David,

Thanks for letting me know. We absolutely want the conference to be accessible for all Canadians (that’s why we use those words in the tagline) and I apologize for any difficulties you’ve had with our online presence.

For context, right now, “they” is me: I built the site, registered the domain, wrote the copy, and manage the social media accounts. I’m also the person who reads every submitted survey, which is why I responded immediately to your feedback by email when I received your input.

We’re using two commercial solutions—Squarespace and Typeform—to run the site at the moment, which I built myself. One of my reasons for choosing a commercial platform was that it would have such features built in, and I’m surprised to learn that neither offers these kinds of features. I also struggled with making the site bilingual using these tools, which seem aimed almost entirely at a unilingual English audience. Fortunately, our current website is temporary, and we’ll be launching a more comprehensive one shortly.

I have already sent both companies’ support departments messages to find out how we can improve our accessibility using the existing tools. If they’re unable to do so, it will definitely affect our choice of platform once we launch the conference properly.

We asked people to suggest the topics they felt were most important to them so we could design the curriculum around this. Several people, including yourself, have reminded us that the discussion of digital inclusiveness needs to be broader. I assure you that inclusive accessibility is important to us.

Thanks for bringing the shortcomings of the platforms to our attention. If you have any questions about the event, please respond to the mail I’ve sent you and perhaps we can get on a call to discuss.