From Meetup to Movement – Joschi Kuphal on Building the Accessibility Club Summit

Back in 2014, a small meetup in Nuremberg planted the seeds for what would later become a vital part of Europe’s digital accessibility movement. What began as an informal exchange among accessibility enthusiasts has grown into the Accessibility Club, a thriving network of events and summits dedicated to building a more inclusive web.

At the center of this evolution is Joschi Kuphal, a designer, developer, accessibility advocate, and founder of tollwerk, a digital agency based in Nuremberg. Tollwerk specializes in custom web development, open source technologies, and human-centered design, with a strong emphasis on sustainable, privacy-conscious digital solutions. Under Joschi’s guidance, tollwerk has supported numerous socially impactful digital initiatives and championed web standards and accessibility best practices.

Most recently, Joschi and the Accessibility Club team hosted the Accessibility Club Summit 2026 in Würzburg, bringing together some of the world’s most respected voices in accessibility. The event featured two dynamic days of talks, workshops, and community building, providing a rare and invaluable space for professionals across disciplines to learn, collaborate, and push the boundaries of what inclusive technology can achieve.

In this edition of The Better Web Dialogues, we speak with Joschi about the origins and growth of the Accessibility Club, the intentional community design behind its summits, and the challenges of organizing such events without losing sight of values. We also explore his personal journey into accessibility, the philosophy that drives his work, and his vision for a web that truly includes everyone.

Origins and inspiration

Q. Can you share the story behind the first Accessibility Club meetup in 2014? What motivated you to initiate this gathering, and did you anticipate its evolution into an international summit?

The Accessibility Club was never planned. It grew out of a screen reader we almost couldn’t use. But let me back up.

In 2013, my team and I founded a so-called Open Device Lab, part of a worldwide initiative that had started with my friend, the British developer and designer Jeremy Keith. In a blog post, he had invited the developer community to come to his studio and use the devices he kept there, mostly smartphones and tablets, to test their web applications. The idea quickly caught on, and agencies, especially across Europe, began opening comparable facilities to the community. For us, the idea pushed at an open door, and we soon had the best-equipped Open Device Lab in Germany. Shortly afterwards, an American woman offered, via an international mailing list, to support an Open Device Lab with a generous donation, provided the tools bought with it had to do with accessibility and came with a long-term strategy for improving it. I applied for the donation and started thinking about how to live up to the donor’s wishes.

We had already been working with accessibility for a few years and were well-connected. I reached out to Marco Zehe, then responsible for the accessibility of the Firefox browser at Mozilla, and asked which devices he considered particularly worthwhile. Surprisingly, Marco didn’t recommend any special device. Instead, he suggested we offer visitors to our Open Device Lab the option of using a screen reader to test web applications. He put me in touch with Willi Lutzenberger, a local vendor, from whom, thanks to the donation, which we had in fact been awarded, we bought our first JAWS license. Handing it over, Willi, who is blind himself, congratulated me, but rightly pointed out that operating the screen reader would be anything but self-explanatory for our visitors. At that point, the developer community simply lacked experience with assistive technologies.

I had to agree, and as so often, I decided to fall forward. Why not set up a small meetup to introduce developers and designers to assistive technologies? Without thinking about it for long, I planned a first gathering at the co-working space in my hometown and persuaded the vendor to walk a small group through his screen reader. About ten of us met, and we had planned for two hours. During that very meeting, it became clear we had an endless need to talk, and after four full hours, the co-working space had to practically throw us out. This would not remain a one-off. The Accessibility Club meetup was born. A few months later, we met again, as part of Nürnberg Web Week, a multi-day event I was helping to build up at the time. By then, there were 30 interested people, supported by the city of Nuremberg and with Marco Zehe among the guest speakers. From that point on, things almost took on a life of their own.

Evolution of the Accessibility Club

Q. How did the Accessibility Club transition from local meetups to international summits? What were some pivotal moments or decisions that facilitated this growth?

