[Music] hello everyone and welcome to Accessibility Talks
this is the monthly virtual Meetup where we chat about digital accessibility inclusivity and
usability each month we invite a speaker or in this case you're you're uh gonna get a panel
today of all the A11y Cats and uh we present a topic and afterward we invite the community to
ask questions and participate in the discussion I'm really excited to host today my name is Andrew
Olson I work at Principal Financial as a software engineer
and I live outside of Chicago Illinois
here in the United States I use the pronouns he him and I've been a part of the A11yTalks team
for two years if my math is correct didn't stress everybody else out with math on how long they've
been an A11y Cat or part of this wonderful team before we get too far into the talk I want to let
you know that unfortunately today we don't have live transcripts but the great news is as we share
behind the scenes about how we put on these great events is that
sometimes things don't always work
out so while we don't have a live captioning for you uh our resident expert here AmyJune is going
to help share uh or share some of the uh captions in Chrome I see the link is out there about how
you can have your own live captions and if there's any questions you know please ask but we're happy
to share how we move through this Digital World in an accessible manner uh I'm going to share the the
slides here today um so very important thing that we have her
e is we've taken time to pull together
a code of conduct so we want to remind everyone that our group seeks to provide a friendly and
safe environment and we require all participants which include speakers and hosts and everyone
that's watching on YouTube uh and commenting on the social networks to adhere to the accessibility
talks code of conduct that link should be in the chat here shortly one of the team members or all
of all of us will put things in there because we're all used to doing
this behind the scenes and
putting all the links in the places but uh it's very important for everybody to feel like they
can engage in productive dialogue and share and learn with each other in an atmosphere of mutual
respects that said uh this is a panel discussion today you know you have a bunch of people here
that are excited about putting on Virtual events and we want to share with you how we uh put these
events on um and you can ask questions as we go we'll do our best to field those
um and we'll
talk about how we go through uh the events but please put a question um you know uh maybe preface
it with question it will make us easier to find it in the um live uh the Youtube chat so um before
we get too much further along I want to thank you for coming here on Giving Tuesday that was kind
of a theme that we wanted to bring to this about how we put this on and we can't do that without
our A11yCat club members so thank you Carie Fisher Rajab Natshah uh myself Alyssa Panetta
, April Sides and Steve Woodson so thanks so much for your monthly contributions or any contributions
that you've given uh to make this possible you can also join the A11yCats Club more of that will
be coming later from uh our friend April and with that you know we talked about questions putting
them in the chat we'll answer them as we go um so with that I am so excited to be here with
my friends and fellow A11y Cats uh I'm gonna go around here and have each one introduce themselves
I alrea
dy said I'm Andrew Olson I'm kind of the uh person that's going to be heading the conversation
today but with that I'll pass it on to Carie Fisher would you like to introduce yourself Carie?
I would Andrew thank you for kicking us off uh my name is Carie Fisher I am just recently uh
started working at GitHub so previous to that I worked in various foundations and um different
companies for all kind of around accessibility and front end development so it's really nice
to be back in the open
space uh Source open source space words are hard as well as math today
apparently and and live captions so we call these called Tech Gremlins right and sometimes they rear
their heads at inopportune times usually that's when they do um but part of doing Live Events is
rolling with it as Andrew said and making the best of the situation and of course the captions will
be fixed at the end if um you are using the Chrome version or the auto captioning through YouTube so
apologies for that um pas
s it over to Kat thank you Carie um my name is Kat Shaw and uh my pronouns
are she her I am now a lead engineer at Lullabot I used to be a senior friend and developer and
I thank you I specialize in accessibility and I have been with A11yTalks for two years just over
two years and I've been I think with Lullabot just over four years and I'm live in Perry Kansas which
is maybe just about an hour 45 minutes to an hour outside of Kansas City and I love my Chiefs and
my Jayhawks I have to menti
on that always and I uh I'm really happy to be here and I'll hand it
over to AmyJune thanks Kat my name is AmyJune um title camel case always one word AmyJune um I
currently work at the Linux Foundation as their um certification uh um Community architect so I help
build exams for emerging Technologies and what's nice about my role is as I'm building these exams
I'm teaching people about digital accessibility as we're creating test questions so um I'm very
excited that I can weave accessibil
ity into my new role um I've been with this group since
the middle of 2018 and that's where the math isn't going to happen um and I um my role sort
of progressed over over over over the years of what I do and how I can support the team and
currently I'm a digital Nomad um so I don't really have a place right now and I'm just kind
of doing the thing because why not when we work remote and I'll pass it on over to my friend April
hi everybody I'm April Sides my pronouns are she they I am based
in Asheville North Carolina
where kind of chilly today but I guess I can't complain because I'm in the South so I've heard um
I am a principal software engineer at Red Hat but I do Drupal so I do back in Drupal development
and I've been with A11yTalks uh for about two years Thanks so much .Ta-da! That is a very Lullabot thing yes working with Lullabots. All right well thanks everybody so this isn't the whole crew
we have uh four other people that also work behind the scenes and so they are
Mark Casias,
