I am excited to be co-leading a new project focused on accessibility at the Salesforce Commons Community Sprint being held this August. Our working title is the Accessible Community Working Group.

Since last fall I’ve been working with Salesforce’s Kelly Hamilton to review Trailhead content for accessibility. Our goal is to make sure the content goes beyond just passing formal WCAG requirements. We are trying to make sure it’s actually useful to the largest audience possible.

To help broaden that effort, and help the Salesforce nonprofit community grow comfortable with accessibility testing, we are creating this new Salesforce Commons project for this summer’s virtual sprint. Hopefully it will grow into a sustainable project.

What does the project do?

I gave the sprint organizers this description:

We’re helping ensure Trailhead, and other content important to our community, is accessible to all members of our community. Building on efforts started during the Denver Sprint in 2025 we will be helping community members understand how to test for accessibility by auditing Trailhead content (and any other content we can influence that the group thinks is important to the community). No web accessibility experience required (but greatly appreciated). We will provide resources ahead of time, training during the sprint, and places for you to get started giving feedback directly to the trailhead team! We will also be looking for ideas about where the community thinks this project should go as we get established.

We needed something to get ourselves started, but nothing is cast in stone. Once we have a team gathered, we can discuss our future as a group. The description, name, and goals will all be subject to future discussions.

Who should sign up?

I hope anyone attending the sprint in August will consider joining us. No prior experience testing accessibility is required. For people new to accessibility testing we will provide materials ahead of time, and some training about what to look for and how to report it. If you have experience testing accessibility of web sites we’d love to have you join us.

If you use assistive technology in your daily life we are particularly interested in your engagement. I know full well the best people to engage in these efforts are the people who are let down when they are not done right.

What you can expect

As a participant in a new project you can expect to have a lot of influence over happens. Kelly and I worked out a process to do reviews and submit feedback for Trailhead content that we’ll be adapting to work for the sprint. We also want to have some discussion about effective standards to encourage for community related content.

Basically, we have a starting point, but we need more engagement to make the project successful.

What content will we review

We will have suggestions to help people get started. Those will include at least some trailhead modules and some community project documentation.

Our goal is to review any content that we can influence which is important to the Salesforce nonprofit community. We know that includes trailhead. I expect that means community documentation for other sprint projects (I’ve put out a call to other project leaders for content they want reviewed).

We hope people will bring their own ideas as well. The only boundary will be content we can actually influence so everyone’s time is well spent.

Some resources to get you started

We still need to get a list of resources together before the sprint, but here are some to get started with:

What happens after the sprint?

That’ll be up to the group that joins us. We have ideas but we want to hear from the community. So feel free to come with your suggestions about the directions we should take this effort in the future.

If you have questions and want to reach me ahead of time contact me through LinkedIn or the Trailblazer Community.