April 15 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.

Community Updates

• Article about the OTF saga of last year here
• Great piece on OTF's continued efforts to support Core Infrastructure
• With a number of activists all over Italy, there is a national campaign against racism especially on national TV (use of the n word, racist stereotypes) called cambieRAI (aka RAI you need to change) and prendiamolaparole (let's speak up), recently one of the very first magazines by afro-Italians, immigrants and refugees focused on racism in Italy has been published, antirəzinə, and given for free in local libraries also available in digital version here. As well as another campaign in Italian in video format to breakdown systemic-racism called "Fading"

• This week with JAAKLAC, they have been launching the #DetoxDeDatosLatinx campaign on Twitter and Instagram. With the support of Tactical Tech we adapted its Data Detox Kit to make it more accessible.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Tip of the Week: if you have low vision, contrast becomes important, especially with text

• Contrast Checker
• So essentially, the stronger the contrast, the better it is for some folks. This is because it is easier to distinguish things.
• There's a lot of pale text on pale backgrounds out there.
• Plus, there is text that isn't eligible for people with color blindness - and there are a lot of people with color blindness.
• But the good news is that there are contrast checkers. WAVE and other tools will flag it for you
• Automated tools don't catch everything, so it's important to look at things yourself. For color blindness and other low-vision visitors, make sure the meaning of charts and other things can be found without relying on color. And like other images, use alt-text to convey the meaning of visualizations.
• Aside from automated tools, there are platforms where companies pay people to test websites for aspects including UX and accessibility but daily users of assistive tech will always be the best testers!
• There are also people who have neurological symptoms from inaccessible websites, and the research is ongoing about that.
• Reports are very important in our space, and there's an open source project for accessible data visualization.
• A workshop on making accessible charts.
• Knowbility Usability testing
• You can join the conversation and share your tools, resources and tips on the Accessibility Channel on the IFF Mattermost.