Open Source Accessibility: What You're Getting Wrong  🔗 **Source:** [Open Source Accessibility: What You're Getting Wrong](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV1KwNkEO0o) Okay, great. Great. No, I think we can do it in 15 minutes. And by the way, the last speaker is always the best speaker. So, I really appreciate that honor. Yeah, that's great. Let's jump right in. Um, so I'm head of accessibility GitHub. That means I'm responsible for everything related to accessibility GitHub both inside our four walls you know within the company and externally of course including our products and events. So my remmit is all of it. Um and over the last six months we've embarked on a strategic planning process and I want to just give you a little bit of um little bit of insight into the results of our strategic planning process for accessibility. So, first off, um, GitHub, like I said, is really the place where more than any other, it's where technology gets built. There's 150 million developers working on GitHub, 4 million organizations, 90% of the Fortune 100. And we believe that the technology that's bu getting built on on GitHub and we know this um it drives human progress and our mission with respect to accessibility is to make sure that people with disabilities can both benefit from human progress that technology is driving human progress and also perhaps most importantly contribute to the creation of that technology. So we have four priorities for our strategy. We're looking at five years here. And one of those priorities is the accessibility of open source because it's such an integral part for uh technology as a whole. And we'll dig into that more in just a second. So, as a result of the strategic planning process back in May, we took a public pledge to help improve the accessibility of open source at scale. And that's why we're here at All Things Open uh today and this week. Um our pledge included three um three primary goals and I want to just run through them really fast for you. And the way we're going to do this is to start with a poll. Now, I'm blind. Um, and the way that we in the blind community, the way that we have this this polling kind of a thing in an audience like this is if I asked you a question then if if like hey um let's see uh do you are your the color of your eyes is it blue? If your color of your eyes are blue, do you would raise your hand and say I >> just a few blue eyes. Thank you. That's that's how we do it. Exactly. And um and that gives people who cannot see I can hear the response and of course people who cannot hear can see the raising your hands. That's why it's a multimodal accessibility hack. Okay. So um the question is how much source code within modern software your typical application how much of it is open source? I want you to think about this. If you were to take your typical website, your typical application, look at all the soft, all the all the code that contributed to it, both the application itself and its dependencies. Okay, how many lines of code are have been open source apart from an open source project? And there's three potential answers here. I'll read out the first one. And as I read this out, raise your hand and say I for the one that you think is true. 30 to 50%. >> Okay. 50 to 70%. >> Okay. Yeah. more 70 to 90%. >> Probably a little bit more. Okay, so we're building as we go. >> Answer 70 to 90%. >> That's from the Census 2 survey, by the way, from the Linux Foundation. Okay, that leads us to our first goal is to increase the accessibility of all those mainstream open-source projects out there that are being incorporated into those products and websites that we use every day. And if those open source dependencies are accessible, then that greatly increases the chances that the resulting websites and products will be accessible. Does that make sense? It's a supply chain issue. Same is true for security, right? If you're building an application or website, you're using open-source projects, you need to make sure they're secure. Okay, let's make sure they're accessible as well. Next poll. This is from the state of open uh in the UK. And they surveyed a bunch of companies for this survey. And the question they asked was basically when you're looking for software talent for developer talent, do you pay attention to do you look for do you consider the fact um that they've contributed to open source projects? Okay. Answers are 22%. >> A few% >> more 45%. Maybe about the same, maybe a little less. 51%. >> Okay, that probably ties for that's pretty evenly distributed, I think, for those last some of those last three. Let's jump right in. And the answer is 51%. So, as technology professionals, contributing to open source, being involved in open source is a huge um it's a huge plus uh for your resume and your ability to get a job. And what if you were excluded through through no fault of your own excluded from participating in the open source communities to get that valuable learning experience. Right? That's why we need to make all of open source both the outputs and the contribution process the communities themselves accessible and welcoming to everyone including people with disabilities. And that brings us to goal number two is to empower people with disabilities to be a part of open source and contribute. Last goal I want to tell you about accessibility versus assistive technology. Accessibility is a property of things that we build, things that humans create, applications, websites, conferences like this one, buildings like this one, presentations like this one. Right? Accessibility is a property. means that people with disabilities or people with a wide range of abilities including disabilities can enjoy everything that's being offered. Now, assist of technology is different. Assisted technology is very personal to individuals. It's like it's like part of your kind of an extension of your person. Think about um think about your eyeglasses, your contact lenses. My seeing eye dog is is organic assisted technology. Um who can lick you in the face, you know. Um you see most blind people, they use white canes. White canes cannot lick you in the face or snuggle you snuggle with you. Um that's why I use a CNI dog. Um we're a team. And a wheelchair is a great example of a piece of you know low tech, you know, no tech assistive technology. Okay, that's the difference. Turns out that open-source is an amazing place for people with disabilities to build their own solutions for their access challenges in the form of assist of technology. They can get together with people who have the same face the same barriers. They can build communities around these solutions as an open source you know open source projects and then expand the circle of people who can benefit. Now, if I had more time for this talk, I would show you a short video about the two blind people that started the open source project called NVDA, non-visual desktop assistant. Sorry, access non-visual desktop access, which is the screen meter that I'm listening to in my earbuds right here right now. So, what you see on the screen, I'm reading it u in my earbud interactively. And there's two be two blind people in Australia who started that project as an open source project. Now, there's more than 250,000 blind people around the world using this open source assisted technology for free. And that's why, [cheering] right? [applause] Yeah, we want more of that. Okay, so just a quick recap recap of the goals here. If you're interested, you can snap a photo of that or just a quick recap. And I'm going to move on really fast. Today here, I don't know where it I think it's that way maybe. I don't know. There's there's there's another room that we're in here today right now. Um there's like a bunch of people over there at the open-source accessibility summit. Um here at the conference, it's the first one u and this is like the first deliverable on our pledge as GitHub u to help improve open source. But the thing is is GitHub's not leading this effort. We're creating the space for people in the community, people with disabilities, developers, um people from companies, um to come together and find all the great things that are happening in open source with respect to accessibility and accelerate those things further across the entire ecosystem. So that's what we're doing today. We have three goals today. One is getting those people, those disperate communities together um to meet each other share those current best practices, those bright spots, you know, where things are really, really going well and also discuss the challenges and then most importantly to define a roadmap for improving the accessibility of open source. We're doing this in a way that's open. So the results of the summit today, we will be published in a repo in a in an org that we created. We created an org on GitHub called open source accessibility. All the results from today's summit will be published. And this is the beginning of a global virtual collaboration that's communitydriven for us to together work to improve the accessibility of open source. And we would love for you to get involved or just tune in to see what's going on. You can do that by hitting this QR code or you can go to gh.iosource accessibility. Those words are separated by hyphens. And that'll take you to our organization on GitHub where all these things are happening and uh we would love to have you get involved. And uh how we doing on time? This is what I got. >> I crushed it. Like 10 minutes. Boom. All right. [applause], Open Source Accessibility: What You're Getting Wrong, Ed Summers, 01kymtzdj7j35hghtaj6tn4kvc.