November 2022

Sia Magadan (she/ella) & Val Neumark (she/they)

Designing 'With' & Not 'For,' rootid's Culture Shifting Process

This session will share the highlights and ‘warts’ of our journey to shifting our organizational culture. We will highlight the Liberatory Design Framework and Mindsets, as well as some of the other techniques we use to embody our values and put them into action. Our values are not only forward facing—meaning the code of conduct for clients; but these same values also hold us accountable internally, as an organization that not just uses the words but embodies the practice—making continual space to notice and reflect upon how power, identity and oppression show up in varying contexts of our organization and work. Join us as we discuss the steps we’ve taken to hold ourselves and each other accountable with grace.

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Accessibility with dark light theme

Sibu Stephen (he/him)

This session will discuss light mode and dark modes for those who are visually impaired. We will explore what we can do in CSS to implement dark and light modes, various certifications available, and how we can improve accessibility within the Drupal content management system. To get the most out of this session, you may need to be familiar with CSS and the open source Drupal project.

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Cognitive Overlords

Alex Tait (she/her)

Interfaces are doing too much - we've gone from cognitive overload to cognitive overlords. There is so much drive in tech to increase engagement that websites and software platforms have become intrusive and annoying at best, and dangerous at worst. As an accessibility "consigliere", I come across issues every day that could be "fixed", but often a better choice is to remove or change the pattern to minimize cognitive overload. Let's take a look at some common interface patterns and explore why they exist, if they are accomplishing their intended purpose, and how we might reconsider them and slay the cognitive overlords!

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Making a strong case for accessibility

Todd Libby (he/him)

Accessibility is often overlooked or bolted on to the end of a project from the experiences in my career in web development and design. The case for accessibility is something we as people who create and build things for the web should be implementing and advocating for disabled users from the inception of a project to the release or handoff and beyond.

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Representation Creates Reality

Keely Cat-Wells (she/her) & Dan Edge (he/him)

Together we’ll discuss disability representation within the entertainment, media & advertising industries and how that affects our society. They will discuss the social model of disability, intersectionality and encourage turning any doubts into questions.

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