In the summer of 2016, I came across a tweet by the American accessibility expert Karl Groves, who announced he’d be in Germany that autumn and asked whether anyone wanted to organize a workshop or some other accessibility event with him. I’d had brief contact with Karl before and found the idea appealing. Independently, the Berlin-based developer Stefan Judis had signaled interest on Twitter in putting together an accessibility event in Berlin, but lacked a concrete starting point. And my friend Marc Thiele, founder and driving force behind the creative conference beyond tellerrand, had announced his first Berlin conference, which I naturally wanted to attend. I put one and one and one together and decided the Accessibility Club should leave my hometown for the first time and venture into the wider world. In November 2016, the first Accessibility Club meetup in Berlin took place, together with Karl Groves, who has been an ardent supporter of our initiatives ever since.

More meetups in Berlin, Nuremberg, and Munich followed, with steadily growing attendance, before Stefan and I took the plunge in 2018 and dared to put together a full conference dedicated solely to accessibility. Until then, we’d had slight doubts about whether we could fill a full-day event on the topic. But it sold out in no time, with 200 attendees, a clear sign that accessibility appeals to a large audience.

2018 was very draining. I organized more than 40 events in total, also beyond the Accessibility Club, from small weekly meetups in my office to an international conference in Iceland. I had to decide to take on less and hand over part of the work. In the meantime, local meetups had sprung up in other cities too, some inspired by the Accessibility Club. And so the idea of a summit was born, one that national and international accessibility communities could organize jointly. In November 2019, the first two-day summit took place in Berlin, combining a barcamp day with eight half- and full-day workshops the next day. Since then, the summit format has been the main form in which the Accessibility Club appears in different places, Amsterdam in 2024, Würzburg in 2025, and 2026. In parallel, offshoots organized by community members existed or still exist in Finland, Belarus, and, since last year, Hamburg.

Organizing international summits

Q. What are the key components and challenges involved in organizing events like the Accessibility Club Summit? How do you ensure these events are inclusive and accessible to a diverse audience?

An exhaustive description of everything it takes to organize an inclusive event would go well beyond the scope of this interview, and I should say up front that I haven’t come by any of this easily. I don’t consider myself someone who has professionally learned to organize events, quite the opposite. I run these community initiatives alongside my regular day job as a developer, designer, lecturer, and consultant, with no formal training for it. All of this is essentially a hobby, albeit an at times very time-consuming one.

So please take what follows as anything but a checklist. It’s an arbitrary and almost certainly incomplete snapshot of the things I’ve learned to pay attention to, loosely grouped along three levels: the venue, the communication around it, and the “soft” aspects of how people are treated once they arrive.

The first level is the on-site situation, and it’s the one people think of first. Is the venue accessible to people with all conceivable disabilities? Are there accessible facilities, including restrooms, access routes, signage, and quiet retreat spaces for people who are sensorially overloaded?

But the considerations begin much earlier, with the format itself and how the event is announced and communicated. Information about the event has to be understandable and accessible, whether on the website, in promotional media, in invitation letters, or in social media announcements. Communication before and during the event must be accessible too, including live captioning for talks and accessible digital companion media such as the program.

The level I pay the most attention to, though, is the “soft” one. We value every dimension of diversity, so that beginners and experts alike find an engaging environment. The same is true for people with the most varied impairments and disabilities. Part of that is keeping the barriers to attending as low as possible in every respect. All Accessibility Club events are therefore, on principle, either free or run at cost. We always offer scholarship tickets for people who can’t afford to attend for financial reasons. At the 2025 summit, we also enabled online participation in nearly all sessions for the first time, so people who can’t travel for health or other reasons can take part as well. We also try to give attendees an all-round pleasant experience. Wherever there’s catering, we ask about preferences and assistance requirements in advance and take them into account. And we ask all attendees to be respectful of one another, including sensory, communication, and privacy needs.

I could go on for a long time. But it’s important to me to stress, in closing, that I learned much of this only over the years, and I’m certainly nowhere near the end of what there is to learn. I hope our attendees have had a pleasant time at our events despite the occasional hurdle, and I always welcome feedback and further suggestions.

Community and collaboration

Q. The Accessibility Club has seen participation from various countries and communities. How do you foster collaboration among different accessibility groups across Europe?