Liz Davis, Donna Bungard and Heather New, so we're excited to have this great team of people to bring
these wonderful events so with that today is just kind of structured as a panel discussion and first
we're gonna I'm just going to give an outline of what we're gonna talk about as subjects and again
we're here to take some questions if you have them but first we're going to talk about the history of
A11yTalks and Carie Fisher will be going into that next we're going to talk ab
out speaker selection
how how do we get all these great speakers and these great topics and Kat Shaw is going to share
a little bit of insight into that for pre-event so once we do have an an amazing event AmyJune and
the rest of us are gonna share how we pre-event and promote the event then the meat of this is
really kind of how uh we pull off a live event and post event and all the things that we do to
make sure that speakers feel safe and welcome and that it's an accessible event not onl
y during but
afterwards and then finally April uh I'm going to be the one that's going to be talking through
that along with help from the panel and then finally we're going to talk about how you can help
contribute on this Giving Tuesday to A11yTalks because this is something that takes talented
people but also takes some money uh and some help from the community and we're really excited
that one we're we have some people and um by us sharing how we do this what we do hopefully you
can se
e that um it's it's not easy and does take a little bit of extra work so April's going to go
into uh a little bit of of how we're structured and how we just make it easy and you can have swag
all sorts of great stuff so we'll save that at the end um but back to the agenda here is history of
A11yTalks so I'll hand it over to Carie to kind of talk about how and why this uh began thanks
K yeah thank you Andrew um and I'm gonna do just a brief version of this um if you want to learn
more defini
tely go to our website there's an about section you can learn about all of the individuals
that are working behind the scenes currently and a couple past volunteers a little bit information
about them as well so just kind of on a high level A11yTalks was started informally um by me in 2016-ish and then became official official public 2017 so math you know if we're counting the unofficial
it's been about seven years um not long after creating this it it kind of started out as an internal
conv
ersation about accessibility at my company that I was at then and we thought well you know
this is going so well let's make it a little bit more um you know public and more a little bit
more professional uh definitely a little bit more formal than the very beginning if you go back
to the archives and watch some of the old old videos you can definitely see how we've developed
over the years I was a host for a long time and I realized I couldn't do a great job on my own
so I I called in some
reinforcements with Donna Bungard and AmyJune here and we kind of again
math uh couple years or a year into that maybe like 2018 and then now fast forward and we have
nine professionals helping out in the background so it's great because then when you know somebody
has uh something in their life or they need to take a pause for whatever reason another person
can jump in and we just really help each other out there as Andy mentioned we really seek to provide
a friendly and safe environment w
e part of that is around our mission and our values so again we
started really informally and we decided that you know when we have that formal more public presence
we wanted to make sure that our mission our values were explicitly stated we feel very strongly
about focusing on on diversity and inclusion we really make an effort to have our speakers
um people with disabilities, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ women other marginalized groups in technology be
represented either in the topics or in a speaker
selection and we really try to diversify it um
sometimes we have uh done better than other times but I'll let I'll let Kat talk about some of the
ways that we've been implementing that through our speaker selection but we really want to push those
voices and also part of that diversity inclusion is people who are new to speaking versus Prof you
know people have done it professionally for years we like run the gamut right panels or individuals
we want to make sure that all kinds of different
voices in the communities are heard so that's
kind of us again on a high level the mission and values statement is found on our website as
well so I won't read that all out to you um but it is really critical to our mission here not
only to provide you know digital accessibility education for all types of professionals and
Technology but also to have that representation I think we all feel really strongly about that
um if there's any questions let us know in the in the chat uh otherwise I'
ll pass it on back over
to Andy or if Kat's ready to go yeah I think uh Kat would you like to tell us a little bit more
about all the great speakers and topics and how we pull that off sure I can definitely do that so
um one of the first things we do obviously is with recruiting um we um as Carie was mentioning
we really focus on uh recruiting people from marginalized groups and so when we talk about
marginalized groups um I think a lot of people when they think of diversity they automatica
lly
go to Black and Brown groups which is definitely uh top on the list list but we also focus on
people that are disabled um women low-income people there's there's a lot of different groups
that can fall into the marginalized groups so that's really very important for us when we're
recruiting people um and so for me one of the things that I find is helpful is I attend a lot
of camps conferences webinars virtual events and um as I get as I watch speakers I'll get names
of those speakers a
nd contact information and build up uh a list on our queue and try to contact
them to see if they're interested in speaking for us and and that all of the team actually does
that it's not not just me and so um we also have people that have reached out to us that just
want to speak which is great um we really love that and if that just shows an eagerness to speak
and we contact them back and and we will let them know yeah absolutely um we are really interested
in not having just experienced
