From Accessibility to Inclusion - Interdisciplinary Design

This talks explores the intersection of digital accessibility for people with disabilities with other disciplines, including language support, artificial intelligence, privacy and data protection, security, and safety widely used open-source tools and applications. For example, how does AI bias, dark patterns, and lack of language support lead to discrimination, and how can we across the FOSS community work together to ensure inclusion of everyone?

Digital accessibility for people with disabilities is an emerging topic that is unfortunately often approached with ambivalent feelings. Many designers meanwhile know of design accessibility and may even recognize the growing need to ensure design that is accessible to people with disabilities. Yet how to address accessibility across FOSS tools and applications is commonly not well understood, and there are often sensitivities and myths. For example, does security of tools exclude accessibility? How can a single design achieve both priorities? This includes the design of standards, polices, applications, and basically all open-source digital technologies which unfortunately commonly misses accessibility and the involvement of people with disabilities. The talk will raise hard questions about intersectionality approaches for inclusive design within the FOSS ecosystem.

This session will attempt to map out some of the interfaces between different disciplines and what each can bring to a shared table of requirements, including accessibility, security, user experience design, usability, and more.