Reflections on A11y Camp 2025

Samantha Dancey, Global Accessibility Practice Lead and Annie Valentine, National Sales Director, attended the annual A11y Camp in Melbourne in November. A11y Camp is an annual event focused on digital accessibility and inclusion, featuring presentations and speakers across the industry. These are some reflections and highlights from Samantha Dancey.

Samantha and Annie standing in front of a bright pink backdrop that says 'A11y Camp' with pink and blue balloons either side. Samantha and Annie are both wearing black shirts and smiling.
Sam is a caucasian female with shoulder length blonde hair and grey eyes. Wearing glasses and a green shirt with a black jacket
Samantha Dancey, Global Accessibility Practice Lead

It was fantastic to connect with our digital accessibility peers at A11yCamp this year. It’s always so uplifting to meet people from a variety of organisations, who are at different levels of accessibility maturity, and learn more about their approaches, successes and challenges.

Some of the key messages from the conference:

  • Jennison Asuncion, Head of Accessibility at LinkedIn sharing his insights from across his career and his current role. Jennison said that so many conversations happen when accessibility it not ‘at the table’. Having accessibility champions throughout an organisation means that they can raise accessibility from the beginning and then lean on the accessibility specialists when they need support.
  • Ricky Onsman, Principal Technical Writer at TPGi shared that ‘disabled is the new normal’.
  • Michelle MacDonald, Senior Test Automation Engineer, Aesop presented about their approach to accessibility. It is important to learn from each other and for organisations to be able to share their methods and processes for digital accessibility. Michelle informed us that her team has a 4-stage process; Plot (the road ahead), Brief (lots of design briefings), Protect (block code mergers if they do not meet requirements), Report.
  • Herin Hentry, Digital Accessibility Lead at a government agency talked about their approach to meeting AS EN 301 549 (ICT Procurement Accessibility Standards). Herin described how they ‘tweaked’ their processes to include their requirement that procurement meets, or is close to, the standard. She discussed the processes and checks they have created to enable them to validate accessibility, encourage suppliers and set time frames. The key message from Herin was ‘progress over perfection’. 

There were many other amazing presentations, and of course, networking afterwards was a highlight. Meeting the wonderful volunteers and attendees, and having the opportunity to discuss our work together, is always a delight.