speakers but also new new speakers so we like to mix it up with um
having both of them so if we could have like a new speaker or newish speaker and then an experienced
speaker kind of rotate that and another thing we like to do with recruiting is have maybe like a
tech more of a techy talk and then more of a high level talk so that not every single talk is so
Tech focused and on the flip side not everything is so high level um um so once we do those kinds
of things um I reach out first by s
ending out an email um asking if they're interested in speaking
um and then when I get a reply or if I get a reply from that um then we start a conversation and then
the speaker is added to what we call the speaker queue which is basically a table where we add some
of the basic information and so the next step for us is just to gather the speaker information um so
that would be like the topic and description and social media um their preferred pronouns um their
head shot we ask for like a f
un fact because it's just a fun thing and we we learn a lot about
the speakers that way it's really I think it's actually my my favorite thing to ask um and then
a speaking date is really important because we like to do it uh Tuesday through Thursday midday
so that uh people can attend more easily um and also slides and we like to ask for the slides as
early as possible so that they can be given to the um live captioners so that they can kind of
look at them and and get any uh words or phra
ses or anything that might be difficult for them so
when they do the live captioning they're aware of that and then um that's about it that's that's
how we do that so Kat what would be a fun fact about you speaking of fun facts oh not to put
you on the spot but fun facts um I love like I love 80s movies well I think a lot of people do
but I actually forced my daughter to watch them so the other day um my my husband and I were
talking about rad and we actually got it off of Amazon we watched
rad with her the other day
and she didn't think it was as good as we did but it was so awesome watching it but I I did say you
know it's amazing how different things are when you're an adult versus when you're a kid but it
was still bad that's awesome that's so cringe Kat yeah that's awesome yeah and um one other thing
we like to really make sure that we do with uh with our speakers is make sure that they follow
our code of conduct and and so um we have our code of conduct on our our um on
our website and
we you know we really like to make sure that uh their talks include inclusive language and that
they're respectful of viewpoints um and that you know they can accept constructive criticism
um and that they they are not like an insulting and trolling kind of person and that doesn't just
include during their talk but just in general also in social media so we really you know if there's
a person that's not uh conducting themselves as a person well that is something we'll consi
der when
it comes to a speaker so and we we have done that we've rescinded invitations to speak in the past
after some information's come to light and that's not happened a lot but we do take that seriously
and it doesn't mean that you have to be like a perfect human but just have to be a decent human
yeah and it's the psychological safety of the team as as well as the attendees so we want to make
sure that we represent our team um in the in the best possible way we can so I think that that
that
speaker vetting is really important absolutely I think it's very important Andrew I'm going to take
over your hosting duties for one second because I feel like Steve's question is really relevant and
I'd love Kat to talk about it I'm gonna go ahead and show it sorry this is what happens when you
have multiple hosts all together at one time I will restrain myself and the future I promise but
Steve has a really great question uh the question is curious of What kinds of tools you all use
to
stay organized asynchronously and remotely for example Kat mentioned a queue a couple times what and
where is that sure so our queue is actually in Airtable so Airtable is a really cool product um it has
a free version and a paid version we use the free version because you know I don't like to pay for
anything and um it's really cool because you can add it to different you can add it to like almost
like a table or a grid and then you can have like a can band and different versions and e
ven a form
to fill out um and then we can move those into the different columns so we started from the queue
move it to marketing move it to the different columns as um the speaker is going through the
process um another obvious uh thing we use is Google Drive and all of the various Google doc uh
products like Google Docs and all of that um and that's just because it's widely used um we can
collaborate on that and that's another product I I would say we use is there anything I'm missing
I
also used a Drupal issue queue um for my project management space because it we started out as a
Drupal sort of centric talk and we want to provide attributions where we can I'll talk a little bit
more about attributions later but I'll use the the Drupal issue queue to keep track of some of my tasks
as well yeah I think oh I was just going to add I think Slack is also a tool that we use like
pretty much every day to communicate and maybe that's not the most organized one but that's talks
to
Steve's question about being remote so I think that's why we stay connected and we also have
monthly meetings we try to get together and talk about the future months um and so we've got these
even though it maybe looks a little disjointed at times and is uh we do have plans in place and
we have ideas and plan B and plan C and all the way down to Z right and so this idea is that you
know Kat keeps us organized and then the rest of us like uh Mark mentioned in the comments we all
mess it up
uh and don't do the things that we were supposed to do but she keeps us in mind that
sounds about that's right about accurate right would you say Andrew absolutely the one thing that
did does help our team with it being a larger and growing team team is something is the roles that
we play and so how I was excited to join the team was to kind of help Define a role and then
document what I think that role is and kind of my activities and then um the other part of that is
what I really like ab
