Nearly 12 months after our team of advocates created this petition about accessibility and privacy issues at Sakura-Con, we would like to comment on the status of each of our demands in this petition ahead of the 2026 event.

Please read the full details below to the end and encourage anyone you know who attends or is a prospective attendee member to sign our petition to demand Sakura-Con resolve its privacy and accessibility issues.

On Privacy

1. Remove the full legal name from the membership badge for privacy.

- “NEW FOR 2026: Badges will not have names on them. 

Your legal and preferred name can be updated at registration as needed, but we MUST have a legal name on file in our registration system.”

Source: https://sakuracon.org/accessibility/

This demand is met.

2. Change the design of the membership badge so that disabilities are not stigmatized, and relocate any indicator to the reverse side of the badge for privacy.

- “If requested, we can place a sticker with a wheelchair symbol on the front of the badge to denote that the member needs ADA accommodations.”

Source: https://sakuracon.org/accessibility/

Using the wheelchair icon as an indicator of someone in need of accommodations is not inclusive of the wide variety of disabilities besides mobility that are out there, both those that are more and less visible. In any case, it is better to have a more discreet indicator that is only understood for those on a need-to-know basis. For privacy reasons, it is also not necessary to place the indicator on the front of the badge to be visible at all times when the back side of the membership badge is unused.

The language on the Accessibility webpage is unclear if the wheelchair sticker is required to access ADA accommodations since it is optional to request the sticker.

This demand is NOT met.

On Accessibility

3. Publish a page for Accessibility on the website for Sakura-Con.

• Sakura-Con published the webpage the day before the general meeting in April 2025.
• Sakura-Con updated the Accessibility webpage for 2026 recently before the 2026 event.

This demand is met.

4. Redesign signage for high contrast so that they are more visible for people with blindness, visual impairments, and even those without disabilities.

Disclaimer: The explanation for this section includes heavy technical language. Unfortunately the change.org platform does not support embedding more images into body of an update to accompany the text for clarity. The big idea is that there are many known issues that we reported last year that remain unfixed and we discovered new issues this year. Read on to understand what our community members mean when they say that signage is inaccessible or feel free to jump to the final section. This demand is NOT met.

For the 2025 event, Sakura-Con took no action on our feedback about the accessibility and usability of their signage, maps, event app, and event website.

For the 2026 event, Sakura-Con made a few adjustments to some recommendations we provided including:

• Sakura-Con added stroke and changed the color of the label for ‘Garden Terrace’ for more color contrast on top of the lime green background.
• Sakura-Con revised map icons to be enclosed in large circles. They also included a map legend to communicate the meaning of each icon.
• Sakura-Con included text beside escalators indicating which floors each went to.
• Eventeny resolved a bug in which the floating labels overlapped on top of the menu for selecting different maps.

There are many more accessibility and usability issues that remain. Below they are listed under whether Sakura-Con or their service provider, Eventeny, bears responsibility.

For Sakura-Con:

• The maps that Sakura-Con included in the ‘Maps’ section of the Eventeny app have images “stretched” to fit their container. This makes the map image appear warped and unusable. Sakura-Con has worked around this by making each map image clickable, navigating to the Eventeny event website instead. If the intended experience is to go to the website anyway, it would save the user a click by simply launching the website upon clicking ‘Maps’ in the navigation rather than needing to deal with the distorted maps.
• Static labels on the maps have poor color contrast. They use a narrow font which has low readability because the letter kernings are too close together. The text is white on a very light background color (light grey, pink); the contrast is poor and has low readability because it’s a light color on another light color.
• The escalator icon is unclear and misleading, and all icons have poor color contrast. The escalators in all buildings are central, defining features. For instance, the Summit escalator spans nearly the entire length of Pine St. and is visible from far away outside. Yet the maps show a lot of empty white space where the escalators actually take up a significant amount of space. Secondly the escalator icons may appear flipped. This may be an attempt to indicate a difference in direction, but it’s further confusing because the icon may be interpreted as going left to right or right to left (also unclear) when the actual path is perpendicular to the icon like the case of the Arch building main escalator. We have recommended using the existing indicators for escalators from the maps provided by the Seattle Convention Center since they communicate size, direction, and orientation.
• The show hours for the Exhibit Hall and Artist Alley are not in highly discoverable places on the Sakura-Con website, the event website, nor the event app. If someone wanted to find the opening and closing hours to plan their weekend, they would have to know the name of the room with the vendors and artists to search for in the schedule. Important information like this should be surfaced up front to reduce friction for attendees and get them where they wish to go.
• The physical folding signs between the Arch and Summit buildings state the name of each building with an arrow pointing in opposite ways for each. The arrows are unclear and unhelpful in actually navigating from one building to the next. The color of the text is darker pink on a lighter pink background and the arrows are red which is poor color contrast. Other conventions either station a person between the buildings for guidance or they place signage in the glass windows of the Annex building that lists what is in each building and provides better directions.
• The physical sign on an easel indicating the location of Registration in the Summit building provided unhelpful directions. It included the text “Entrance @Boren & Pine” and had an arrow below that pointing up to itself with no point of reference for what the arrow could mean. People entering the Summit building interpreted the arrow pointing up meaning they could travel forward within the Summit building up to where Registration was. It was thanks to an attendant repeating directions to all passersby that people could find their way.
• The TVs outside the Arch rooms use a font size that is too small to be viewed from a distance, yet much of the screen has unused space. Other TVs in the Summit building show the image of the mascot and a message reading “We’re thrilled to have you here!” Instead of the mascot, those TVs would be more impactful if they included either a map directory for the current floor or the schedule of events for the given room.

