Guest post by ARSTM@NCA 2020 preconference chair, Dr. Lauren Cagle
Academic conferences are often notoriously inaccessible. Rooms without mics, long hikes between meeting rooms, echoing acoustics, hidden elevators, uncaptioned talks, visuals without audio descriptions, a dearth of childcare, lactation stations tucked away in distant bathrooms–the list of barriers to full participation for everyone is long.
We can do better. By “we,” I mean in academia at large, and I also mean at ARSTM events specifically.
As I wrote in a previous blog post about this year’s ARSTM@NCA preconference, it is, by necessity, not the usual 1-day in-person preconference we typically enjoy at both NCA and RSA. And because of its unusual virtual format, the 2020 ARSTM@NCA preconference presents both new challenges and new opportunities for accessibility.
In thinking about these challenges and opportunities, I’ve specifically been thinking about how the preconference can meaningfully include:
- Disabled attendees with visual, oral, cognitive, or motor impairments that affect how they interface with computers, preconference content, and digital conference platforms,
- Attendees with caregiving responsibilities,
- Attendees in different time zones, and
- Attendees without material institutional support (i.e., funding).
To make this year’s virtual preconference on the theme of social justice accessible, we’re taking a number of steps, including:
- Hiring professional CART captioners to caption the entire event live,
- Providing a complete transcript based on the CART captions to members after the event concludes,
- Making talks available ahead of time (either as a written paper, a captioned and transcribed video, or both),
- Providing keynote speakers and talk authors with advance guidance from Composing Access on creating accessible documents using formatting, alt text, and visual design elements,
- Providing keynote speakers and talk authors with advance guidance from Composing Access on creating accessible presentations using visual descriptions and design elements, signposting, and other strategies,
- Providing attendees with clear instructions in advance about how to “attend” the preconference, how to participate, and how to manage their virtual presences (e.g., by changing a display name or adding pronouns to it),
- Explicitly encouraging multiple participatory modalities (video on or off; audio or chat questions/comments; dressed up or dressed down; etc.),
- Starting at 12pm ET, to save folks in (most) other timezones from getting up way too early or staying up way too late,
- Keeping all sessions under an hour (except the 90-minute keynote session) and adding breaks between to enable people to pop in and out, and
- Offering no-excuses-required free membership and registration to anyone who asks.
Accessibility is never a one-and-done accomplishment, though. It is a process. As Margaret Price puts it, accessibility requires no less than a “continually evolving dialogue.”
So, I invite everyone to share accessibility requests and recommendations with me at lauren.cagle@uky.edu. The work is never done, but I’m glad to do it in service of and collaboration with the ARSTM community.