While the necessity and benefits of accessible services on the web are obvious, web accessibility is still not a widespread practice. Common reasonings range from putative additional efforts, tight budgets to the misbelief that «validity equals accessibilty». In fact, however, it's safe to assume that the majority of developers and designers simply have no clue where to start — which comes as no surprise as most of them never had the opportunity to get their hands on assistive technology.

The Accessibility Club gives you the chance to get some real-world experience with assistive technology, deepen your knowledge about web accessibilty and get in touch with like-minded webworkers.

Let's learn from each other to make accessibility a natural part of our daily work and mindset.

A brief history

The origins

The Accessibility Club started in 2014 as a tiny webworker meetup in Nuremberg, Germany. The idea was simple: Gather a bunch of web developers, designers and other creative folks, lock them into a room with a professional screenreader user and see what happens. For most of them, this was the first real-life contact with assistive technology, and it was eye-opening. Instead of the planned 2 hours we spent almost the whole night sitting together, dipping into umpteen topics …

Participants of the 1st Accessibility Club, July 2014
© Juliane Schütz / tollwerk GmbH (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Since then, various meetups have taken place in different cities across Germany, including Nuremberg, Berlin and Munich.

Over the years, the event format has adapted to the growing interest and number of participants: From a conversation-oriented meetup with a handful of web enthusiasts, it has turned into a mix of a small barcamp with collectively planned, open theme discussions and presentations by internationally renowned performers such as

The Berlin team

In 2016, Joschi teamed up with Stefan Judis to bring the Accessibility Club to Berlin for the first time. Ever since, the two have been operating the Berlin branch as a team. They're especially proud of the foundation of the A11y Meetup Berlin which happened during the meetup in 2017.

Stefan Judis and Joschi Kuphal after the Accessibility Club Meetup Berlin 2016
© Annika von Karger / tollwerk GmbH (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Happy Stefan Judis (left) and Joschi Kuphal (right) after the first Accessibility Club in Berlin

A first conference

In November 2018, the Accessibility Club took the plunge and gathered more than 200 accessibility enthusiasts at the Spreespeicher Berlin. It was the first conference on web accessibility in German-speaking Europe which had several internationally renowned speakers on stage:

The conference was very well received — a detailed documentation will be available shortly.