Business

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

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

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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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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From Disabled Veteran to Full-Stack Drupal Developer

Edmund Dunn (he/him)

As of August 2020, there are over 4.7 million disabled veterans in the United States. They are all dealing with a variety of disabilities connected to their time in the service. To say this is an under-represented group is an understatement. With the right help, these veterans can transition into the tech industry which is chronically short of developers of all stripes.

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Introducing ARRM: Assigning Ownership to Get Things Done

Jen Chadwick, Bill Tyler, SeAn Kelly

The Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM) Methodology is a proposed W3C resource through the Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG). It’s also been described as a “gift to digital teams” as they start to shift left and implement accessibility efforts earlier in their processes. The ARRM is a highly effective tool when you’re identifying what tasks need to be done – the next important question after “how” and “when” is “who”. It’s a flexible and adaptive framework that can be applied at an organizational level or project level - assigning ownership of those tasks in a collaborative team exercise, where they also find solutions. The outcomes are team collaboration, education, clarity, ownership, and finally empowerment.

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