Speaking at CAN

The Champions of Accessibility Network (CAN), is a community network made up of accessibility advocates, specialists, leaders, team and people who generally care about making the web a more inclusive space from all around the world. It meets once a month to chat on a variety of accessibility related topics and themes. I've been attending meetups since around 2022 and my time at Code.

During that time, I've been privileged to host an in-person meetup for the network at the Code Computerlove Manchester office, and recently I ticked off a long-standing goal I had, which was giving a talk at a meetup.

With so much experience and knowledge at the meetups, it's something that I felt quite anxious by. What if I said the wrong thing, said something stupid etc. However, the network is an incredibly welcoming and friendly bunch of people I needn't have worried.

The session was a series of lightning (or lightening) talks, which felt like a great opportunity for me to deliver a talk, without the added pressure of it being a main event of the session type talk, and being like 30-45 minutes. I decided to submit a talk based on my experiences of working at digital agencies and the challenges this brings in relation to accessibility and content creation.

The talk lasted around 8 minutes, and hopefully gave people an insight into my experiences and maybe some takeaways for working with external content authors and aiding them in creating more accessible content, or at least making them more aware of it and their responsibilities.

You can view my Google Slides deck, if you would like to get an idea of what the talk was about, and I would like to say a massive thanks to Charlie, Heather and Gareth for organising the sessions, giving me an opportunity to speak and to everyone that attended, it means a lot!