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Articles by Ed Summers
Hack the World: Why hackathons are still the best place to learn to build
Home / Developer skills / Career growth The barriers to building software have collapsed. Today, anyone can build. Hackathons are a great place to start learning. October 9, 2026 | 3 minutes Share: Someone bursts through the door and announces, “There’s pizza!” Nearby, a team has duct tape and cardboard holding its prototype together. Another is debugging a model that won’t detect their movements. This is a common scene during hackathons, and for a lot of people they’re the place to learn to build.
Building GitHub’s next chapter in accessibility
Explore our update on GitHub’s accessibility strategy, and learn how you can join us in building a culture of accessibility. May 21, 2026 | 8 minutes Share: Five years ago, we stood up GitHub’s accessibility program. What began as a small team addressing accessibility debt has grown into a company-wide discipline, woven into our engineering fundamentals, our design system, our AI tools, and our culture.
Our pledge to help improve the accessibility of open source software at scale
Home / Open Source / Social impact GitHub takes the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) pledge. May 15, 2025 | 8 minutes Share: GitHub is honored to take the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) Pledge, reaffirming our commitment to improving accessibility in open source software.
The top 10 gifts for the developer in your life
Home / News & insights / Company news Whether you’re hunting for the perfect gift for your significant other, the colleague you drew in the office gift exchange, or maybe (just maybe) even for yourself, we’ve got you covered with our top 10 gifts that any developer would love.
Congratulations to the winners of the 2024 Gaady Awards
Home / News & insights / Company news The Gaady Awards are like the Emmy Awards for the field of digital accessibility. And, just like the Emmys, the Gaadys are a reason to celebrate! On November 21, GitHub was honored to roll out the red carpet for the accessibility community at our San Francisco headquarters. December 4, 2024 | 2 minutes Share: The Gaady Awards are like the Emmy Awards for the field of digital accessibility.
Exploring the challenges in creating an accessible sortable list (drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop is a highly interactive and visual interface. We often use drag-and-drop to perform tasks like uploading files, reordering browser bookmarks, or even moving a card in solitaire. Drag-and-drop is a highly interactive and visual interface. We often use drag-and-drop to perform tasks like uploading files, reordering browser bookmarks, or even moving a card in solitaire.
Scaling accessibility within GitHub and beyond
GitHub celebrates Global Accessibility Awareness Day by launching another installment of the Coding Accessibility series and sharing how we scale accessibility within GitHub and beyond. A popular mantra within the disability community is, “Nothing about us without us.” That mantra embodies the strongly held belief that people with disabilities must actively participate in the decisions that impact their lives.
How we’re building more inclusive and accessible components at GitHub
One of GitHub’s core values is Diverse and Inclusive. It is a guiding thought for how we operate, reminding us that GitHub serves a developer community that spans a wide range of geography and ability. Putting diversity and inclusivity into practice means incorporating a wide range of perspectives into our work. To that point, disability and accessibility are an integral part of our efforts. This consideration has been instrumental in crafting resilient, accessible components at GitHub.
Celebrating 1 year of A11y Design Bootcamp: Takeaways and tips
May 16 is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), and I’m using the occasion to reflect on one of the longest, if not the longest, projects I’ve worked on throughout my accessibility design career: Web Accessibility (A11y) Design Bootcamp. In talking to fellow web accessibility practitioners and folks who work in product development, I often get asked what the bootcamp is, how we got started, and how they can do the same in their organizations.
Empowering accessibility: GitHub's journey building an in-house Champions program
For more on this topic, check out Alexis Lucio, Catherine McNally, and Lindsey Wild‘s axe-con 2024 talk, “Establishing a Scalable A11y Education Ecosystem,” which laid the foundation for this blog post. Free registration required. Laying the foundation In today’s digital world, accessibility isn’t merely a checkbox—it’s the cornerstone of creating an inclusive experience for all users. At GitHub, we recognize this fundamental truth.
How GitHub uses merge queue to ship hundreds of changes every day
At GitHub, we use merge queue to merge hundreds of pull requests every day. Developing this feature and rolling it out internally did not happen overnight, but the journey was worth it—both because of how it has transformed the way we deploy changes to production at scale, but also how it has helped improve the velocity of customers too. Let’s take a look at how this feature was developed and how you can use it, too.
Empowering all developers to build without barriers
GitHub has been awarded the 2024 Axe Accessibility at Scale Award from Deque Systems. Read more about how we’ve implemented accessibility at scale. Author At GitHub, we believe that accessibility is a team sport.
GitHub's Engineering Fundamentals program: How we deliver on availability, security, and accessibility
How do we ensure over 100 million users across the world have uninterrupted access to GitHub’s products and services on a platform that is always available, secure and accessible? From our beginnings as a platform for open source to now also supporting 90% of the Fortune 100, that is the ongoing challenge we face and hold ourselves accountable for delivering across our engineering organization.
