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.