out documentation is I call it a lead follow where as I document as I'm going
through something I document it myself and then I pass that to another member to follow and take
over that role so we have double coverage what we're joking about here is like Carie's sharing this
comment and I'm you know we have these roles that like a a producer during the event but there's
pre-event there's uh all these different you know expertise that the team has and everybody's
worn each other hat at some p
oint so we have that coverage and the other thing I will say is uh the
reason I really like our team and and how it's large is everybody goes through seasons of their
life right and so if if we need to share the load um you know we have it well documented we have
great coverage of a team and a very supportive team and and loving team and we get together
uh at those monthly touch points to just kind of check in like how is everybody doing how is
your season if I need to take a step back like
sometimes during summer months or just things come
up and we're there for each other and the other part is is we document because we know we want
that person to be successful in that role um so that is kind of uh another really important thing
is not only the tools but defining those rules having a good supportive team that has that double
coverage is really I think the secret sauce of how we actually get this done monthly and put on
these events monthly and learn from each other as well w
ith that um we can go to the next chapter
uh which is really talking about the pre-event so AmyJune do you want to talk through some of
those things and we'll we'll um talk about what we do after we have that speaker selected what
are the next steps to promote that event sure um so Kat does a lot of the background for us
and makes it really easy um and once she kind of secures all that stuff we have a a design
team there's a few of us that can do that but we create posters um for um for med
ia use we
use a a poster for you know our our metadata for our website and for YouTube and stuff like
that and we send that back for approval so we create um uh a a design slide and once that's
approved you know we start promoting it in the different spaces and to do that it takes a team
someone creates a YouTube event someone else will put it on our actual website I will put it up in
different spaces um and that can include a lot of Drupal spaces like we have a Drupal's community
events p
age um where it gets featured on Drupal and on a map and even though we don't always talk
about Drupal accessibility is important to Drupal and a lot of us come from those Drupal Roots so
there's a few places in Drupal I post um and then as far as um promotion goes you know we do it
in the spaces that make the most sense and get the get the the wider set of eyes so right now
Slack is a good tool for us a lot of us are in a whole lot of different channels we all have our
different networks s
o I'll create um the copy for everyone to sort of look at if they want to use it
they can modify it and then everyone kind of posts in their own um in their own slack networks and
then we don't have a LinkedIn account but we all post on LinkedIn because all of us have different
networks you know Carie might know 400 people and April might know 300 people in the accessibility
world you know and I might know a 100 and so between us you know that's math um but that's
that creates that bigger r
each grow right um and of course we use uh what was formerly known as
Twitter we do still have an account there but we have an account on Mastadon and um we do try to um
promote and tag people in an appropriate way just to get that wider reach out there we do work with
the IAAP team and they actually help when it's a talk that they find fantastic they help us do some
promotion and what's nice about working with the IAAP team is um through the years we've sort
of been able to have our event
be considered a continuing education credit so not only do people
who attend the event get a continuing education credit towards the IAAP certifications they have
whether it be all the alphabet soup stuff you know um but also speakers get credits too so if you're
curious about how the IAAP continuing education credits work it's on their website but it's it's
a great way to um help people with their career building too you know they can say that they were
on um accessibility talks they can a
lso use that continuing education um to help them keep their
certifications and from there you know after we have it on the website and after we have all of
our stuff promoted that's when Andrew typically comes in and secures our CART captioning um and
like Kat said we we provide um our interpreters with the slide decks ahead of time but we also
try to give them some technology keywords that they might not be accustomed to that way as
they're typing things out they're like H what is Kuberne
tes you know and that way they have a
little bit of a key to go by Andrew do you want to talk a little bit more about how securing CART
Works absolutely I just put into the channel who we use for CART and so again we we find that very
important um to have the human captioner um again unfortunately apologize that we did not have
that for today whether um it was a resourcing or whether it was a miscommunication with doing
Carie you know that's that's something that uh wait a minute getting so
me blame here now I think
part of that before jumping into CART like it talk like a short short history about how we started
with um and we've used all Technologies so when we first you know did this long time ago from
the informal version it was just like a Zoom call right and then we and back then they used Otter
Ai and no one you had to pay for it so no one had those so it was kind of captionless for a long
time um but then we tried different combinations of YouTube streaming and zoom an
d Google Meets
we've done it all right and um we've done the automatic captioning for a long time AmyJune
had a connection with Thisten which was a great AI version for captioning they did a pretty great
job um and then that uh dissolved and so then we were like well what now this is a perfect moment
to up our game when it comes to captions and go from the automatic AI generated captions which
have I will say Advanced light years from when we first started the same with YouTube autoc
capti
