Last week, when I wrote about moving our Refresh Detroit event registration from Meetup.com to Eventbrite, I explained the main reason was to create a more usable and accessible experience for our members.
I talked about how the Meetup.com design released in late 2017 resulted in a frustrating and less accessible experience for organizers as well as people registering for events.
As Refresh Detroit co-organizers, Nick DeNardis and I talked about event registration alternatives to Meetup.com and ultimately chose to use Eventbrite.
Why?
When we reviewed Eventbrite, it offered a better organizer and attendee experience.
Plus, it had the built-in option for charging for events as well as some limited mailing list functionality. That’s something the other alternative GetTogether, doesn’t currently have.
And, in the back of my mind, I remembered other accessibility meetup organizers had commented that Eventbrite was more accessible.
But I have to admit, we didn’t do any testing.
Thankfully, one of our Refresh Detroit members did. Read on to learn what they discovered.
Eventbrite and Accessibility
Al Puzzuoli is a long-time Refresh Detroit member. We met years ago when he worked at Michigan State University and I worked at Washtenaw Community College.
Al has presented to our meetup group several times over the years on games and accessibility.
When I mentioned to Al that our Refresh Detroit group was moving from Meetup.com to Eventbrite to improve accessibility and usability for our members, he offered to check out a sample event.
He’d let me know if there were any issues with a screen reader.
I was grateful for his help.
Al uses a screen reader daily. While I could test an event with a screen reader, he has more expertise and knowledge on what issues could block screen reader users from registering for events.
The results came back quickly and were overall positive.
Testing Eventbrite with the JAWS Screen Reader
Using the JAWS 2020 screen reader with the latest Chrome version, Al was able to register for an event on Eventbrite.
He encountered a slight issue trying to expand the Register menu. He first tried to do it by pressing Enter.
When Enter didn’t work, he tried the space bar and it worked.
When I asked his thoughts on the process, he replied,
It’s not perfect, but I didn’t see any showstoppers.
The confirmation email message has a lot of graphics that cause more verbosity than I would like with JAWS, but it’s readable.
That was good news to hear!
I canceled Al’s registration for the sample event.
And that’s when we ran into a couple issues. Neither one of us received the cancellation email notification from Eventbrite.
Not an accessibility issue, but we would have liked to review the whole process. Which is something I’m following up with Eventbrite support.
Wrapping Up
As meetup organizers, we were glad Al confirmed that Eventbrite can be used with the JAWS screen reader on Chrome.
Hopefully the results will be useful to other meetup organizers looking for more usable, accessible event registration options.
Yes, we only tested with one screen reader on one browser.
More testing needs to be done with other browsers, screen readers, and assistive technology. If you do some accessibility testing with Eventbrite, let me know the results.
For my part, I’ve contacted Eventbrite support to ask them about their accessibility roadmap. I couldn’t find an accessibility statement on their website.
Similar to what I did a few years ago asking about accessibility in Hootsuite and Buffer, I’ll publish what I learn from Eventbrite.
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