Leveraging AI to empower all developers at GitHub Universe 2023
GitHub Universe 2023 is just around the corner! Join us and learn how GitHub is leveraging AI to empower all developers, including developers with disabilities. Author In just a few days, our global community of developers will come together for GitHub Universe. The annual conference includes an in-person experience at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco as well as a free virtual experience.
5 tips for making your GitHub profile page accessible
The README on your GitHub profile acts like a front door to your work, skills, and professional self, so it’s important that everyone who visits your profile can read and understand it. In this post, we’ll be sharing some tips to help you make your README more accessible. Making content accessible means designing it so that people with disabilities can navigate and interact with it just as easily and comfortably as everyone else. Why are accessible READMEs important?
Research: Quantifying GitHub Copilot’s impact on code quality
Today, we’re releasing new research on GitHub Copilot Chat. By using the power of natural language, developers in our study used GitHub Copilot Chat to get real-time guidance, tips, troubleshooting, remediation, and solutions tailored to their specific coding challenges—all in real time without leaving the IDE.
Prompting GitHub Copilot Chat to become your personal AI assistant for accessibility
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast quantities of data. As a result, they have the capacity to generate a wide range of results. By default, the results from LLMs may not meet your expectations. So, how do you coax an LLM to generate results that are more aligned with your goals? You must use prompt engineering, which is a rapidly evolving art and science of constructing inputs, also known as prompts, that elicit the desired outputs.
Why Rust is the most admired language among developers
For the eighth year in a row, Rust has topped the chart as “the most desired programming language” in . And with more than 80% of developers reporting that they’d like to use the language again next year, you have to wonder how a language created less than 20 years ago has stolen the hearts of developers around the world.
Accessibility considerations behind code search and code view
GitHub prides itself on being the home for all developers, including developers with disabilities. Accessibility is a core priority for all new projects at GitHub, so it was top of mind when we started our project to rework code search and the code view at GitHub. With the old code view, some developers preferred to look at raw code rather than code view due to accessibility barriers, and that’s what we set out to fix.
Exploring GitHub with the redesigned navigation, now in public beta
GitHub’s redesigned navigation is enabled for all users as a public beta. Millions of users build with GitHub every day, and we’re constantly working to make the platform user-friendly, more accessible, and an integral part of your workflow. To that end, GitHub has introduced a brand-new version of the site-wide navigation, redesigned to make it easier to find your way around the site and quickly access your most-used features and functionality.
Make your GitHub projects more accessible with accessibility-alt-text-bot
We are excited to announce that we have open sourced the accessibility-alt-text-bot–a GitHub Action that supports accessible image sharing in GitHub Issues, GitHub Discussions, and GitHub Pull Requests. The accessibility-alt-text-bot leaves automated reminders in a comment when a user shares an image without providing meaningful alt text. What is alt text? Alt text, short for alternative text, is code associated with an image that describes an image’s intent.
GitHub celebrates developers with disabilities on Global Accessibility Awareness Day
At GitHub, our favorite people are developers. We love to make them happy and productive, and today, on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we want to celebrate their achievements by sharing some great stories about a few developers with disabilities alongside news of recent accessibility improvements at GitHub that help them do the best work of their lives.
This month on The ReadME Podcast: Balancing openness and control
Subscribe to The ReadME Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Scarf founder, CEO, and maintainer Avi Press is trying to solve a familiar problem in open source: the need to understand who is actually using the open source projects that we maintain. But the desire from a project maintainer to understand this often brushes up against expectations of privacy and community control. For Press, the issue is managing this information and sharing access with the community.
How we work: inclusive retrospectives for the GitHub Accessibility leadership team
Retrospectives are essential for a team’s ongoing growth and achievement, but they can be exclusionary for team members with disabilities due to the inaccessibility of most retrospective tools. These tools often depend on drag-and-drop functionality, images, color coding, and undefined digital spaces with no clear headings or navigational anchors. To ensure everyone can actively participate, the GitHub Accessibility leadership team uses tools and processes that fully engage every team member.
Building a more inclusive GitHub Global Campus
GitHub is the home for all developers, a place where we come together to learn, collaborate, and ship code. At GitHub Education, our goal is to welcome students and teachers into that home and provide them with the skills and leading industry tools to complete their academic journey, from classroom engagement to career readiness. We believe every student and teacher deserves the same access to our offerings.
More than meets the pull request: maintainers talk contributions
Creating an open source project can feel a bit like sending out an open invite to a party—will it be a roaring good time, or will you unbegrudginly dine on leftover junk food for the following week after nobody shows? When the first guest arrives, you breathe a sigh of relief. The party’s a success, and you really didn’t need to eat potato chips for a week, anyway.
