Accessibility

Hackers & Designers aims to do the best we can with the tools and resources available to us to create more access in the spaces we convene, the information we provide, the digital tools and platforms we contribute to, the activities we facilitate, the publications we make and all projects we embark on. Creating access is an ongoing process and there is always room for more access. Therefore, in the case that you encounter a space, page or moment where you believe your or someone else's needs could have been better accommodated, we'd like invite you to inform us through this form. We wish to do our best to reduce barriers.

[something about the awkwardness of making a "statement" and the complexity of living up to what we say?]

Spaces

H&D hopes to make the spaces it hosts, facilitates and presents as accessible as possible.

Studio

The Hackers & Designers Studio is located at NDSM-plein 127, inside the NDSM-werf in Amsterdam North-West. The nearest bus stop is Klaprozenweg, approximately 300 meters away, giving access to buses 391 and 394. The NDSM ferry stop is approximately 400 meters away, giving access to the ferries F4 (to Central Station, 15 minutes) and F7 (to Pontsteiger, 7 minutes). There is a supermarket and bakery near this stop. The last years have seen a lot of construction in and around the Amsterdam North-West area, creating many diversions. We expect this to continue for the coming years.

The main entrance of the NDSM-werf is the big blue door. It is usually open during the day and closed in the evenings and during special occasions. Beyond this door, step-free access is not always possible. The ground floor is rather uneven and the first floor, where the studio is located, has many small holes (not safe for creatures with small feet or creatures wearing heels). Getting to the first floor can be achieved by a series of staircases scattered in the building and elevator initially designed for carrying heavy loads. This elevator can only be operated by pressing and holding the button without releasing, which is not helpful if you have difficulties with this. The bathroom in the H&D studio is not wheelchair-accessible.

The NDSM-werf is a warehouse shared with many makers, artists and craftspeople. This means that there will often be loud noises from metal, wood and stone-cutting machines. The studio is an indoor space enclosed in another indoor space, which can lead to the air being quite stuffy sometimes. In the months of November and December, the heating can take quite some days to kick up and it can be a bit cold.

More information on reaching the space can be found on our contact page.

Website

The Hackers & Designers website is designed following as many of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as possible. The document markup is semantic, labelled and attuned for assistive devices. Special attention has been given to the accessibility tree and keyboard input, allowing for multiple forms of navigation across the site and its pages. Moreover, the website has been tested against and optimized for several different screen readers. The website is also tailor made to attune to different operating-system-level settings a user might have such as preferences for higher contrast, inverted colors, bigger text, reduced transparency, dark mode and reduced motion. Furthermore, special attention is being directed towards writing image descriptions. We understand many of the WCAG guidelines as standardized modes of creating access to disabled bodies on the web and acknowledge them as incomplete, as standardization is ableist. We therefore welcome any feedback or points of improvement you might have about the website.

We have opened up multi-lingualism as a feature on our website. The pages on this site are presented in English as a default and translated to Dutch when possible. Some articles, often relating to activities and happenings outside the Netherlands are provided in context-specific languages such as French, German or Korean.

Communications

• language in newsletters and social media
• image descriptions
• translation to dutch when possible
• simple language when we can

Activities

• each activity has dedicated time and resources to making it more accessible
  • this is different per activity, depends on context, scale, participants, situation...
• we try to ask what participants need when an activity involves signups and known participants
• paying attention to accessibility of spaces when choosing host locations
• ....

Publishing

• trying to experiment with accessibility in each publishing activity in a different way
• ...

Approach

We believe that a process of making access starts with posing the question "What do you need to access this space, page or moment?", while acknowledging the inherent power imbalances on the sending and receiving ends of this question. Here, a guest and host are implicated in a negotiation, each with their own needs, limitations and preconditions. Thus, a follow up question should be posed: "Who is inviting who into who's world?", allowing us to reflect on the violent history of access-making and look towards crip and disability justice as a point of departure.

Processes and conversations around making access have to center crip and disabled voices and reject assimilationist and solutionist approaches. These approaches, with their roots in modernism and techno-solutionism, have historically systemically designed, built and replicated a world by and for able bodies. In this world, disabled bodies are excluded guests who are given additional tools, aids and access points in order to "assimilate" into it, i.e. to navigate, operate and inhabit it as an able body would. An anti-assimilationist approach thus departs from the perspective that it is not the bodies that are disabled, but the spacetimes that have been designed to systemically exclude them.

More practically, this means for us that we understand our processes of creating more access as never complete. We cannot make spaces that are fully accessible to all their potential guests: many of their access needs are often not known to us (nor to them sometimes) and many of our own abilities as hosts are sometimes limited. There will always be bodies excluded because of their disabilities. We own up to those we can't include, try to show up better next time and continue to work towards creating more access.

Credits and References

We'd like to thank all our past and future collaborators