Hello World!
Welcome to Historica11y1!
This newsletter is all about the history of web accessibility; those who fought for it; the disabled people it is meant to empower; the roadblocks; the innovators; the implementers; the maintainers; the global, interlinked efforts, and everything in between and that I haven’t yet thought of.
I’m indebted to many other disabled people in this work and I am determined to highlight as many developers, designers, engaged users, lawyers (and others I again haven’t thought of) as possible.
I’m hoping for this to be an international affair, and would love to hear about any resources, people or organisations that I should contact in this effort. I originally phrased this project as wanting to document web accessibility “from the beginning”, but as long as there have been disabled people we have been adapting things to suit us, so I think really I’m documenting web accessibility everywhere it has appeared and how it came to be.
I’m aiming for this newsletter to come out weekly on Sundays, and I hope you will subscribe! This is an experiment and I’m pretty new to this kind of research - lots of trawling through W3C archives will probably be involved! - so please bear with me as I find my footing in this exciting project.
Finally, I have subscriptions available to this newsletter; I’ll send mid week updates about work in progress exclusively to paid subscribers, and founding members will be able to start chat threads, but the “main event” aka the core newsletter will always be free to everyone. Please subscribe if you feel like this is valuable and you’d like to support it(and you’re able!); I’d really appreciate being able to pay my bills doing something I love.
Thanks so much for reading!
pronounced historically, a play on the web developer contraction for web accessibility. The 11 in the middle stands for the eleven characters between the “a” and “y” in the word “accessibility.