Best Practices Badge for Inclusion and Accessibility

[JimStLeger]

Inclusion starts with accessibility. And being accessible is a holistic approach. It includes ensuring your entire project and community is fully accessible for people with a wide range of disabilities including Deaf/hearing impairment, blind/low vision, mobility, limb, mental health, etc. In the spirit of progress-over-perfection it could start with small steps, many that can easily be implemented. Are your community calls on a platform that enables closed captioning? Are you encouraging (or mandating) an accessible approach for contributing standards (contributing.md)? (Might be adherence to W3C's WCAG 2.1 for example.) Are all images using and including alt text? Are all pdfs screen reader readable? Are your community gatherings physically accessible? Are your events proactive in soliciting attendees for individual accessibility needs? Etc.

There are some existing open source badging efforts that might be bolstered with an accessibility theme. The CHAOSS project has an Event Diversity and Inclusion badging program. But it does not currently look at accessibility as a metric. Perhaps it could. Or perhaps there's a parallel CHAOSS Accessible Event badge to be created. The CII/OpenSSF project has a Best Practices Badge program (silver/gold) that predominantly looks at community coding standards. Similarly, these standards could be expanded to include an accessibility dimension.

Some ideas for consideration.