Accessible Advent 2020 - learn, adopt, advocate

Tl;dr Follow the #AccessibleAdvent hashtag on Twitter and learn from the disabled people and the activists about how to ensure access. You can also read the content at accessible advent website.

Introduction

December 2020 saw several advent calendars being published around by the community. My most favorite one is the Accessible Advent. It is a positive and creative campaign started by @GinnyAndT to raise awareness around disability access.

Quoting @EnableMagazine from twitter:

We've spoken to @GinnyAndT about her wonderful campaign, #AccessibleAdvent raising awareness of #disability #access 🎄♿️ Ginny enthuses: "Let the hashtag belong to you because it belongs to the whole disabled and chronic illness community!" ✨

As part of this, Every day in December, people are posting one thing that would make life more accessible for them.

Learn from the content

The tweets have been eye-opening and should be considered as learning material by everyone in order to work together and make a more inclusive world.

• Learn how ableism affects the daily lives of the disabled and chronically ill people.

• Access needs are different for everyone. The key is to be flexible and keep trying to improve the accessibility for everyone

• Don't judge by what you see. Many disabilities and symptoms (such as pain) are invisible, but that does not lessen the impact they have on the person.

• There are lots of things which we can do, efforts we can make in a transformative way, to normalize the disabilities and ensure fair treatment to everyone.

Adopt the learnings and convert them into results

The products, services, and environments are all built by people, so we have the power to build it better and build it for everyone.

As @MikScarlet highlights,

we need to change the mindset and adopt a "why not? attitude rather than always asking "why?"

I want to highlight that the first thing that would make society more accessible & Inclusive is for it to adopt a "why not? attitude rather than always asking "why?". Why not do it? Why not improve? Why not invest? The power of why not.

Go through all the tweets, recognize the problems, and implement the solutions.

If you find it difficult to scroll through the tweets and keep up with the content, I have created a website dedicated to #AccessibleAdvent 2020. It contains all the tweets listed down along with a day and user filters for a good reading experience.

Presenting to you - accessible advent 2020 website.

My aim to create this website is to keep the content always easily available to people.

Advocate

Learning is a continuous process. We have to keep learning and adopting the correct measures to ensure inclusive solutions for everyone.

Also, we have to share them with the world, so that more and more people join hands to work together for the cause.

Be the ally to the disabled community, advocate for the cause.

This advent calls us to listen to what disabled people have to say and help amplify their voice, help make a better experience for them.

As @DisabilityLib says

listen to what disabled people say. If you want to have advice on how things could work, then ask a disabled person, who have lived experience, rather than someone doesn’t have any experience of disability. You never know you might learn something.

You can send this website's link to people, businesses, and foundations who you think should

• learn more about the current state of accessibility
• should work towards building accessible solutions
• could help amplify the voice and concerns listed

Or, in a nutshell, share this website with everyone.

What to do next

Read the tweets, understand the issues, start addressing those issues, advocate.

Let's reflect on how we can enrich society through accessibility.

Tweet about it and spread the word.

Conclusion

There are so many ways in which we can make our world much more accessible and inclusive for everyone. Let's act now.

Build in access as standard, not an afterthought!