Ethereum Foundation Grant Announcement
A Pro Bono Initiative For The Community
We would like to proudly announce our grant award from the Ethereum Foundation for a pro bono community initiative! This grant is provided through the Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) in order to promote best accessibility practices in the context of Distributed Ledger and Blockchain technology .
Haptics DAO is an early stage social impact startup. This formal announcement is to highlight the grant’s deliverables and goals for this year. Let’s dive into each section!
Expert Interviews
This deliverable consists of interviews from experts and specialists within the intersections of accessibility and disability. This ongoing series of talks will be hosted on our Haptics DAO channel on youtube. The hope is that they serve as forms of inspiration and aid in providing greater insights for the community. Some talks are more technical than others, but we are striving to make the content cater to everyone. All roles in a team and organization can contribute to accessible design.
Our Youtube channel may be found at this link.
Additionally please consult our Linkedin and Twitter for notifications of upcoming talks and articles.
Accessibility Mixed Methods Study
This next deliverable is our mixed methods study to help in setting a baseline for blockchain accessibility.
Namely, what is the current state of DLT and blockchain accessibility? What are prevalent issues and how can we as a community remedy these across all our projects?
In blockchain, despite differences in protocols and ecosystems, many decentralized applications can be attributed to a more general category.
Examples of some of these categories include:
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)
Decentralized exchanges (DEX)
NFT projects/marketplaces
Dashboards and Analytics applications
Analyzing and interviewing access to these major categories will allow us to determine which practices are applicable in making them more inclusive and to eliminate barriers for everyone. To this end, the study consists of a qualitative and a quantitative phase.
The qualitative phase is dedicated to exploring user testing for users who leverage assistive technology or require more accessible design. This phase consists of informal interviews conducted remotely and participants are compensated for 40-60 minutes of their time.
The second phase consists of the quantitative phase. Based upon insights from the first phase, we can determine more specific (quantifiable) questions for a survey to propose for the community.
Additional work in both phases includes analyzing a large list of examples applications and projects in the community with accessibility tooling.
Best Practices
This component is at the application level. There is no shortcut to accessibility. In the same way that we write integration tests to ensure our code functions in the correct way, we must also ensure our applications are accessible. Accessibility has many dimensions and different accommodations are required for different needs.
We are therefore in the process of developing “dapp clones” which are examples of some of the major categories of application types in the blockchain space. The purpose of creating a clone with better standards is twofold:
1. Others may use it as a source of inspiration or a template for their work.
2. Encourage teams to further explore potential barriers in their own existing work. The intention is not to point fingers and lay blame. Issues may be raised by teams and contributors by their discretion at a repository level in their projects.
Accessibility is something we must all achieve within our applications. There is no single solution or magical fix. Accommodations and designs are dynamic and unique.
Final Thoughts and Recap
This initiative is to foster greater inclusion and accessibility for the Ethereum community and wider blockchain ecosystem. Eliminating any barriers to access now will pave the way for greater innovation and inclusion as technology continues to advance.
Adding accessibility to applications, apart from the humanitarian impact, aids in more robust code, less user queries for support, and better design for all users.
If we are truly to be an inclusive space, we as a community, must be accessible to all.
As always, thank you for your time. Onwards!
Further Resources and Links
1- https://esp.ethereum.foundation/
2- https://www.w3.org/TR/wcag-3.0/#abstract
3- https://webaim.org/