Drupal Camp Asheville Sessions Highlight Accessibility, AI, Canvas, and Local Tooling

Several Drupal Camp Asheville 2026 sessions will examine accessibility, artificial intelligence, Drupal Canvas, and local development tooling during the 9 July to 12 July 2026 event in Asheville, North Carolina. The camp is scheduled for UNC Asheville Highsmith Student Union and combines training, conference sessions, and a community day. The DropTimes received written responses from AmyJune Hineline, Michael Anello, Carie Fisher, and Dan Gurin about sessions that connect Drupal work with communication, inclusion, automation, and delivery practice.

The programme reflects the broader shape of modern Drupal projects. Developers and site builders still need technical implementation skills, but delivery also depends on accessible content, structured components, responsible AI use, and repeatable local workflows. These four sessions show how decisions made before deployment can affect real users, editorial teams, and development practice.

AmyJune Hineline, Certification Community Architect at the Linux Foundation, will present Scrolling Without Barriers: Practical Accessibility Tips for Social Media from 14:00 to 14:45 EDT on 11 July 2026 in Mt. Mitchell (226). The session is listed under Site Building and User Experience & Accessibility and is open to all attendees. It focuses on accessible social media practices for people who post, plan, edit, review, or share content through digital channels.

Social media moves fast, and accessibility can easily get lost in the shuffle.

In a written response to The DropTimes, AmyJune said the session is meant to be approachable for people who work with digital assets, not only accessibility specialists. She said the session will cover the small and large choices that can unintentionally create barriers in social media content. Attendees should leave with practical habits they can apply immediately to images, videos, hashtags, emojis, and everyday posts.

AmyJune said she wants attendees to see what inclusive social media looks like in real life, not only in theory. Her goal is for people to leave with a few simple checks they can build into their everyday content workflow. She also pointed to the hallway track, the community hike, mountain views, ice cream, egg and cheese biscuits, and a respectful distance from any black bears as part of what she is looking forward to at the camp.

Michael Anello, developer and trainer at DrupalEasy, will present Creating single directory components with Drupal Canvas in mind from 15:15 to 16:00 EDT on 11 July 2026 in Mt. Pisgah (228). The session is listed under Back End, Front End, User Interface & Design, and Theming, Design, & Usability. It is aimed at developers who know at least a little about Single Directory Components (SDCs) but have limited or no experience preparing SDCs for Drupal Canvas.

Drupal Canvas relies heavily on an SDC's component.yml file.

Michael said the session will spend most of its time on how Drupal Canvas uses the contents of an SDC’s component.yml file. He said attendees will also see Canvas-specific additions that can be made to the file to improve how components work in Canvas-aware builds. Much of the material comes from his 18-hour Professional Single Directory Components course.

The expected takeaways include understanding why a fully populated component.yml file matters and how existing SDCs can be used in Drupal Canvas. Michael is also teaching Responsible Drupal AI Basics, a full-day training from 9:00 to 17:00 EDT on 10 July 2026 in Beaucatcher Mountain (225). He said this will be the final presentation of the one-day version before DrupalEasy beta tests a full course of more than 20 hours with alumni in mid-July, with the first public offering planned for August 2026.

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Michael described Drupal Camp Asheville as an easy-going summer Drupal event in a location with plenty to do outdoors when attendees are not focused on Drupal work. That setting is part of what he is looking forward to, alongside the Friday training. His comments place the Canvas session inside a broader teaching path for developers moving from basic SDC knowledge toward structured component work for visual building.

Carie Fisher, Senior Accessibility Program Manager at GitHub, will present Building Accessible AI: Embedding Inclusion Across the Software Development Lifecycle from 13:00 to 13:45 EDT on 11 July 2026 in Mt. Mitchell (226). The intermediate session is listed under User Experience & Accessibility. It examines how accessibility can be embedded across planning, design, coding, review, continuous integration and continuous delivery, and feedback workflows.

AI doesn't fix broken processes – it accelerates them.

Carie framed the issue as a workflow problem before it becomes a tooling problem. In her written response, she said that if accessibility is not already part of a team’s workflow, AI can speed up the barriers the team is already creating. Her session will show where accessibility belongs across the software development lifecycle so teams can use AI tooling to scale inclusion instead of scaling gaps.

The session will include a live demonstration of GitHub’s new open source AI-powered accessibility scanner finding, filing, and fixing issues in real time. Carie said attendees should leave with a high-level map of where AI fits across planning, design, coding, review, and deployment, including where it helps and where it does not. She also said the session will provide tools, resources, and concrete next steps for embedding accessibility into existing pipelines.

Carie said accessible systems make better products for everyone, not only disabled users. She co-presented on the topic at Microsoft Build, but said the Asheville session gives her more room to examine the subject in depth. She is also looking forward to catching up with friends, meeting new people, exploring downtown Asheville, and attending AmyJune’s session on accessible social media.

Dan Gurin, founding partner at Dangur, will present Local like a yokel - how to pick & fiddle your sandbox to new heights from 16:15 to 17:00 EDT on 11 July 2026 in Mt. Mitchell (226). The intermediate Emerging Technology session looks at local development environments as more than places to run PHP. It covers Cloudflare SSH tunnels, open source business tools such as Twenty CRM and ListMonk, and private AI workflows using Ollama with Dalia.

We often treat our local sandbox like a basic black box that just runs PHP.

Dan said the session is about breaking out of that limited view of the local workstation. In his written response, he said developers and site builders can use free, open source tools to turn local environments into systems for automation, testing, publishing, and private AI experimentation. He framed the value in practical terms: stronger local capabilities without software cost, subscription bloat, or unnecessary cloud privacy exposure.

The expected takeaways include using Cloudflare SSH tunnels to share a local sandbox for client feedback or webhook testing, running tools such as Twenty CRM and ListMonk beside local Drupal sites, and setting up private local AI with Ollama and Dalia. Dan’s focus adds a local infrastructure layer to the camp’s practical Drupal coverage. Before a site reaches staging or production, developers often need better ways to test integrations, share work, debug across devices, and automate local tasks.

Dan said Drupal Camp Asheville has a tight-knit community energy and offers a chance to talk with other developers in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He is especially interested in how developers are beginning to bring local AI and open source tooling into daily workflows. His session places those choices inside the same open source frame as Drupal itself, with attention to cost, control, and privacy.

Taken together, the sessions show why Drupal Camp Asheville 2026 is not limited to implementation techniques. Accessible social media affects how organisations communicate with users, Drupal Canvas and SDCs affect how teams build reusable interface patterns, accessible AI workflows affect whether automation reduces or reproduces barriers, and local development tooling affects how much control developers have before work reaches shared environments. Full schedule and registration details are available on the Drupal Camp Asheville 2026 website.