Jyväskylä 2025: Accessibility isn’t compliance, it’s care - and in South Africa, it’s connection

At PloneConf 2025, I challenged us to see accessibility not as a checkbox exercise, but as an act of care, rooted in the South African tradition of "making a plan" that works for real people in real circumstances.

I drew on powerful examples from South African innovation, from the MiDesk that brings classrooms to students without schools, to the Hippo Roller that makes water accessible to children and elderly people who couldn't carry traditional containers.

These physical solutions share a crucial insight with digital accessibility: when you design for the edges, you create innovations that benefit everyone. I brought this home through real stories from my work: a student in a rural village where the difference between a 15MB and 150MB file means finishing an assignment or missing a deadline. The Soul City project that succeeded by creating a low-bandwidth "side site" that actually reached rural communities, contrasted with an education client whose beautiful 8MB homepage couldn't load in the schools it was meant to serve.

Key Takeaways:

• Design for the edges: Solutions that serve the most constrained users often become innovations that benefit everyone
• Accessibility is participation: It's not about screen readers alone. It's about bandwidth, language diversity, digital literacy, and real human constraints
• Empower your editors: Make accessible choices feel natural through required fields, schema-driven guidance, and smart automation rather than adding compliance burdens
• Think local, impact global: Many African innovations (like M-PESA) started by solving local accessibility problems and became worldwide solutions
• Care over compliance: Communities like Plone show that when we share knowledge and build better tools together, we transform compliance into true inclusion