Today was the end of axe-hackathon 2021 and I was presenting my work with aXeSiA, my first open source, accessibility oriented, project.
I was not even playing with the idea that aXeSiA will win, just to make that clear. It is not so innovative and it’s impact and reach are not hackathon material. It was just because of the timing – I wanted to make a tool for myself and axe-con asked if we can maybe have some ideas for axe-hackathon. So I just went with the flow. I will need the tool for myself, but it is based on open-source, so why not share it with others, maybe even cooperate with multiple people to add more features and fix more bugs quickly.
Congratulations to the winner and also other projects
It was also funny when I listened to other project presentations and wanted to be with them as well. Especially winner project – called Inclusiville (opens in new window) – seemed something very interesting. I’ve actually worked on something similar in my spare time – trying to simulate how a screen-reader works for sighted people and give them tasks to solve. But I did not get far with my experiment because I needed testing tool more. But the idea is brilliant and I was not surprised they won.
Other 3 projects were also extremely good:
- HiringCognitive.tech (opens in new window) – research and webpage with useful information about how to hire for cognitive diversity in technology,
- Hapticast (opens in new window) – amazing concept – how to convey multi-sensory information using haptic technology,
- a11ysupport.io (opens in new window) – this page lists how supported are different aria elements in different assistive technologies and browsers.
If I had more spare time I would definitely like to contribute to all projects that were in the axe-hackathon, especially Inclusiville and A11ySupport.io.
Lessons learned – what would be better for a hackathon
Well, the main lesson is that if I wanted to even dream of winning I would need a team to be able to make things more effective in parallel, I guess. I like lists, so let me list some thoughts here:
- team work would be best – one person can only get so far. Back-end, front-end, database, data analysis, user experience and user interface persons would make any product much better, right,
- thinking of impact is vital – aXeSiA is not suitable for people that do not want to spend time in their command line. So nice user interface and working, public, website would be much better,
- innovation – combining multiple tools is maybe not the innovation that a hackathon was looking for. Anybody can do it. It would maybe be better to include some innovative technologies like machine learning or even maybe blockchain. I’ve made some plans with machine learning, but again – it would be possible if I had a team backing the work
- presentation – well, let’s be honest, my presentation skills are not too good. And English as a second language does not help. It is not an excuse just a fact.
Plans for future of aXeSiA
As mentioned – aXeSiA was never planned as a one-time project for a hackathon but as a tool that I will be using and evolving as an open source. It will be my favorite tool to test for accessibility and other website related metrics so I have quite big ambitions for it, some of them are:
- stability and reliability improvements (it works but it needs improvements),
- additional tools need to be integrated and their results presented effectively,
- architecture decisions – it is now just a local tool maybe move it to the cloud would be better,
I’ve made a project on GitHub board called critical improvements (opens in new window) and I will add tasks there, so that I can map them to pull-requests and be able to follow up on everything.
So – no, aXeSiA is a tool I am planning to use and evolve and if anybody out there want’s to contribute I will also do my best to follow up on that. Please visit the repository for aXeSiA on GitHub (opens in new window) as I’ve made some additional information about security, contribution and code of conduct right after the hackathon.