oning that is fascinating to me like how much has changed but yet we still find the human
captioner as AmyJune was kind of talking about AC or specific technology stacks or you know how do
you pronounce you know this person's name right we found or write out this person's name like
we found out a lot of human captioners could capture that more clearly and we've also had some
really interesting discussions about does it need to be verbatim versus are we talk talking about
the context of what
is being spoken about and is that captured right so or emotions that maybe
not wouldn't be captured by AI right now at all could be conveyed through human captioner so I
just wanted to kind of set that up there again apologies that we don't have it today probably
my fault I'm sure I'll take the blame um today but uh but for sure after this we're going back
to YouTube and there are options to have caption and we'll use the automatic captioning as a kind
of a foundation like a base and the s
ame is true as if we had a human caption captioner here we
would take that um file you know they come it in different kinds of versions of the caption file
and then you can go into YouTube and still edit so we retain the captions that YouTube automatically
captions what the human captioner does and then we still go in and we do our manual edits um which
Andrew was going to explain in a little more detail so but I just want to give that historical
context that we're always looking at new way
s to support different audience members with different
disability types and we don't always get it right but we are evolving and trying things out just
even like using Streamyard right that's another new technology that we've incorporated in the
last year or so so these are things that you know trial and error you know and don't be afraid
to make mistakes in that regard because again accessibility I think is really about you know
along the lines of what Meryl Evans always talks about is abo
ut you know keep pushing towards you
know progress not perfection essentially like we want to keep pushing the envelope keep trying
new things and it might not be yet but you know we won't know until we try it if it's going
to work so yeah I think that's a huge Kudos back to you Carie when I joined this team you
were looking for new ideas and it's always been what can we do how can we change how can we push
ourselves to have a better event or if there is a new technology let's not shy away
from it let's
give it a try let's go into it because we're all we all are very passionate about accessibility
we do our best to vet it out as as much as we as we can but we try and be Innovative with this
so it's not the same old we're not afraid to try something new classic example of that is again
when we have speakers they come to us if they do need accommodations uh go back to Meryl who
talked in November of 2021 she was talking about um you know a hard of hearing and she said hey
woul
d you guys have ASL interpreter I don't need it for myself but would you be willing to do that
and we said absolutely how she's like how do we do that we have we no idea but we want to do it and
we were able to through our community figure out and and secure um some ASL interpreters for that
specific event and um it was really interesting I was really excited to be behind the scenes and see
how that all comes together how we bring people up on the stage how there were two ASL interpreters
t
o give a break because we talk uh pretty fast in the subject matter but you know these were
learnings that we all had and at the end you know I feel like our team continues to learn and
grow uh as we we bring people but um that's also a kudos to to Kat and to the speakers that that
advocate for themselves and say you know I have these needs and and we're here to to figure out
how to put on that event and to learn and get better so um another just details we'll just
finish up kind of the cap
tioning thing here so what I always thought was interesting about
how does a CART person come to to be a part of A11yTalk so this is again behind the scenes
here we secure it using AI media we we uh put in a request we share slides so they the CART human
captioner can feel up to speed about the speaker names how they're spelled the subject matter
you know how what what is Drupal so because you never know it's not going to be the same person
that may not have technical abilities right so we
try and arm them with as much uh information
as possible going into to this event and really they just joined the stream so right now we're
using Streamyard that is then live broadcast to YouTube and they just join our meeting and they're
just a person sitting there silently and they are just captioning as they go and as we found with
humans right uh some some captioners have been better than others but in the end I feel like
the the the heart of what the subject is it's not verbatim it's n
ot every single word that said um
it it's interesting how overall the captioning is a part of of this event and so we've changed
from having um after YouTube is done we'll get that verbatim captioning right and so what we do
is we'll replace that with the CART captioning um and that's been a process and what I'm going to do
is I'm going to throw in um Carie when we spoke about this at the Florida Drupal Camp in 2023 um
that was recorded so I'll drop that link in there I thought that was a g
ood discussion that we had
kind of talking about our process a bit more but I just wanted to share that um just kind of to to
come back on all of the captioning things here is that we didn't really know how or we were going
to pull this off and as we moved through it and we documented it and shared it it's it's really
not that hard or bad to to make your event that accessible and overall um feel it's a really great
step forward and I want to throw something in because I came into it kicking
and screaming when
we went from Zoom because I utilize captions and some of the Technologies we chose don't utilize
captions because we're on a delay so as a host I was super scared that people are talking and I
don't see those captions for 30 seconds so if I miss something I have to wait a while to catch
up and that's when um right about the time Andrew came on the team and I've worked with Andrew
at Drupal events and I've discovered the live captioning in Chrome so that's our workaround
for
if we have um folks who need um captions who are in Streamyard them itself we don't have the paid
