WordCamp Europe started as an attempt to bring people together—people from different countries, cultures and professional backgrounds—with one major thing in common: their love for WordPress.

As global WordCamps grow, it’s important to remember our initial goal: create a place where everyone is welcome, build friendships and make connections. WordCamps are for everyone and, as a team, we’re doing our best to make sure that despite borders, politics and life circumstances, everyone can join us and be a part of the event.

Following the great examples of WordCamp London and WordCamp US, this year we are taking WordCamp Europe a step further in terms of accessibility in an attempt to serve as an example for all the local events.

Child Care

So many WordPress babies! Isn’t that just amazing? Nothing brings us more joy than seeing your kids at WordCamps. Being a parent also shouldn’t keep you away from meeting your extended family, so this year, we’ve tried to help out.

Bring your kids and enjoy the conference! We will have the professional help of Kinderfreunde – Austria’s national association for kids and families. A team of nannies will take care of our WordPress kids for the two days of the conference.

Kinderfreunde run kindergartens and day care schools around Austria, they do holiday activities for kids all over the country. In Vienna, Kinderfreunde is one of the biggest providers of child care, caring for 10.000 children in Kindergartens.

If you already registered for child care, your kids will be on our list and you should ask at registration where our volunteers will escort you to the child care room. If you haven’t registered yet, you can do that at registration, so just let our volunteers know and they will provide all the necessary information.

Child care at WordCamp Europe is completely free thanks to all our generous sponsors.

Child care room hours:

• Friday, June 24th: 9am – 6pm
• Saturday, June 25th: 9am – 6pm

If you have any questions about child care, please don’t hesitate to use the contact form on the site. The amazing Eva Neumeier from our local team will be in touch with you and give you the details you need.

Live Captions

We’re extremely happy to announce we’ll provide live captions during WordCamp Europe.

Live captioning at events helps to make them accessible to all those attending with any degree of hearing loss, and also for non-native speakers of English, particularly where there is a wide range of accents among the presenters.

You will be able to read captions in English of everything a speaker says while they do their presentation. We’re getting professional help with live captions from the team at Global RealTime Captioning.

Global RealTime Captioning is a partnership between Julia Jacobie, and her colleague Norma MacHaye. They are two freelance real-time verbatim captioners with many years of experience who specialise in captioning conferences together as a team.

Julia and the GlobalRealTime Captioning team come highly recommended by the WordCamp London team and will cover all talks in all tracks during Friday and Saturday.

Thanks for the nudge, Claire and yes, we made it happen!

Breast feeding/baby room

Vienna is one of the most liberal capitals in terms of public breast feeding, but nevertheless, we will provide a room available for mothers who would like to breastfeed in private. If you’re bringing your baby with and you’d like to go into the breast feeding room, please ask our volunteers at registration about it and you will get help getting in.

Multi-faith room

If you need privacy for prayer, you will have access to a designated room in Halle E+G. Our volunteers will be able to help you out with the directions to the Multi-Faith room.

Full accessibility to Halle E+G and the Leopold Museum

Halle E+G and the Leopold Museum are fully accessible for wheelchairs. Elevators and platforms are provided for moving around the two levels of Halle E+G and there is an elevator from the square for going into the Leopold Museum.

Our Contributor day venue at the University of Vienna is also fully accessible for wheelchairs.

WordPress beyond borders

There’s something worth mentioning that we do not talk about as much as we should. During the preparation of WCEU 2016, we issued more than 20 invitation letters for visa interviews to people from all over the world. As event organisers, we do our best to help all attendees in need. This year our job was particularly challenging because, due to the refugee situation, embassies have tightened their control and created stricter requirements for the invitation processes.

Several of the nicest, kindest people we’ve had the pleasure to communicate with over the years, could not get visas to come to Austria. Some had volunteered, and for some it would have been their first WordCamp. We’re sending them our warmest regards and wish they could have been able to join us. We hope that they will be able to do it next year.

This is just a tiny reminder for those of us who are used to moving freely across most parts of the world to not take it for granted.

Live streaming

And for anyone who cannot attend in person, for the second year in a row we will be offering free live streaming for everyone who’d like to join us online and watch sessions. We’re extremely happy that we can provide the service for free and we’d like to say a huge thank you to our sponsors for making it happen. If you’re not able to make it to Vienna for any reason, you can grab a free live streaming ticket: https://2016.europe.wordcamp.org/tickets/

The first 1000 live streaming tickets are gone and we’re making sure we can provide additional tickets for everyone who’d like to join us and watch WordCamp Europe 2016 live.

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The WordCamp Europe team has put a lot of time and effort into ensuring the camp is as accessible as it can be. We would love to hear your feedback and we will consider any recommendations you make regarding accessibility for the future camps.

We’re all ready to welcome you all in Vienna!

See you soon ❤️