For Eventeny:

• The floating interactive map labels appear offset from their actual position. This bug replicates when viewing the maps from the ‘Map’ tab on the main event page but it does not replicate when viewing the map from the ‘See full map’ page.
• Text in the floating interactive labels use a tiny font size and don’t wrap to the next line by discrete morphemes (words). Text is split up once the character count reaches the end of a line. So room titles may have a few letters of a word on one line but the remaining letters of the word abruptly broken up to the next line. Instead, text should wrap to the next line once there is not enough space on a given line for the next word separated by a space. The labels should also include padding so that text at the far edges do not overlap with the borders of the container for readability.
• Text in the floating interactive labels may also be too large if its surface area is very small (e.g. the small rectangles for each artist in Artist Alley). The numbers for each Artist Alley booth are too close together so they overlap for some operating systems/browsers and are not readable. The map is unusable and there is no directory of artists to search from as an alternative experience.
• The more visual ‘Day View’ of the schedule is unusable for tracks with 3 or more simultaneous events. This view places a rectangle on a time table for each event in a track so that users can see event titles and their durations at a glance and choose the one that interests them. While users are not required to use this view, this visual experience is why users like Guidebook and the fan-created schedules.
• The maps on the event website have very high resolution. At 100% zoom which is the minimum zoom, some maps may start off looking at an empty corner. It is only possible to view the full length and width of each map on a desktop with a monitor that can support 4K. Mobile devices and monitors limited to 1080p cannot zoom out far enough to view the full context of each map and the user would need to drag their finger up and down around the map to look for rooms. Last year we reported that the maximum zoom in the Eventeny map viewer was 200%, but this year maps can zoom up to 1000%. It is not necessary to use such a large resolution map if the zoom limitations have been fixed.

This demand is NOT met.

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In addition to sharing an update on the status of our demands, we wanted to point out what had transpired at the last general meeting on April 13, 2025.

• Sakura-Con’s Chair mentioned the Accessibility webpage in passing as if it had always existed but it was only published the day before the meeting. The Board had not communicated its existence with community advocates or the broader public prior to the meeting.
• Sakura-Con’s Chair told a disabled community member that they were not tone-policing them and proceeded to police their tone. This is a common tactic for silencing disabled people who are simply advocating for themselves.
• Sakura-Con’s Director of Membership had moved off stage to sit in the audience facing away from the crowd for parts of the meeting. They were first asked to return to the stage to speak into the mic to which they responded by standing off to the side of the stage and not on the stage. Later they were asked to speak more loudly and into the mic so that members on the remote Zoom call and a member who was signing for a another disabled member in the audience could hear clearly to interpret it. Instead of respecting the request of audience members for accessibility, they said “I’m done” and abruptly left the stage and the room. It should also be noted that at no point did any Board members re-voice audience questions and comments into the mic as basic etiquette for meeting accessibility.
• Community members asked if Sakura-Con would have an Accessibility coordinator. A Board member said nobody had come forward. Asked if they had advertised it, a Board member made an excuse that they don't advertise volunteer roles. Nobody can come forward for a role when they do not know it exists because it is not advertised.
• Community members urged the Board to consistently train their volunteers so everyone is on the same page with ADA accommodations and basic code of conduct. They revealed that each department runs their own training and they do not have an org-wide training. The Chair said they tried in the past but nobody showed up or they attended and quit before con. Community members offered solutions such as just recording 10 minute videos. It is unclear if any has been implemented in 2026 due to the NDA.
• The meeting minutes omit many comments from members. An uninformed reader would not be able to tell from the minutes that the Board had received a petition about accessibility and privacy. The meeting minutes notably did not include an important comment from a community member who thanked them for creating the webpage for Accessibility and summarized the con’s responses to each petition demand.

There are no proper channels remaining for providing feedback to the convention. Sakura-Con had already cancelled their end-of-con feedback panel, and attendees report not receiving a feedback survey. A community member who had emailed feedback about the April 13th meeting had their membership badge revoked without warning or consideration for their travels. As of writing this update there have been zero general meetings scheduled. Even if there were meetings, the bylaws were updated such that staff members and attendee members “will not be able to vote and are not entitled to notice of any meetings.” Sakura-Con’s Board had not replied to any emails regarding the petition and accessibility issues. Our team of advocates would like for these issues to be resolved, but the only way to communicate with a Board that has shut off all channels for providing feedback in good faith is by petition.