Session: Community Lightning Rounds

Center for Accessibility and Open Source (CAOS)

Speaker: Joshua Miele, Founder, CAOS

The Center for Accessibility and Open Source (CAOS) is a new organization. Through meaningful and sustainable disability inclusion and community engagement, we support:

    • mainstream open source communities to value and strive for accessible outputs
    • open-source accessibility projects to build community and capacity.

 

A11yhood.org

Speaker: Yumeng Ma, PhD student, University of Washington & Jennifer Mankoff, Director, CREATE

A11yhood.org is a central hub for open-source assistive technologies. It catalogs accessible switches, 3D-printed device grips, and software stabilizers, and makes them available in a searchable format with tutorials, documentation, and community ratings. The platform’s goal is to support disabled makers, developers, and allies by making it easier to find, use, and contribute to accessibility projects. Alongside this catalog, our current work also examines accessibility in software generation, specifically how large language models generate web code and whether those outputs are accessible. This includes evaluating whether generated code applies semantic HTML, ARIA attributes, and keyboard navigation correctly, and identifying where these systems introduce barriers at scale. Together, these efforts aim to strengthen both the availability of physical assistive tools and the accessibility of digital interfaces.

 

Accessible CLIs

Speaker: Andy Feller, Software Engineer, GitHub

How do we build delightful, accessible CLIs in a terminal world without any standards and loose, grassroots conventions.

 

Driving Organizational Change: Open Sourcing the Accessibility Awareness Lab

Speaker: Glenda Sims, Chief Information Accessibility Officer, Deque

Deque’s Accessibility Awareness Lab has helped organizations around the world ignite passion for accessibility by showing teams the human impact behind digital accessibility requirements. This hands-on experience helps participants understand why accessibility is essential.

Now, we’re taking the next step: preparing to open source the entire framework and materials so anyone can create their own Lab and build self-sustaining accessibility momentum.

In this lightning talk, Glenda Sims, Deque’s Chief Information Accessibility Officer, will share the key components of the Awareness Lab, why open sourcing it is so powerful, and how it can help organizations everywhere build lasting accessibility cultures.

 

Whisper-to-Cards

Speaker: Lenise Kenney

Whisper-to-Cards is a minimal pipeline that converts any talk or tutorial into dyslexia-friendly notes and bite-size study cards. Using Whisper.cpp for offline transcription, the tool auto-chunks content, simplifies sentences, adds glossary popovers, and exports Anki decks. A “listen instead” button creates short audio summaries for each section. I’ll demo processing a 2-minute clip into readable notes, an Anki deck, and a one-page “Easy-Read” PDF. Great for learners with dyslexia who benefit from chunking, simpler syntax, and multi-modal repetition.