I actually find it far from easy to gain and keep an overview of the various communities in Europe and beyond, let alone to support them effectively in collaborating and exchanging ideas. Many initiatives are carried out mainly by volunteers. People come and go, many enter the industry for the first time or leave it again, and some meetups struggle under the fluctuating capacity of their active members.

From the Accessibility Club’s perspective, I can say this. Since the first summit at the latest, we’ve tried to connect the communities, at least the European ones, as well as possible and to offer a shared platform for exchange, at least around the summits. For quite some time, there’s been a Slack community that grew out of the Accessibility Club and now has around 800 international members. Several local, independent initiatives have formed around the Club, some still active today and organized entirely independently of me. I support the direct offshoots not only with advice, motivation, and public communication, but also, for example, with a listing on the Accessibility Club website to promote their meetups. I also sometimes help run events on-site and provide useful little aids to keep things running smoothly.

I do want to be clear, though, that this is by no means down to me alone. The Accessibility Club lives above all through the commitment of many other volunteers, without whom hardly any of our events could exist. Out of that grows a strong sense of community that has long since spread beyond the Club itself. Our industry, unfortunately, also has its corrosive currents and individuals who, through their words and behavior, actively harm the cause of accessibility. But the members of the Accessibility Club community are, without exception, lovable and deeply dedicated people who all pull together.

Personal commitment to accessibility

Q. What sparked your personal interest in digital accessibility? How has your understanding and approach to accessibility evolved over the years?

Honestly, I can no longer really retrace my own journey into accessibility. My history with the web goes back to the 1990s, when I started building websites. Back then, the materials and techniques I learned were stripped to the absolute basics. Frameworks didn’t exist yet by a long shot, and it was standard to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from the ground up and write them by hand. My theory is that it’s almost impossible to avoid accessibility once you’ve taken such a fundamental path.

On top of that, it has always mattered to me to understand my materials and tools from the ground up. For me, accessibility is a fundamental hallmark of quality; not accounting for it means not doing high-quality work. I’d rather do without glitter and glamour on the surface if the quality underneath suffers for it.

I still remember that, back in the 2000s, we were already handling public-sector commissions whose requirements explicitly stipulated accessibility. My engagement with the subject probably goes back to that time. In my mind, developing accessible solutions is inseparable from writing high-quality HTML.

I see a real problem in the fact that, historically, accessibility was never a mandatory part of the training for the professions in our industry. Yet it belongs firmly in every IT and design discipline. Even my daughter is convinced it should be her school’s job to address dealing with diverse needs, including those of people with disabilities, as early as the classroom. Then again, she’s probably the only one in her circle who has anything close to an eye for barriers and their solutions. For me personally, what has grown over the years above all is the desire to teach accessibility thoroughly to the experts of our trade, in educational settings and in daily practice alike. That’s why a large part of my work today is no longer just developing and designing accessible applications, but above all passing the necessary knowledge on to organizations and future generations.

We must always remember that barriers aren’t given by nature, they’re erected solely by us. So we shouldn’t talk about having to remove barriers. We have to learn to avoid them from the ground up. Only then can we include everyone. Accessibility must be recognized as an absolute hallmark of quality, not treated as a nice-to-have.

In the end, I keep coming back to a mantra from my professor during my interior design studies: “The design of a table is only good if the table also looks good from underneath.” Accessibility is the underside of the table. Most people never see it, but it tells you whether the work was done well.

Role of tollwerk in Accessibility

Q. As the founder of tollwerk, how does your agency integrate accessibility into its projects? Can you share examples of how tollwerk promotes inclusive design and development?

As an agency, we try to cultivate accessibility on many levels. For one, for years we’ve taken on exclusively projects that are in some way connected to accessibility. The web applications and graphic designs we produce should meet the highest possible accessibility standards. Unfortunately, that isn’t always our clients’ priority. Even though it’s my conviction that accessibility only rarely means genuine extra effort, our clients aren’t always persuaded. So for many years, we implemented accessibility unasked, without raising it with the client, so no suspicion could even arise that we were wasting time and money on it. By now, we’re in the fortunate position that clients approach us because of accessibility in the first place, so we no longer have to do any convincing.

