Anne-Mieke Bovelett introduced us to her CloudFest Hackathon project “Can everyone use?“.
See caneveryoneuse.com for more details.
Transcript (auto generated)
Simon:
So what’s your project called and what is it all about?
Anne-Mieke:
Well, my project is called Can Everyone Use? Which is derived from caniuse.com, which most developers know asthe source to go to if you want to check whatever you’re trying in your browser is going to work.
Yeah. So as an accessibility advocate, I’ve observed that many, many developers actually are criticised for not making whatever they’re building accessible.
Well, no one likes to be spanked over something they’re not aware of, and we have to put aside our frustration about the unawareness in general.
So we are working very hard to bring this awareness to the world, especially because next year in June in Europe, allhell is going to break loose with the European Accessibility Act.
But we do not want to come from no and from fear.
We want to come from yes. So this is why we’re creating this project where everyone can try and see if the componentsthey’re using in the library of their framework of choice, if that component is accessibility ready by itself, and if it’s not,what they can do to make it generate accessible output.
Output because accessibility is always about the output to the front end for assistive technology to read and the site will at the same time educate about the parts that the developer actually cannot influence but that he or she or they can tell the designers and the content creators they work with about.
Simon:
Okay, so your project is, the end result is for developers?
Yes. And it sounds like it’ll be pretty much platform and software agnostic.
Anne-Mieke:
It’s platform and software agnostic, and it’s being run on GitHub.
It has a main WordPress website, because we would like to inform the public in general.
And of course, it needs to be easy to find on the web.
With a regular website, I think we can do more about search engine optimization.
And we’re also going to need sponsors for this project because it’s really big.
There are a lot of projects going on. There’s a lot of frameworks, a lot of libraries, and everybody benefits from this.
So we’re taking it out of the voluntary atmosphere, for sure.
Simon:
So now you’re doing this in the framework of the CloudFest Hackathon, and time is kind of limited this weekend.
So what is your short-term goal? What would you like to end up with after this weekend?
Anne-Mieke:
After this weekend, we have the foundation standing in English.
There are already being high numbers of components being added to GitHub the way we want to see it.
And the website will be also done in the basic form in English, but we’re adding internationalization, localization to it, bothon GitHub and on the web, because there are so many developers in other countries that are not very well versed inEnglish, and this is a problem that we also would like to solve.
So that is the goal we’re trying to reach, and as things look now, we’re going to make it.
Simon:
I’m looking forward to that. I guess a note to end on would be you mentioned that you were looking for funding.
So where should people head to learn more about that?
Anne-Mieke:
They should head to the domain caneveryoneuse.com.
Simon:
Okay, that’s nice and catchy. Good. Anything else we should mention?
Anne-Mieke:
I think we covered about everything. But I would like to mention that I want to thank the CloudFest Hackathon onmy knees for giving us this opportunity.
And I would like to thank my team that has been working relentlessly, giving goosebumps at the speed and the love withwhich they are doing this.
And I would like to thank the other teams that have been interviewed by us by talking to us about how they deal withaccessibility, and of course again the organization thank you so so much it’s great and I’m looking forward to another onenext year thank.
Simon:
ou so much thank you for taking the time.
Anne-Mieke:
You’re welcome.