GlasgowJS Accessibility and Calendars

We held the February GlasgowJS Meetup last night. I was pleased again at the good turnout and quality of the talks. Between Glasgow and Edinburgh we are building a real community of developers who are learning and networking from each other.

We had two excellent speakers last night. The first speaker was Mozafar Haider who has been working on UI components for an open source healthcare system. His talk focused on the challenges and solutions to building calendars for non-Gregorian systems.

After Mozafar’s talk I said:

I think we are quite privileged as web developers. Because the web is world-wide it isn’t just dealing with a narrow thing, sometimes you get to do a deep dive on something that is super-interesting about the way the world works.

We are so lucky to live in an age where we can find out and cater for languages, cultures and ways of doing that are not our own. The world is an interesting place, and trying to model it can be a great way of knowing and understanding it.

You can find Mozafar’s slides on Canva, and the calendar component on the DHIS2 UI showcase.

Our second speaker was Doro Hinrichs who used a metaphor about juggling hedgehogs to talk about accessibility issues.

After Doro’s talk I said:

One of the great things about our jobs is that we can change things, and we can make the world a slightly better place just by doing a good job. […] and you probably don’t need to ask anyone just to start doing this.

I had a few discussions afterwards about why Acessibility is usually more of an add-on afterwards rather than a core part of the development process. I think that if you take time, care and dilligence to get accessibility issues right then you are likely going to end up with an overall better product for all users. I’d be keen to explore the blockers further, so if you want that discussion then get in touch.

If you want to read more resources, Doro has collected them on her portfolio website, alongside three things you can start doing for A11y.

If you want to join future discussions we have the Scottish Technology Club YouTube where you can chat on livestreams, and the ScottishTechnology.Club Discord Community where you can connect with fellow attendees.