Beyond the implementation work itself, I consider it just as important to raise awareness of accessibility and build knowledge that lasts. An important motivation for us is not to keep the knowledge of accessible solutions to ourselves, but to carry it actively into organizations and to people, so they can implement accessibility on their own, without us, and as a matter of course. Our ambition is for our results to be sustainable, and acting as a gatekeeper wouldn’t be justifiable. Besides, I’m convinced we won’t run out of work in my lifetime either way. So by empowering our clients to do it themselves, we are, in a way, deliberately working to make ourselves redundant.

Not least, organizing events like the Accessibility Club is where my passion for bringing people together meets my mission of making accessibility the standard.

Educational initiatives

Q. You’ve been involved in teaching digital accessibility at various institutions. What insights have you gained from educating others about accessibility?

On a meta level, I’ve found it’s entirely possible to get people, especially the up-and-coming generations, excited about a seemingly unglamorous subject like accessibility. Many of my students or training participants had never had any point of contact with it before. At least that’s the fair assumption when they sit in one of my courses for the first time. But within a short while, I can show them vividly that accessibility is anything but a niche topic, and that most of them have already run into barriers and the problems that come with them, directly or indirectly. The “aha” moment is all the greater when, after the first session, the associations start forming and the desire to engage with these topics suddenly appears, even if they didn’t seem particularly attractive at first.

It’s a special experience for me every time students choose, after my courses, a career path in which accessibility plays a role. Many develop the wish to situate their theses in the field, and I’m then regularly asked to accompany and advise them. Once, I was even asked whether I thought it made sense for students to build their own business around accessibility, to support other people in this meaningful way rather than chase a purely profit-driven goal.

On a personal level, I’ll add that the regular exchange with young students gives me an enormous amount. It keeps me in touch with the wishes, fears, and needs of the younger generations. Naturally, they have their finger a little more on the pulse of the times than I do, and it’s all the nicer when we can each gift one another a bit of knowledge.

Future of the Accessibility Club

Q. Looking ahead, what are your aspirations for the Accessibility Club and its summits? Are there new directions or initiatives you plan to explore?

Of course, I hope the Accessibility Club Summit will go on for a long time, visit many more places, and introduce even more people to accessibility. I don’t really pursue concrete goals with my involvement here. It answers an inner need to bring people together and get them excited about this important topic. I’m delighted every time the Club sparks in someone the idea of starting a meetup in their own city, or simply of engaging more deeply with accessibility in their everyday life, or when the Club and its community can change the course of someone’s life. There are very touching examples of that, and they fill me with great joy.

It matters to me that the Accessibility Club not depend on me. I’m only gradually becoming aware of the privilege I enjoy in having the means, including energy, time, resources, and a running start, to orchestrate gatherings like these. As long as I have that opportunity, I want to use it to empower others too, so they can build up their own commitment and carry it forward.

Advice for aspiring advocates

Q. For individuals passionate about promoting web accessibility, what advice would you offer? How can they contribute effectively to the accessibility movement?

The most important prerequisite, in my view, is a genuine interest in other people and an awareness that not everyone starts from the same place. Many of our fellow human beings depend on us supporting one another and not putting obstacles in each other’s way, consciously or not. So it’s important first to become aware of your own abilities and to consciously perceive others. There are many ways to commit yourself to other people. Accessibility is only one. But if you choose it, it often doesn’t take grand words or deeds. Accessibility happens around us every single day, and it’s the small gestures that count. So I’d advise everyone not only to raise their own awareness and expand their own skills, but above all to pay attention to the people around them and give them the same conditions they’d want for themselves. A great deal would be gained if everyone acted that way.

In practical terms, I can only encourage people to make contact. On one side, connect with people who depend on accessibility, such as people with disabilities, to get to know their needs and perspectives. It can also be very motivating to team up with others who are interested and learn together. The Accessibility Club extends a standing invitation to that, but the many other initiatives and platforms are invaluable too.

Above all, it’s important that people with disabilities are involved everywhere, and that decisions about what is supposedly good for them are never made over their heads. Nothing about them without them. Where I hold privilege, I don’t see it as a licence to speak on anyone’s behalf, but as a responsibility to step aside and hand over space so that people with disabilities can speak, decide, and lead for themselves.