Diversity and Inclusion

What’s the first thing you think of when someone is called “mentally ill”? Many probably imagine someone unkempt, babbling incoherently on the street or locked up in an asylum.

I am mentally ill, but despite my multiple diagnoses, I am a functional member of society. I’ve been able to deal with my mental illness with treatment, support, and lots of work, and if you’re suffering from mental illness, chances are that you can as well.

In this session, attendees will learn about the basics of accessibility through the lens of inclusive design; the talk will also highlight roles for developers as advocates and implementation specialists for accessibility. Situating people first, this session will examine how persons with disabilities—permanent, temporary, or situational—can face challenges working with non-accessible websites.

When working with Drupal, most of what we’re working with out of the box contains some form of accessibility. However, when it comes to content on a Drupal website, not everything can be controlled by Drupal’s innate capabilities. PDFs are one of these items and are a major source of online content.

During this session, we’ll share clear methods on how to create and use accessible friendly PDFs with your web presence. 

We will cover:

Accessibility is essential for marketers that want to create high-quality content and not exclude people from using their products and services. If you’re in charge of your team’s marketing, you have a lot of things to cover between keeping it up to date, entering and managing content, and making sure it's all accessible.

As part of an inclusive content strategy, how accessible is your social media?

I've always had a mentality of giving back to the people who made me.  How to provide insight to others who might be going through similar motions or experiences that I've traveled so they can learn from my mistakes, my successes, and why certain paths were taken.  One of the biggest giving back moments of my life was being a Board member for ADUG.  I never got a lot of return out of it financially, as that wasn't my intent.  My intent was always to give back to the open source community.  In college, I was a PHP/Front-End Developer, and it gave me a perspective that I otherwise wouldn't ha

What's the state of the Drupal community? How can we promote Drupal to a wider audience, encourage more contribution, and bring more developers into the community? In this session, I'll walk through some updates from the Drupal Association and some ideas about how to grow and foster the community. I'll talk about new initiatives to promote Drupal, increase diversity and inclusion, and coordinate the efforts of event organizers. 

It should be a really interactive session! Bring your questions, thoughts, and ideas.

I’m JD and I have mental illness. I’m also not alone. Every year, roughly 20% of the US adult population deals with some form of mental illness, however that number is MUCH higher in the tech community.