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:

• Accessible Salesforce Customizations: Inspired by discussion at the Denver Sprint, Kelly made this one happen in what felt like record time. There’s a lot in there and well worth any administrator’s time.
• Get Started with Web Accessibility : A useful trail of general accessibility guidance.
• Stanford’s Guide to Alt Texts: Good image alt-texts are hard for a lot of people. I’ve had Stanford’s guide offered to me several times when seeking advice.
• Accessibility Best Practices for Your Project: A guide for open source projects to help ensure they are usable by as many people as possible.
• Official Fundamentals Overview: This is the introduction to accessibility from the folks that maintain the standards.

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.

In a world that at times seems to grow increasingly uncaring, chaotic, and impossible to change, two sets of teenagers, a century apart, living remarkably different lives, may offer us a path forward.

On March 25, 1911, 145 textile workers perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. They died of smoke inhalation, flames, or from injuries sustained as they leapt down the elevator shaft or out of the ninth story windows.  The factory owners had locked these young, largely immigrant women in their building so they could inspect their bags as they left and on that day no one remembered to free them.

Two years earlier, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory workers had gone on strike, as part of a larger effort on the part of textile workers across New York city.  As these young women picketed, marched, and struck, police beat them, with the approval of many bystanders. The media paid little attention, except when a small number of wealthy women joined them in their protests.

Few non-working class New Yorkers cared that the children spent their days in factories not schools, immigrants lived in dire poverty, and working conditions were hazardous.  It was only in death that they became human.

From the American Experience documentary about the fire:

Newspapers, public officials, the wider world had begun to attach names to these Triangle workers by then: Rosie Bassino and her sister Irene; Max Lehrer and his brother Sam; Mary Goldstein; the Saracino sisters; Michela Marciano, who had survived an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius before emigrating to America; Rose Manofsky, whose little sister had lost her sole source of support; and Salvatore Maltese, who had buried every female in his household: his wife Catherine, his 20-year old daughter Lucia and his daughter Rosaria, who was – at 14 – the fire’s youngest victim.

Apathy and even hostility towards the labor movement finally changed to outrage, support, and eventually significant reform as these invisible women suddenly became visible.

One hundred years later, the official charge from the family court to Guardian ad Litems charges us with conducting an independent investigation so we can make recommendations to the court.  To conduct those investigations, guardians have a right to sit in on all meetings about the teenagers we advocate for, visit their schools, talk to their teachers and doctors, and see where they live and meet with their caregivers. In doing so, I discovered to my amazement, that I have the power to make an invisible child–often poor, neglected or abused, afraid to open-up, justifiably suspicious of the system, and sometimes openly hostile–appear human. All of a sudden an angry school principle stops seeing a defiant, scary teenager in need of expulsion and instead sees a child afraid of the world and in need of help rebuilding trust.

Recently, while working with the staff in for-profit group homes, I have stumbled on the power of the language of motherhood. While I don’t actually consider the teenagers we work with children, I use that language, I describe them as my children and myself as their mother, at least figuratively.  The effect is polarizing. For a few adults, the reminder that the person they are intent on punishing is a human being and someone’s child makes them angry. But more often than not, that language de-escalates tense situations, helps me refocus conversations around the children’s strengths rather than their perceived failings, and leads us out of confrontation into negotiation or even creative problem solving.

Increasingly I see part of my role as showing the teenagers that they don’t have to be invisible.  That they have rights that deserve to be respected, needs that deserve to be met, feelings that deserve to be honored.  And seeing me stick up for them helps them see themselves as more valuable and also more powerful. Sometimes I am rewarded by watching them learn to successfully advocate for themselves and make a difference in their lives, to see themselves as powerful.

Today, the anonymous victims of textile factory fires are still poor women, still invisible, but this time we ignore them because they live in foreign places that most of us have never seen: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, even while, like New Yorkers, we wear the clothes they make.

So who else am I still leaving invisible? Who are you making visible?