a11y-monsters
Bootcamps, online tutorials and courses very rarely cover the most important aspect of front-end design and development...Accessibility.
The A11y (short for Accessibility) monsters are a community of designers, developers and tech professionals who want to learn more about accessibility and strive to include accessibility principles in every aspect of their work.
Together we can help hundreds, thousands and even millions of people by removing barriers, increasing inclusion and making the web what it should be: a place for everyone.
Contents:
- Getting Started - join the community and get involved in less than 5 minutes
- What can you expect - learn a little more about the sessions / lessons / cohort.
Getting started
Announcements, the schedule for streams and events and relevant resources are all available on the A11y Monsters Discord server.
1. Join the Discord Server
Join the A11y Monsters Discord Server
Although not a necessary requirement to follow along with the course, being part of the Discord community will help you to keep up to date with upcoming events, get feedback on accessibility, ask questions and more.
2. Familiarise yourself with this repository
This repository is the central location where all lessons, exercises and related resources are stored.
If you want some help getting familiar with the repository, check out the welcome page which details where items can be found easily.
3. Get going!
That is it! Once you know your way around the repository, clone it and start following along with the lesson plan;
What can you expect?
A semi-structured course on accessibility, where we learn about WCAG, ATAG, WAI-ARIA and other strange acronyms related to accessibility.
But more than that, it is mixed learning, where we use a combination of tutorial, presentations and, most importantly, practical application (we will build cool stuff!) to explore the interesting, exciting and important world of accessibility.
You can expect:
Live streams
We will be having bi-weekly live streams (over on Twitch or YouTube) where we will build components, applications and websites and cover accessibility considerations along the way.
These will be recorded so you can watch them later, but if you can make it to the live event then it is much easier to learn as you can ask questions etc.
Exercises
Each week there will be a short exercise where we introduce a concept around accessibility and then provide a short challenge to practice your new skills!
Community round tables
A weekly "office hours" on the server where we will review your sites, and those of others, and pick up accessibility errors through audits.
Open Source contributions
A strong focus on practical learning. Each week we will audit projects for accessibility errors (and you will learn how to audit them yourself!) and then we will create a load of issues so you can get those green squares by applying what you have learned!
Projects to get involved in
WCAG 101 is an open source project designed to simplify WCAG. As you learn accessibility there will be loads of opportunities to contribute code examples, snippets, explanations and more to this resource.
Fun and friendship
The occasional bit of spice, a few silly jokes and a community of like-minded people.
Speaking of friendship
If you want to include your name and socials in the community members list and make some connections, feel free to do so!
It is a great way to add your first contribution to the project and introduce yourself to everyone!