Q42, a Cool Studio that's Focused on Accessibility

For this Weekly Nerd session, we visited Q42. Q42 is a digital product studio based in Amsterdam, with a nice view over the IJ. They have built many apps and connections with major clients like PostNL, Hema and the like. They wanted to show us their workplace and office and give us a lecture.

I hadn't taken many notes this time, so this is more of a first impressions blog of what I thought of them.

First Impressions

When I walked into their office, I did find it a cosy and cozy place. We started right away with a talk on accessibility and how they have implemented it in their projects. One of their projects was a maths app for the blind called SenseMath. This involved the app reading multiple complex graphs to blind and visually impaired people through certain frequencies of sound and tones. This was really cool to see, they had also let us hear examples of such a graph and let us guess which one was the right one. You could also add Dutch maths books and find all graphs from there, useful for when you need a specific book.

Then we talked about the app Oculi Mundo. This is what I was most excited about, as it was about a private painting collection of a woman and her family, and wanted to showcase this online in an original and interactive way. So this was built with a 3D experience. What surprised me most about this is that this was built entirely with html and css. Things that you thought, ‘this must have been made with GSAP’, wasn't. Like the navigation, for instance. This was done with the 3D perspective in CSS.

Afterwards, they had given us tips on how to improve our sites in terms of accessibility and showed 1 of their sites they also developed called Appt and did a walkthrough.