“Jeder ist seines Glückes Schmied” is a German phrase you will often hear if you live there. Translated word for word, it means: “Everyone is the smith of their own fortune.” Most of you may know it in the form: “Everyone is the architect of their own fortune.”
Many of you might agree with this saying, but we disagree. Why? Because your future depends on many factors beyond your control: where you are born, the family you are born into, the resources you have, whether you are born with impairments, the quality of your teachers, how strangers treat you, or which people become your friends. All of these can be obstacles placed in your way. In our opinion, these factors should not matter. But the reality is, they still play a major role in life.
We, the Byting Ninja Pandas, have chosen to develop and promote access to information for everyone. Again and again, we experience that accessibility is on the rise, yet still too rarely understood or truly supported. In many client projects, accessibility is labeled a “must-have” on paper, but in practice it ends up as a “nice-to-have,” hastily and half-heartedly patched in at the end.
Some people have heard of the new European Accessibility Act (EAA). But when it comes to what it really means and how to achieve it, we often encounter puzzled faces. In our view, this needs to change. That is why we have set ourselves the following goals:
- To build a knowledge hub where we share our expertise and experiences, so that you can ultimately create accessible content and software yourself.
- To develop free and accessible software ourselves.
We want to create software and a knowledge hub without barriers, so that the path to information is open to everyone. In the digital world, inaccessible software is one of those obstacles and we want to remove it.
That is the path of the Byting Ninja Pandas: writing software for a better world, where education and technology are open to all, not just the fortunate.
Along this path, we follow our ideals:
- Accessibility — software must be usable by everyone, regardless of ability.
- Openness — knowledge grows when it is shared freely.
- Collaboration — we build more together than any of us could alone.
- Creativity — innovation comes from courage and curiosity.
- Respect — diversity makes our code, and our community, stronger.
This is our way: coding with purpose, guided by ideals, and fighting injustice by breaking down barriers, one line of code at a time.