version that does the captions so again there's no captions for me but I run my captions through
my browser so that helps it be more accessible for me too so it's not only the accessibility
of our speakers and our guests but also this the the accessibility for our our organizing team
too and I think they already posted that link of how to how to do that through Chrome one of the
things tha
t's very interesting about the captions um is you know we rotate responsibilities as
you've talked about um with um doing the captions after the fact and adding the live captions to
the video and um it's it's a very interesting task to to edit the YouTube cap captions with a
live captions and going through step by step and something sometimes having to rewind to make sure
you hear something right um and I'll I'll tell you it really gives you a new found respect for
live captioners because i
t's not an easy thing to listen and type and make sure you get everything
right when uh you're you're doing that so I I want to give kudos to the live captioners um of the
world our live captioners but live captioners of the world because it's not an easy job so I
think that's a good point and and one more point and then I'll let pass it back over to Andrew to
move on to the next topic um but you know a lot of this we're trying to document internally but
we also have been we have a GitHub r
epo for our website and it talks also a little bit about our
process and we're in the process of of updating the website and making these things that we're
talking about live so I know that uh I think it was Steven who was asking about you know will we
have a handout or something at the end I would say TBD but definitely in the New Year we're supposed
to we'll make that a little bit more public and then you can follow along and again your process
might look different than ours depending on
your accessibility needs and your event needs but
uh kind of will give you a skeleton to build whatever it is that you want to build on because
I think all of us again we've kind of talked about Drupal but also I'll do a shout out to Wordpress
and other uh Stacks out there but we we really are the ethos of like uh open source is really
important to all of us and making having that transparency which really kind of talks about you
know the financial part that April's going to get into a litt
le bit more and along those lines of
transparency and making sure that we all are on the same page so I'll kick it to Andrew it to
kick it to April maybe I don't know multiple hosts it's fun yeah the that's the only thing
I wanted to put on here is that like just to wrap up our live event is you know we have that
team we have that role and what you see here in front of you is everybody on the call is visually
here typically we have somebody behind the scenes feeding questions moving things
in moving things
out like doing all of the things and it's kind of fun to just our hands are off the steering wheel a
bit with this talk it's kind of kind of fun to to see that um because uh we do have a great host and
then we have that person that is just there you know like right with that next question with that
next thing um and you know um that's what makes this work really well from and then uh if you do
miss it back to Kat's point about the captioning it's really great to reread uh a
nd go through the
event and relive the event even if you weren't there so that's a great way if I can't attend a
month uh I'll definitely pick up uh the post-event task that we have outlined so that way I can uh get
caught up because we can't make every single event um any last points about kind of how we put on
this event and and hosting and and all the things that are behind the scenes but today you see them
in front of you I would say that we need to rename that person The Wizard of Oz b
ecause I mean they
are behind the scenes they're behind the curtain they're doing a bunch of things you never see
them and yeah I mean you know I am in Kansas so I think it's the perfect title I think the other
good thing about being on this team too is the selfishness of like I want to host this I want to
talk to this person yeah what you don't see in our Slack channels are like this we got this speaker I
wanna I want to be the host for this so we do have the internal fighting of of that b
ecause I get
really excited about some see me too and like I'll say like you know echoing what Kat said I'm like
I don't know which way people are facing but like captioners yeah shout out but I also give a shout
out to the hosts like until you host an event and a live stream like you have no idea how difficult
it can be to like keep that momentum flowing and it's honestly it's a skill you learn after doing
it multiple times and there's no other way to learn it I don't think and Mark I wish
he was here
because he's a host with the most here um but he helped teach us you know some of those
things and we look at him as because he's done it for years before in radio and other uh venues
and and medias I should say uh but like you know having that cadence and having those conversations
and but I think having that real interest speaking to what Andrew and other people have said you
we're like internally we're like oh I want to be the host because we really love accessibility
and w
e love to hear uh these different topics right we hear these different speakers so um yeah
we try to to spread it out and then there's some people in our team that don't like to host or
they're in a season of their life like we talked about earlier that they're unable to host and
so we keep you know plenty of tasks for other people to do uh during that time it's not just
hosting there a ton that goes on on I like that Wizard of Oz behind the scene you're a creative
director though Kat so I
don't know what was it universal yeah I don't know before we get
too much you know so that's kind of how in in these events and and what what you see when
you come here monthly and the other great thing about it is that I love when somebody says oh
I couldn't attend it I'm like this is amazing because you just go to that YouTube link and
it'll just start playing the only disadvantage you have is asking questions in real time that's
the only disadvantage to not attending our our Live Events
but I'm really excited to move
on to the next piece here to to tag on to that if you're watching sorry sorry April to
