Building accessible-app.com: Further steps together

First things first, I am amazed by how well the idea was received on Twitter, judging from the vast amount of retweets, likes and replies. As I already wrote over there: It would be really really great to create an amazing resource on building inclusive designed Single Page Apps together.

But enough of self-reflection (I'll get back to it later). Here are learnings since the last blog post:

1. The brainstorming list has to be "opened", meaning: put on GitHub for interested folks to edit and contribute to this early phase of the project
2. I need to put content on accessible-app.com. Be it a short pitch, links to above mentioned GitHub repo, and links to these blog posts - a dedicated small website is better than an idea, only sold with skewed comparison ("todomvc.com for web accessibility") and spread out in a series of blog posts
3. The first project phase must be completion and refinement of the brainstorming, leading to a backlog of web app features and frameworks. But I think it would be counter-productive to stay in this phase too long, because of two reasons:

• The backlog can and will grow throughout the project either way
• The backlog is only the mere starting point, not the aim of the project

Hence, phase 2 will be prioritizing the backlog and picking the first items to work on (and to work in, when these items are frameworks). No matter how many theories we make in advance about the project, that's the point where we get insights.

Learning 1: Setting up GitHub

For better collaboration, I created an "accessible-app" organization on GitHub and created the first repo, backlog. I guess the best solution for adding and commenting new and existing ideas is using GitHub issues - so I transferred the original brainstorming list and ideas of others (Marc, Steve). Feature backlog items are labelled accordingly, framework ideas as well.

Learning 2: Ideas for a descriptive micro site

Although I really feel the urge to create a logo for this project 😌 (Edit: Ooops.) I feel that in this phase it's way too early to think of "marketing". A small site with an elevator pitch of the project idea would be good, though. Ideas for the contents of this small site:

• Short description. Maybe someone's got a better comparison than the todomvc.com one?
• Link to the GitHub organization
• Link to this series of blog posts

Am I missing something important?

Learning 3: Giving the brainstorming phase a time box

I got no experience with a comparable project, but my instinct tells me to timebox the ideation phase and start to work on the concrete implementation as soon as reasonably possible. Let's say: Phase 1 ends on October 1st, 2018, at the latest?

Phew, part 2

The feeling of overwhelming still persists. But the great feedback on twitter yesterday, with retweets from both web app and accessibility specialists further stoked up my enthusiasm for this idea. Let's start!