Your summary of upcoming accessibility education events in October 2025

Question

WordPress Accessibility Meetup

Thursday, October 2 at 10 AM Central

It can be a struggle to convince your client to put in the effort and also conform to any regulation, like Section 508, the EU Accessibility Act, or otherwise. Drawing from her own experience with "difficult" clients and some basic psychology, Annelies Verhelst will provide you with compelling arguments and advice on how to make a business case.

Funka Foundation Friday Webinar: Cybersecurity + Accessibility = True

Friday, 3 October, 13.30-14.00 CEST

Cybersecurity and accessibility are both critical for resilient digital infrastructures. This webinar explains how accessibility requirements are integrated with modern cybersecurity measures. Together, they form robust and inclusive standards that support the Cyber Resilience Act.

Wagtail Space

Wednesday, October 8th - Friday, October 10th

Come join educators, publishing professionals, developers, open source enthusiasts, and leaders from organizations around the globe for three days of talks and networking.

WordPress Accessibility Day

Wednesday, October 15th - Thursday, October 16th

WordPress Accessibility Day is a 24-hour global event dedicated to promoting and learning website accessibility best practices for WordPress websites.

Comments

Nice roundup of upcoming events that highlight how accessibility connects with broader tech topics. In what ways do you think these gatherings help push accessibility from a checkbox requirement to a core design mindset?

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In my experience, these organizers in particular are actively involved with the community. There's a big usability gap between learning the WCAG success criteria, and understanding how they translate in practice. It's just like any user testing: Once you get in the same (virtual) room, talk to a number of users and see how they use your website, you get a lightbulb moment because those are the small but impctful details that you won't find in regulations and guidelines.

TBH I can't speak for Wagtail yet, as it's the first time I will be attending/speaking at that one, but all other organizers have proven themselves to be really, and I mean really, supporting accessibility as a tool for inclusion.

Sometimes meetups will treat accessibility as a standalone topic or optional specialization. That's exactly the checkbox mentality you're mentioning!

At Wagtail, I will be co-hosting a talk on screen readers, semantic HTML and aria-labels together with a blind developer. I think we are the only talk that is not directly related to the CMS, which makes me happy because it shows that they consider a11y in general as part of their product, not "how to make things accessible" in their product, meaning: it's not accessible by default/would require a chunk of extra knowledge and time to make it accessible.