It's almost past the holiday season and I hope you've had one that you were dreaming of all year. I realized, I haven't ever repeated my advent calendar event which many of you seemed to have liked. That does not mean I have stopped researching good practice examples of accessibility implementations around the world. As a way of making up for it, I wanted to share a story that I digged up by following a thread of references from a podcast I was listening to, through somebody's personal website like it was done 30 years ago, through an anonymous FTP to the main site of the Braillnet project. I found the story really inspiring. It's 1993 in then Czechoslovakia. and the Internet is slowly becoming a thing alongside some, often locally produced, ways of making DOS and Windows 95 PC’s talk, at least with the most common software. It is apparent to the employees of the local blindness organization that the net will be a game-changer in access to information for blind and partially sighted users, some of whom own notetakers like the Eureka or even PCs. By cooperating with the IT centre of a university they set up a BBS under a phone number in Prague and offer, for the first time, access to digitalized books and magazines, an e-mail account, a Telnet and FTP client. Public transport schedules might have been a thing too but I'm not 100% sure about that. The network develops but the limitations are apparent: access mostly to internal information and only through a number in one city. Four years later, an idea is born to give all persons with disabilities access to regular, dial-up internet with prominence of locally sourced material but not excluding the entire world wide web. They manage to secure state funds and support of local ISP's and set up numbers for all major numerical zones in already then Czech Republic, giving unlimited access to the Internet to any person with a disability for the fixed price of around 4 USD per month. #Accessibility #RetroTech #Blind