Branching out
I’m a digital accessibility consultant by trade. Like most of us, I fell into it by accident. It’s had its ups and downs but I’m in a good place at the moment. I transitioned into the higher education sector a year and a half ago and it was the right move.
My work means needing to know a lot about many different things: accessibility standards, legislation, testing tools and approaches, assistive technologies, web development techniques, document accessibility, user research approaches, training design and delivery.. I’m a natural problem solver and I love collaboration so it’s a good fit.
I have technical skills: I’m very comfortable working with HTML/CSS/ARIA and a bit of JavaScript. I’ve dabbled in Static Site Generators such as Hugo and Eleventy. I even know a bit of PHP from a past life and I can just about use NPM properly. Ultimately, I can diagnose problems, suggest solutions and speak in a language that makes sense to developers.
But I’m not a web developer. At least, not a proper one. There are large swathes of modern web development tooling that are currently beyond me - linters, type checkers, pre-processors, bundlers - including proper version control.
Oh I’ve used Git a little and I understand what it can do for me. But that’s like understanding that a car could get me from A to B and that getting started means taking the handbrake off and pressing the accelerator. I still can’t drive.
Git scares me and for a lot of past personal projects I decided it just wasn’t worth the effort. However, in the last couple of weeks I’ve had the privilege to work on a community project: The Internet Archive Fundraiser Zine.
We’re encouraging donations to the Internet Archive during International Archives Week (June 9th - 15th). Donating means you can suggest a topic and we’ll find a cool thing to put in an even cooler digital zine. The project is organised by eladnarra.
We also have a cool website - https://archivezine.org - and I’ve contributed just a little bit to its development. I had to use Git and use it properly. The codebase was well written and easy to understand, and my Eleventy knowledge definitely came in handy.
My contributions were small - some functionality, some CSS tweaks, some content - but I got into the version control cycle: fetching the latest changes from the repo, creating a branch, committing my changes, making a pull request. This won’t be particularly impressive to most readers, I’m sure, but I felt like I actually knew what I was doing. I was able to do something to move the project forward and it felt good.
Prior to this my only contribution to an open source project was a definition for Self-Defined, a modern dictionary, and I think I actually messed up and made more work for the owner. However, this time has been smooth and I actually enjoyed working with Git.
I’m not sure I’ll suddenly volunteer on more open source projects any time soon - I’m still scared of messing up a commit and the pressure of meeting others’ standards - but I’m having such a lovely experience working on this project. It’s a credit to eladnarra and the other volunteers for making this such a welcoming space to learn.
There’s still time to check out our project if you’re interested: please consider donating to the Internet Archive and/or share our website. We’d be very grateful:)