SciPy 2023

Accessibility practices are for everyone, but this may be especially important to notebook authors in academic and public settings where it is often legally required. Using staple accessibility frameworks, this talk will dive into what it means to make your notebook’s content accessible and provide actionable guidance on how you as an author can improve your notebooks. These skills can be applied regardless of preferred notebook interface, author skill set, or prior accessibility knowledge.

This talk is best for an audience that is familiar with Jupyter notebooks. Prior accessibility knowledge or any other Jupyter knowledge is not necessary. The content is likely to be most engaging for an audience who regularly authors notebooks.

The structure of the talk will be as follows:
1. Background and introduction to accessibility (7 minutes)
1.1 Why this talk? (Hint: community members have requested it)
1.2 Defining accessibility and scoping: what we will and won’t cover in the talk
1.3 Common terms (disability, WCAG, assistive technology)
2. Breaking down the notebook with WCAG (13 minutes)
2.1 Perceivable elements (Labels, colors, alternative forms of content)
2.2 Operable elements (Labeling for interactive areas, keyboard controls)
2.3 Understandable writing and structure (Markdown headings, summaries, plain language)
3. Adopting a notebook accessibility checklist (2 minutes)
4. What you can do next (2 minutes)
5. Questions (6 minutes)

At the end of this talk, attendees will
* Have an awareness of foundational accessibility principles and how they can appear in Jupyter notebooks.
* Be able to identify common accessibility pitfalls (ie. misused Markdown, incomplete visualizations, etc.) in Jupyter notebooks and what to do instead.
* Have a checklist for easy reference of accessibility best practices when writing their own notebooks or editing existing ones.