As I was writing up some talks on a couple of topics having to do with accessibility, I stopped to think for a bit about community.
We are all part of some community perhaps, online as we do our jobs. Especially in developer relations and developer experience. We hang out is the Discords and Slacks, we chat on Twitter and Mastodon and other socials. We all have a tie that binds us to community to learn, to grow, to communicate.
As I thought about it more I kept thinking back to "how accessible and inclusive are those communities?" and I felt the need to write about it.
Accessibility
To the point of accessibility, how accessible is the platform of the community you are engaged in? Most of the communities we are a part of have their issues. Hell, 99% of the Web is inaccessible. Do we have a way to make it better? Indirectly we do. We ask for improvements, we file bug reports, feature requests (accessibility is not a feature), and we file pull requests.
We don't have much pull perhaps when it comes to the Twitters and the other sites we log into. But we can use our voices to help improve them. If we want everyone to be able to participate, that's advocacy for the betterment of our spaces. Listen to those people that have a request and share it, spread it around. Help make those communities a little bit better.
Inclusion
Which brings me to my next point, inclusion. We all want everyone to enjoy our communities (generally speaking). So we want to welcome those with open arms and make them feel like they are in a space where they can learn, thrive, and share.
Let's make sure those folks are included. That also ties into accessibility. You make the person feel included, that makes the community accessible to them. If you don't have that feeling of inclusion, you make the community inaccessible. Those people that are feeling excluded won't want to be a part of a bigger thing. Period.
A Part Of
I want as many people to feel like they belong to a community as best as I can. I too, also want to feel included and have access to communities that I want to learn from.
I can tell you from the experiences I have had, many online communities are welcoming and inclusive. Yes, there are those we all know about that aren't so good at being inclusive and accessible to everyone. We have the power to change that though.
A great example is the Ionic Discord community. I started learning Ionic a few months ago, joined the community, and it is a very welcoming and inclusive community. I haven't been too engaging there of late, but from my brief interactions it is a terrific community. That spills over to the GitHub side and the Discourse forums as well.
Summary
Making folks, part of instead of apart from helps everyone in the long run. If you have control over your communities, make sure they are as accessible and as inclusive as they can be. If you don't have control, help make those communities accessible and inclusive.
Accessibility starts with "access" and inclusive contains "us".
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
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