This month on The ReadME Podcast: exploring the fusion of technology and progress
Subscribe to The ReadME Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. That’s a quote from J. Luc Peterson, a physicist and researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who joined our senior editor, Klint Finley, on this month’s episode of The ReadME Podcast to discuss how open source technology accelerated the lab’s game-changing breakthrough in fusion research.
GitHub celebrates the ingenuity of developers with disabilities in new video series
As a person with a disability, I am intimately familiar with the constant need to overcome barriers in almost every aspect of life. For good or ill, it generates creativity, tenacity, and ingenuity—all very useful traits for developers. Today, I am very excited to introduce you to a few developers with disabilities who have an abundance of those traits. Today, The ReadME Project published the first video in our new Coding Accessibility series.
Creating an accessible search experience with the QueryBuilder component
Overview Throughout the GitHub User Interface (UI), there are complex search inputs that allow you to narrow the results you see based on different filters. For example, for repositories with GitHub Discussions, you can narrow the results to only show open discussions that you created. This is completed with the search bar and the use of defined filters.
GitHub, accessibility, and the disability divide
There are more than one billion people in the world with disabilities. I’m proud to be one of them. However, those of us with disabilities encounter barriers every day. From transportation to civic participation, from education to employment, and from entertainment to healthcare, people with disabilities must overcome a myriad of environmental and attitudinal barriers to live the lives we want to live.
How we’re continuing to enable all developers to build
GitHub aims to be the home for all developers and we know that it is a great privilege and responsibility to make this a reality. We want to ensure that all developers have the opportunity to contribute to open source and use the GitHub platform for personal projects and at work—no matter their physical or cognitive ability. This is important work and we’ve been growing the team dedicated to making GitHub more accessible for developers all over the world.
A bit about PURLs
This got me into looking at how the PURL service worked. As the Wikipedia article sketches out, PURLs have had a variety of implementations over the years. From the HTML at purl.fdlp.gov it looks like they are running the Zepheira / 3 Round Stones version–it’s not clear to me where one of those began and the other ended, and if any of that software is open source or not. In 2016 OCLC and the Internet Archive announced that the venerable purl.org service had moved to the Internet Archive.
Trump’s Tweets
So Trump’s Twitter account is gone. Finally. It’s strange to have had to wait until the waning days of his presidency to achieve this very small and simple act of holding him accountable to Twitter’s community guidelines…just like any other user of the platform. Better late than never, especially since his misinformation and lies can continue to spread after he has left office.
How we created a culture of accessibility at SAS
AccessWorld Magazine is like Consumer Reports for people with visual impairments or blindness. The July 2018 back to school issue contains a comprehensive review of SAS accessibility. The article provides an overview of accessibility features that enable students with visual impairments or blindness to analyze data and learn statistics using SAS. Achieving this level of accessibility in enterprise-class products, documentation, training, and support materials is no small feat.
BRIGHTON FRINGE: Odjo: King of the Ocean - Sweet Waterfront 2
Odjo, a man raised by elephants, until the circus is shut down, roams the waves having fallen asleep in a small fishing boat that came loose from its moorings some time ago. A journalist, asked to write an exploitative article about this simple man of the sea, decides to go against his editor’s wishes and instead comes aboard Odjo’s tiny boat to share in his life for three months to see what he can learn from him.
A Block List Against Hate - Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
Two weeks ago a group of students, scholars and activists gathered in the evening at MITH for an event called the Night Against Hate. Our goal was to spend two hours working together to link groups and individuals documented in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Extremist Files to their respective Twitter accounts in order to: We also had the very practical goal of creating a Twitter block list that would allow you to prevent extremists identified by the SPLC from tweeting into your timeline.
The Web's Past is Not Evenly Distributed
This is the 4th post in MITH’s Digital Stewardship Series. In this post Ed Summers discusses ways to align your content with the grain of the Web so that it can last (a bit) longer. If I had to guess I would bet you found the document you are reading right now by following a hyperlink. Perhaps it was a link in a Twitter or Facebook status update that a friend shared? Or maybe it was a link from our homepage, or from some other blog?
Documenting DocNow
This is a post in a semi-regular series about project developments on the Documenting the Now project. Please feel free to add any feedback or questions here in comments or by joining us over in Slack. It was extremely fortunate that just as we began our work on DocNow two members of our advisory board, Deen Freelon and Meredith Clark, along with their colleague Charlton D.
The Aaron Swartz Collection
DESCRIPTION This is a new thing for the Internet Archive: a memorial archive collection. Please upload to this collection (with an open source browser) with any digital materials you think appropriate in a memorial collection: emails with him, code archives, photos. They may not be presented well on this site yet, but they will be preserved and accessible, and we will get better at personal digital archives.
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