Accessibility Days 2019
Awareness-raising event about Accessibility and Disabilities
Ancona, 17-18 May 2019
What are the Accessibility Days?
The Accessibility Days is a a yearly event that aims at raising awareness on accessibility and disability issues for software developers, designers and many others involved in digital technologies.
The event will be held during the "Global Accessibility Awareness Day", a yearly event organized in many locations worldwide that aims at raising awareness about accessibility and inclusion, by gathering up together technology experts and disabled people.
On the wave of the interest generated past editions, we decided to organize a new event for 2019 in Ancona, further involving specialized institutions on the subject of disability. Our meeting place this year is the Museo Tattile Statale Omero, one of the most important museums in the world of its kind, which will allow us to merge history, art and technology in a combination that will surely raise new emotions.
Event Contents
During the event we will have a series of initiatives. Below we are listing the different types:
Conference
More than 30 sessions on accessibility topics: from what are the tools available in everyday life for users with disabilities, to how technologies can help us to design and develop more usable solutions. Always keeping in mind the different legislative aspects that regulate accessibility.
Labs
There will be workshops in where can do practical activities to allow us to understand how to best create Web sites, apps or electronic devices, with the support of experts in various technologies and with the opportunity to confront with disabled users, to understand whether they are really accessible.
The Maker Angle
Developers and designers play a key role in improving the quality of life of people with disabilities, as they are the makers, with their creations! We have tools that make possible things that were deemed unthinkable until just a few years ago: There are electronic cards available to everyone, sensors, or 3D printers, just to name a few. In this corner we will give free rein to the imagination, to experiment how to use these tools to create a more "accessible" world.
Audio-Game Station
In the last edition we already talked about audio-games, entertainment products that can also be enjoyed by people with visual disabilities. This year we will have the opportunity to play and try them personally in a location used for this purpose. It will be very interesting to understand how situations that we would normally imagine with a strong visual component, such as a duel between virtual enemies, can be reinterpreted by doing it without the sense of sight.
Discovering Art, touching it: the Tactile Museum
Close your eyes and for a moment imagine you are in a museum full of statues, or in a city with many monuments, but you can't see them because everything is dark. Thanks to the Museo Tattile Statale Omero of Ancona we will have the chance to try firsthand how a non-sighted can "live the art", by exploring with the other senses the works present there. They are replicas and models of well-known statues and monuments: will we recognize them? Even without using sight, art will still give us emotions!
Dinner in the Dark
One of the experiences that will allow us to better understand what it means to live without the sense of sight will be the Dinner in the Dark: we will eat in a room made completely dark, served by waiters who are themselves blind! It will be a fun and exciting experience at the same time, that will make us understand how, by renouncing by force of things to the sight, our relationship with the environment and food changes completely: we will be struggling even to recognize what we are eating, as long as we are able to find the food on the table!
Round Table: Accessible Music
During the last day on Saturday we will be organizing a roundtable where we will talk about the current situation regarding accessibility of software for the creation of music. Different musical software applications will be analyzed and you will be challenged to understand first-hand the strengths and weaknesses of each of them.
Information Points + Ask the Expert
In addition to the opportunity to confront experienced people of the various topics discussed during the event (Ask The Expert), there will be information points in which representatives of the different institutions that support this Accessibility Days edition can provide Information about their activities and answer any questions you may have.
Your Future Festival 2019
From May 13th to 18th the "Your Future Festival 2019" (YFF) will take place in Ancona, a traditional event of the Università Politecnica delle Marche, created with the aim of foster connections between universities and cities, students and communities, research and territories. A week of workshops, discussions, performances and influences among all the parties with which the Polytechnic interacts. The theme is "The future to imagine". The Accessibility Days was included among the "out of the billboard" events of the festival. If you are in Ancona, don't miss the other events scheduled in the festival, listed on this page.
Night of the Museums 2019
During the Accessibility Days we will have the opportunity to visit the Tactile State Museum Omero of Ancona, to discover its works of art. But there's more! On the evening of Saturday 18 May there will be the "Night of Museums" initiative, and the Tactile Museum will organize "special" visits, with ad-hoc activities for the occasion. So, even being an extra activity of our event, we invite you to keep an eye on the museum site to stay up to date on the initiatives for that night!
You can find more information on this page.
A Sensory
Experience
Past editions have embedded a great deal of enthusiasm among all the participants, thanks to the numerous initiatives that were organized: not only the classic sessions, but also the workshops, such as the Maker's Corner, and other real "sensory" experiences, such as the visit to the Tactile Museum or the Dinner in the Dark.
A summary of the vortex of emotions generated during those days was collected in this post.
Would you like to become a Sponsor of the Event?
Accessibility Days is a free event organized by non-profit associations. You can help us pay for the organization with a small financial contribution. We have defined a series of sponsorship levels, which can be consulted on this page.
Contact us at: accessibilitydays@gmail.com and we'll tell you how you can help us support the event and make it even better!