dai11y 18/08/2021

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

It is time to ditch the title “Evangelist” from Accessibility

  • Ronise Nepomuceno explains why she hates the term ‘Accessibility Evangelist’:
    • It reinforces the idea that accessibility is a ‘nice to have’ that can be deprioritised
    • It has its roots in tech in the 1980’s, when Apple put together a team to ‘evangelise’ developers to develop for the Macintosh platform without the financial incentive compared with their competitor IBM. Ronise feels this is exploitative.
    • It has religious connotations: “they think we are coming for them, to judge for their sins and condemn them all to eternity in Hell”.
    • “It is also essential to respect the boundaries between Digital Accessibility and Disability Rights. They are two different things”.
    • Ronise points out that the term is applied in other parts of tech, e.g. “Cloud Evangelist”.

Prefer longer newsletters? You can subscribe to week11y, fortnight11y or even month11y updates! Every newsletter gets the same content; it is your choice to have short, regular emails or longer, less frequent ones. Curated with ♥ by developer @ChrisBAshton.

Loading...