March 25 2021 GM

Glitter Meetups What are Glitter Meetups Notes from Past Glitter Meetups Virtual Events Calendar Join the IFF Mattermost

Glitter Meetup is the weekly town hall of the Internet Freedom community at the IFF Square on the IFF Mattermost, at 9am EST / 2pm UTC. Do you need an invite? Learn how to get one here.

Upcoming events

@ March 30 | Q&A with Circumvention Lead at Tor About Snowflake https://digitalrights.formstack.com/forms/cks37

@ March 31 | Latin America Monthly Meetup https://internetfreedomfestival.org/wiki/index.php/Latin_American_Monthly_Meetups

@ April 7 | Africa Meetup https://internetfreedomfestival.org/wiki/index.php/Africa_Monthly_Meetups

@ April 8 | Glitter Meetup: Relaynet, a tool for Internet Blackouts https://internetfreedomfestival.org/wiki/index.php/April_8_2021_GM

@ April 15 | MENA Meetup https://internetfreedomfestival.org/wiki/index.php/MENA_Monthly_Meetups

Community Updates

• The Glitter Meetup launches a new section, “The Accessibility Corner” where Karen Reilly, Accessibility Lead of Team CommUNITY will share knowledge regarding Accessibility each week.
• Sounds of Mozilla’s Internet Health Report
• Access Now’s Report on Data protection issues in the SWANA region, surveillance and Covid-19
• Great report by Pollicy on feminist data in sub-Saharan Africa
• Journalists digisec guides' comparative study

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Tip of the Week:

• Alt text! It's a way to make your content accessible to people with low or no vision.
• it's a short description that gets read out by text to voice software
• It can also be helpful for people using mobile phones
• Since folks can't see the images, then the alt text is a description of the image
• It is useful too when you have low connectivity and images won't load
• Alt text is also important when people post screenshots of text.
• Regine Gilbert is a professor who teaches accessible design, and her book has a chapter titled something like "If it's annoying, it's probably not accessible"
• Accessibility testing is best when you involve people who use assistive tech like screen readers, but if you want to try a screen reader, Mac and iOS have VoiceOver built in, the accessibility settings in Android have a screen reader, NV Access is open source software for Windows, and there's Orca for Linux.
• It's a feature on many social networks, like Twitter
• Here's a resource about alt text: Webaim
• The Worst Autoloading Sound Ever - The Media Show
• Check JSON for physical accessibility

Notes

• We talked about our needs, and how are we feeling in the community
• People need Job Fairs, career advice spaces, coaching spaces
• We see that we work with many hats and it is difficult to focus on one area or set up a strategy to find a job
• Organizations usually have job offers that would need three different professionals
• Industry job definitions are so often not the same as NGO job definitions, and so going across that divide is hard.
• Financial advice for short-term contractors
• Ask a Manager’s blog for resume/cover letter advice