Iota School

We wrapped our Pandas/NumFOCUS/Iota Nonvisual Data Science Workshop Series yesterday. Our learners brought incredible energy to these workshops, amazing to have 80 blind, VI, and allied folks in the room and over 350 at home following along async. We blind folks get left out of conversations around data science, AI, and coding far too often, it feels like we're in a moment where we have an opportunity to change some of that. Thanks to my co-instructor, Sarah Kane, and to Pandas and NumFOCUS for making these workshops possible. Special thanks to Patrick Höfler and Richard Shadrach for their advocacy in getting this project funded. Also thanks to Chancey Fleet for some timely technical interventions and to Tony Fast for being an active ally and participant. You can check out the playlist for these workshops below. https://lnkd.in/eb47mHu8

Signups are now open for the Pandas-supported workshop series on Nonvisual Data Science. This five-workshop series will teach the fundamentals of data analysis and sonification using nonvisual tools and technologies. The workshops are designed for those who are blind, low vision, or who otherwise have difficulty accessing visual tools for data science. Thanks to Pandas and NumFOCUS for making these workshops possible through a Small Development Grant. Registration, a full schedule, and additional information available at this link: https://lnkd.in/e5NvVqku These workshops are free and open to the public, and will be led by Sarah Kane and myself. Special thanks to Patrick Höfler, a core developer at Pandas, for supporting this series. Please feel free to share on your own channels, with our thanks.

I'm so excited about the release of accessible HTML papers on the arXiv, one of the most important preprint servers in the sciences. This is a major step forward for #accessibility in #STEM. Thanks to Shamsi Brinn, who organized the arXiv Accessibility Forum earlier this year to solicit and socialize the experiences of the disabled community early in this process. 👏 🧑🦯 https://lnkd.in/gknBDuRS

Introducing the Hikma Advisory Board! We've assembled this cohort of mentors to help the Hikma Collective reflect on what we've learned and support strategic decisions about where to go next. Meet the people helping us shape the next steps of the Hikma Collective. #HikmaHi5 https://hubs.la/Q02bzKrb0

I've had a blast working on the sigstore documentation as part of the 2023 Google Season of Docs. Sigstore is a major open source initiative for software supply chain security. Among other things, we replatformed the whole docs site to #hugo and did a full #accessibility evaluation. It was pretty satisfying to close out some longstanding issues and to work with a great team. Thanks to Lisa Tagliaferri, PhD and Hayden Blauzvern for leadership on the project. From our post-project case study: > We believe that Sigstore is a high-impact and necessary project and that docs are a big, if sometimes underappreciated, element of our community. The docs are often how users first encounter Sigstore, and the docs also hold together different teams of tool-specific contributors. We feel that this period has set up Sigstore to move forward with a more maintainable, functional, and featureful docs site. We would like to thank the Season of Docs team and Google for supporting Sigstore and the open source community by sponsoring this project. https://docs.sigstore.dev/ #SeasonOfDocs #WriteTheDocs, #techcomm, #TechnicalWriting #OpenSource @emckean