portunity for people with disabilities or those who are committed to improving accessibility to advance such efforts. The first face-to-face meeting of the SIGCHI Accessibility Community was held at the CHI 2014 conference in Toronto and its first officers were elected in November 2014. Today, it lists 53 official members on the SIGCHI website and 134 members in the Facebook interest group.

The mission of the SIGCHI Accessibility Community, as spelled out on the website, is to improve “… the accessibility of SIGCHI conferences, and the digital accessibility of SIGCHI web site and publications. Our priorities include providing clear support and information to conferences and their leadership about accessibility, providing support for SIGCHI members who are facing accessibility issues, advocating for accessibility issues, and liaising with other communities such as SIGACCESS.” One of the first acts of the SIGCHI Accessibility Community in 2014 was to assess the state of accessibility across SIGCHI from a member perspective, conducting a survey of SIGCHI members and analyzing post-conference survey responses given by CHI attendees about CHI accessibility. Other data analyzed included the number of conferences in 2014 sponsored by SIGCHI with accessibility chairs (four of 17) and reports by community members on problems they had encountered. This led to the SIGCHI Accessibility Community’s May 2016 report, 11 including five recommendations for future goals for SIGCHI:

Recommendation 1. Ensure 100% of conferences are accessible, have an accessibility policy, and have a clear chain of command for addressing accessibility issues;

Recommendation 2. Ensure 100% of new content (such as videos and papers) meets established standards for accessibility and develop a process for achieving this goal;

Recommendation 3. Create a process for handling accessibility requests within SIGCHI;

Recommendation 4. Increase representation of people with disabilities within SIGCHI; and

Recommendation 5. Assess SIGCHI’s success in meeting accessibility guidelines at least once every two years.

The SIGCHI Accessibility Community brought one major concern— accessibility of other SIGCHI-sponsored conferences—to the attention of the Executive Committee: Although the flagship CHI conference is steadily improving accessibility, most other SIGCHI-sponsored or in-cooperation conferences have taken no steps toward improving accessibility. The Accessibility Community has also highlighted key factors affecting accessibility that need to be addressed, including lack of a clear process (from the member perspective) for handling accessibility problems and constraints; the burden of negotiating accessibility on a case-by-case basis; the problems of depending entirely on volunteers to assess and improve accessibility; and the lack of accessibility at venues (such as in program committee meetings).

Physical accessibility. SIGCHI efforts related to physical accessibility have been evolving for several years. The SIGCHI Conference Management Committee first adopted the SIGACCESS conference physical-accessibility checklist for meeting and conference-site walkthroughs in 2012.a The first direct engagement with membership as a whole about physical accessibility was at the CHI 2013 conference in Paris, where SIGCHI leadership heard complaints about the venue’s lack of physical accessibility. Discussion at the SIG Town Hall meeting at the conference led to adding a post-conference survey question regarding physical accessibility, resulting in 29 responses. Four issues were cited, the first two relating to hotel accommodations and the third and fourth to the convention venue itself:

Closest hotel. The closest recommended hotel was inaccessible for those using a wheelchair or scooter;

Connecting paths. Supposedly accessible connecting paths between the hotels and the convention center were poorly signed and not consistently open;

Ramps. At the convention center, presenters needing wheelchair or scooter access could not easily reach

 

a Because conference venues are contracted years in advance, walkthroughs in 2012 affected only conferences held in 2015 and later; for the checklists, including the “accessible conference guide,” see http://www.sigaccess.org

The main message
is that inclusiveness
starts with the
creation of an
environment
of continuous
improvement
in inclusiveness.