tag on to that if you do watch the Youtube video later we have a hashtag A11yTalks
and you can ask us a question on Twitter or Mastodon and where we can answer that there so
there is a way to ask us questions after the fact absolutely okay I'm gonna add to the stage
your slides April because I'm excited to talk about the next part is how you can be a part
of A11yTalks and c
ontribute so April take it away all right so I put together some slides
just to try and give some visual the things and uh also while I'm going through this if you
want to go to our website to the sponsor ship page the sponsorship page has a lot more
details about how to give the benefits of our different giving levels and other ways to
contribute details about our budget priorities and how we measure our impact through our YouTube
statistics um so if you want to use that to kind of go alon
g with what I'm going to talk about get
that link in the chat I'm assuming yeah sweet all right so last November we announced that we
were fiscally hosted by open collect uh open Collective Foundation which is a 501c3 and allows
us to receive tax deductible contributions so we kind of get this nonprofit status without
managing a nonprofit um so we invited our viewers and followers to join the A11yCat
Club for $5 $15 or $25 a month individuals can receive varying levels of recognition and
r
eceive stickers show the sticker on the slide I can't see myself anymore but got some stick
here it will send out to um A11yCat club members and we also had on our sponsor page that you
could donate uh one-time donations you could give $25 $100 $250 in a one-time donation as an
individual and also receive different levels of recognition and stickers and swag and stuff
so I wanted to kind of go over what we were able to do in that period of time since our last
November I think it was Novembe
r 16th to yesterday of course because I did not do these numbers
today um so we were able to raise $2,000 and7 $2,790 um so big thank you to everyone who
contributed this year um it would really appreciate your support and you help us to deliver
accessible accessibility talks this year so we had $2,000 $263 in expenses and we do have fees
that come out of of the donations that just kind of comes with uh the fiscal hosting and the payment
transactions and things like that um so it gave us uh
pretty much about $69.90 as our net income
that we can use towards next year um and I think it's kind of interesting to see a little bit of
the breakdown of where the money comes from um we do have a Red Bubble store and I don't know
if anybody wants to grab that link and put in the chat where you can get the accessibility talks
or the the A11yCat shirts that and Andy and I are wearing um so we do have that and we have most of
our money came from onetime donations we did have a a few uh si
gnificant one-time donations and then
we have a little bit here from the A11yCat club the this is the this right here is the the only sort
of sort of predictable amount of money that we can expect um to help us plan and meet our budget
priorities and then I'll show you here these are our budget priorities so these are listed on our
website with a little bit more detail um of what each of these are but our live captions are our
number one priority because you know what's an accessible event
without being accessible um so we
were able to fund all of our live captions for the past year so that was really great um we I have
some asterisks here for operations of marketing we did get a $200 donation specifically for stickers
and so some of that were our A11yCat stickers and some of those were some marketing stickers that
I'll show in a minute um so I just kind of wrapped that under operations um another thing that
comes under operations is like domain renewals and things like that
um so we weren't able to fund
a lot of our other priorities that we wanted to do so we looking at today today our balance because
we did have some funds coming before um November of last year our balance is $661 128 and right now
with our A11yCat club contributors we're bringing in we can project that we're bringing in $30 a
month our projected monthly expenses if we're just focusing on our live captions are $150 a
month so with all this math we've been talking about at least I did this mat
h last night um our
live captions will be funded for five months from today um so we need you you know we need your
help to help us do the great things that we've been talking about today to keep things going
and to do even more things than we are already doing um to to meet our mission and values to to
represent our values to meet our mission so how can you give the first thing is giving through
the A11yCat club and and I say this because you know even though it's a lower amounts of money
it's it's that predictable income right so um letting us know that you're going to continue to
give each month helps us for planning and stuff and you get cool stickers I'll put the sticker
oh it disappeared that's weird anyways here's the stick here's a sticker and then we also have some
of these you might see them at some events and things and we'll send one of those in the in the
mail to you um if you've donated and not gotten these stickers there is a form that you have to
fill out um
it comes into uh whenever you donate I think every time you donate you get a a response
a confirmation of your of your donation and then you can let us know that you donated so we can
get your address and send you some stickers you can also do a one-time donation um we have on our
website like I said before we have a few giving l you can also give I think any amount that you
want to give um and those are very helpful too as we saw in the the graph before that's a lot where
our money is comi
ng from it's not predictable but it is definitely what's really paying for these
live captions and to uh help us do great things and then today we are announcing organization
contributions so if your organization um if you if you feel like your organization aligns
with our mission and values because we're really focused on that we want to make sure that there's
good alignment there um each of these levels have different benefits for recognition and visibility
of your donation um again all t
hose details are on the website the link that I shared before and I'll
