategize, and execute. Nonetheless, meetings that are not crafted with inclusivity in focus can leave out critical viewpoints and disengage the audience. The purpose of making meetings inclusive is to ensure that all participants in a meeting, regardless of their ability or background, actively participate and contribute.
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Over the last few years, you may have noticed that many meetings and conference presentations start by people describing themselves. The idea is to make the meeting as inclusive for visually impaired people as possible. But is it for visually impaired people only? Does it make a meeting more inclusive? Is it mandatory? There are many more questions for which there are no guidelines, and often gets awkward to ask. I’ll try to answer some of these questions.
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