(stream): So how accessible are (Jupyter) notebooks for screen reader users?

Hi all,

Accessibility is one of those topics that is often ignored until it’s too late, at times deliberately, and at other times completely by accident.

Unfortunately, the consequences of this are often far greater than most people realize; an inaccessible tool/platform can get companies sued, can get people fired (if their current employer adopts these tools), and can make huge portions of a target audience feel discriminated against and excluded.

Notebooks, either built on Jupyter Notebooks, Google Colab, VS Code and what have you, are becoming more and more of a staple within various fields, be it AI, Machine Learning, Datascience, programming education and more.
So how accessible ARE these tools, at present?

Hi! I’m a fully blind (no sight, no monitor, no nothing) developer and accessibility auditor that likes to create this kind of content, and this is exactly the question I aim to answer in the coming (few) stream(s).

Tomorrow at 3 PM EST (noon PST, 8 PM BST, 9 PM CEST), I will hop onto twitch and Youtube in order to start answering this question. We’ll look at Jupyter Notebooks first and foremost, bring in resources the community have created over the years to talk about notebooks in general and their accessibility and talk about the notebooks UI from both a web developer as well as an accessibility expert’s point of view.
Along the way, topics like " how would you represent data for a screen reader user?" and “if there are accessibility issues, how can a screenreader user best work around them?” will come up as well. There’s a huge lot to cover, so we may have to split this across several streams but for now, I hope i’ll be seeing some of you there tomorrow.

THanks,
Zersiax

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