2019 Accessibility Awareness Day Hackfest

Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2019 Hackfest

With the aim of growing and supporting efforts across Trade Me to make our brand and products more accessible, a group within Trade Me decided to organise our first accessibility themed hackfest. We coincided the hackfest with Global Accessibility Awareness Day. The event spanned across three offices, and over 80 people from 10 different teams got involved on the day.

I was involved as an organiser and presenter, writing internal communications in the lead up to and following the hackfest, as well as putting together branding, posters, and badges.

Promoting the hackfest around each of the offices in the lead up to the day.

We focused the day around a series of talks to introduce ideas around accessibility and inclusivity and what this means for our customers, then ran a series of smaller workshops to demonstrate screen reader technology and accessibility auditing tools.

People with skills and knowledge around accessibility helped guide participants as they conducted audits of products, created cases to fix bugs, conducted research, and built new tools to help teams embed accessibility into their everyday work.  In one day, teams logged a total of 36 accessibility related cases to continue working on, and completed 3 cases.