Jonathan: People who have come to the webinars say that they can sometimes be the most useful hour that they
spend in a month on accessibility. That’s what we were trying to do…
[Title card: Digital Accessibility for Everyone. About Hassell Inclusion’s Webinars]
Liam: So, Jonathan, why should people come to Hassell Inclusion webinars?
Jonathan: We started them in COVID. We couldn’t do conferences or any of those sorts of things.
Jonathan (on webinar from May 2020): We wanted to frame this in the circumstances that we’re in at the moment.
So obviously all doing everything from home. A lot has changed in the environments that we work in, that we shop in…
Jonathan: If you think back to COVID everybody did everything digitally. Which meant what we do at
Hassell Inclusion to try and make sure that everybody can do things digitally rather than everybody minus people who are aging or who have disabilities… We wanted to make sure that at that really important time nobody was excluded.
Rob (on webinar from 2021): Hello everybody! I’m going to talk to you a little bit now about designing for older people.
Peter (on webinar from 2022): We want to produce some digital products that’s accessible to everybody.
Toby (on webinar from 2023): I’ve been a wheelchair user since I was about 2 years old. I work full-time. I’m a diversity and inclusion consultant.
Jonathan: We run them every month, and have been, as I say, for five-six years now. The sort of topics, we pick really carefully.We respect people’s time. Everything is created for that moment, with the latest up-to-date information.
We do webinars on what marketing people should be thinking about when it comes to accessibility. How can they win?
[Quote card: “This webinar is the answer to my prayers in this domain. We’ve been exploring in the dark.”]
We do webinars for people who may be running whole accessibility programs. How can they do strategy? We do webinars for different job roles in terms of kind of digital teams – developers or designers.
[Quote card: “This session has been really helpful… rephrasing training to capability is a brilliant positioning.”]
It’s really important for people to understand that when they come into the accessibility world, there are so many different ways of looking at it.
[Quote card: “I love your webinars. You never hear anything like what’s in them anywhere else.”]
We’ve had lots of people who come to our webinars saying: “It’s the best hour of my month because I feel like part of the community.”
Jonathan (on webinar): Welcome to those joining us… Welcome to Digital Accessibility Experts Live. Thank you so much for being one minute early.
Liam (on webinar): I know a lot of us know that different people with different conditions can concentrate for
certain amounts of time and that actually if there are barriers in things, it can really sort of chip away…
Jonathan: They say “I don’t feel quite so alone anymore.” A lot of people who work in accessibility, maybe they’re the only person in their organisation who cares about this. It’s really important for them to
see this is happening other places. People really get this. And maybe their clan, their crowd of people who will really understand what they’re going through, are actually on the webinar.
We open up the Zoom chat for people to chat with each other all the way through the webinar.
It’s not just a “Hassell Inclusion says this and you can ask us a question” which would be useful, but wouldn’t be community. What we do is people can ask their questions and people can answer each other’s questions. We’ve had people who have found friends and colleagues through that chat.
This is the equivalent of a whole accessibility conference every month. That’s what we’re
proud of with these, and that’s the reason we continue to spend a lot of our time and effort making sure that these are as good as we can make them. Because, really, the community deserves it.