share a link at the end as well but we're really looking for uh some support from organizations
as well and then if none of those levels work for you and you really just want the A11y Cat
shirt or or mug or stickers or whatever it is that you can get the A11y Cat or the A11y Cat's uh
logo on there you can go to a Red Bubble store um hopefully somebody has shared the link and you can
buy things we get a little bit of mone
y from there but you know you'll look cool like us I don't
know if that translates um so again if you go to the sponsorship page all the information is there
um you can always email us at team@a11ytalks.com I believe it's listed on the on that page as well
and let us know if you have questions or concerns or anything like that um we really need your
help just to you know from the community this is a community supported thing we're all volunteers
we're an all volunteer team um so we need we
need help in uh continuing to push what is it push it
forward push the accessibility making making cool things happen yeah it's all I got thanks April I'm
I want to just give April a huge Kudos because we were not 503c you know this was a lot of effort
and time and also to organize all the sponsorship levels there's been a lot of discussion a lot
of hard work by April but I feel like now is just a really good time to help support us going
into the next year um we have some really great spea
kers that we would like that are in the queue
and we're going to keep on doing this monthly but you know as you see we're just really transparent
about the cost of what it takes and not only just our time that our our team is just donating
you know uh there's just the real cost so you know we're really transparent about it we really
hope that you're able to give and um I'm excited to be alongside and uh continuing to to volunteer
but um we really would appreciate having a great strong 2024
and look forward to um to hearing
from y'all with that uh I'm gonna is there any other questions or comments before we kind of
uh go through the the final slides here or any final comments that uh anybody on the team wants
to make about uh being an A11y Club member AmyJune you have your oh about an A11y Club member no
I had a final comment I didn't let you finish go go final comment AmyJune you have the floor is
yours okay I really do want to stress um that for our for our organization here
that redundancy
is Key to Our Success um I know we've said that a bunch but um we talked about the seasons of our
lives and just having to step back but if only one person is doing marketing when that person can't
do it it's a real challenge to for for someone to step in and so we kind of have this buddy system
where you know April was helping with marketing and then I took over and then the days I can't
do it she steps in and so we really have that redundancy built in and some of the team
s even
have three people that can do that same task and so I think that is like one of the the pillars
that makes our group successful Is We I don't think we've ever not had a month maybe we have
didn't have a month because last minute speaker thing but it wasn't because of our team you know
and I yeah again redundancy is key to having a successful project like this that's been going
on for for as long as that's been going on thanks Andrew great well uh I'm gonna share the final
slides I j
ust want to thank the panel Carie, Kat April, AmyJune and all the other A11y Cats
uh you know that are behind the scenes yes wonderful uh you're all I just personally
just want to say you're a joy to work with you make this really fun on I'm always delighted
by the speakers we have whenever I'm a a host or behind the scenes um it's just a great group of
people and I'm always learning so thank you and thanks everybody that's joining today uh really
appreciate you and your time and just even
uh watching us and hearing how we put this on again
progress over Perfection we are uh doing our best and we're really happy to share our resources
and how we uh put on a successful monthly A11yTalks and then um we're always recruiting for the
team April put a little comment in private chat but um if you're interested in helping there's
all kinds of different roles even if you just want to sit in and and learn some stuff um you
can reach out to us and and um we're a pretty good mentoring te
am absolutely which I think
is important right we want to keep the fun and accessibility and and encourage other people
to want to do what we do and the various roles that they have in their organizations because I
think that's you know our ultimate goal right um digital accessibility and making things more
accessible in in the world right is that we all have our role to play and we want to support
people and Mentor people on those roles as well um even just yesterday AmyJune had a question
and I was like oh that's a really interesting question I've never thought of that and so I
got to do a little research and we have some conversations so even just being in the channel
uh I think we've learned a a lot from each other too so yeah come on over or if you want to be a
speaker contact Kat uh there's a lot of different ways to get involved Beyond just donations too
I'll will also say we're talking virtually here but I do know that some of us are organizing of
in-person events an
d we have some good resources in checklists you know April does a great job
with the Asheville Drupal Camp I volunteer for the the Chicago Drupal Midcamp and so you know
this team is a great resource uh we have a lot of great resources and we're built to just look
at any event virtual or in person and try and just make sure everybody can go um and just
lower all the barriers everywhere so you can just attend an event and get the information you
need and leave like that's our goal and that's
that's what we strive for every single time um
with that you know we're looking for speakers we talked about all the great speakers and the
process there um so you know follow subscribe you're here on the YouTube you might be watching
this later we appreciate you and we' appreciate you helping us on this Giving Tuesday to to
help us out so with that um thanks everybody until next time there's going to be a great
speaker here in December so we'll be seeing you very soon take care and have a
great rest
of your Year and thank you for your donation and time
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