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?
Your summary of upcoming accessibility education events in October 2025
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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.