Scaling Accessibility Through Open Source
- Date
2026-06-26
- Location
UNHQ, NYC
- Speakers
Mike Gifford
How I got into Accessibility
- 2009 - shifting from NGO to government
- "Drupal cares about open standards, how hard could it be?"
- I found a bug in Drupal 6, got it fixed in Drupal 7
- I shifted 2-3% of the web & improved the experience for millions!
- Scale can become a bit addictive
Open source runs everything
- 97% of the codebases Black Duck evaluated contain open source
- Developers are Lazy (ok, we're all lazy) - Defaults matter
- Accessibility issues are bugs (not feature requests)
- Fixing a bug upstream has a huge multiplier (often millions of times)
- Shift Left (upstream)
Culture Eats Policy for Breakfast
- It is bigger than the code, it is about being inclusive as a community
- Seeing people with disabilities as people with expertise
- People creating technology are creating our future
- Disability a critical part of the human condition
Early and Often
- Integrate accessibility training into your onboarding
- Build it into your CI/CD processes
- Ensure you have people with disabilities on your team
- Have an ACCESSIBILITY.md or similar skill (I've built one if you want)
Resources and follow-up
- https://accessibilityinsights.io
- https://www.oobee.tech.gov.sg
- https://github.com/mgifford/pdf-crawler
- https://github.com/mgifford/open-scans
- https://github.com/mgifford/vital-core