conferences, thus allowing appropriate accommodations to be made; if such accommodations are not possible, individuals can be warned. SIG and conference organizers must be clear and up front about accessibility at a conference, answering: What, from a physical point of view, is accessible, and what is not? What barriers will attendees face? And is there a hotel that may be farther away but that involves fewer barriers? Encourage feedback from the community at events and between events.

Include people with disabilities in organizational processes. One of the mottos of the disability rights movement is “nothing for us without us.” Decisions about accessibility need to be made based on feedback from those with the most experience—people with disabilities. It is important early on to identify members of your community with disabilities who can provide specific feedback. Acknowledge that perspectives may be skewed; if your community includes many people with one type of disability, the feedback you receive may be biased. A core advisory group can provide feedback and advice and can help determine priorities.

Be clear about your priorities and communicate rationales. It is important to acknowledge that everything cannot be done at once. For instance, for an organization starting to become more inclusive, which of the following is a better first step: Making papers accessible or making videos on the website accessible? Making mentorship programs more inclusive or making journal editorial board software more accessible? Making the conference facility selections more accessible or setting up programs for remote attendance? All are important goals that should be achieved over time, but all cannot be achieved immediately. A dedicated advisory group, as with SIGCHI’s Accessibility Community, can be useful in setting priorities. Once priorities are set, they need to be communicated to the membership and to the broader community.

Recognize and explicitly address and
communicate trade-offs. Be open about
the fact that there are often trade-offs,
as in the one between internationaliza-
tion and consistent models of acces-
sibility. Part of being an international
organization means holding confer-
over another equally attractive city but
with a conference venue with multiple
accessibility barriers.

In addition to event-specific efforts (such as those described here), other efforts to improve accessibility have been ongoing on multiple fronts within SIGCHI over the past few years. For instance, a SIGCHI email alias—sigchi- [e-mail]—was set up for members to share their concerns with the Executive Committee, underscoring SIGCHI’s commitment to being open and welcoming to academics, researchers, and practitioners with disabilities by inviting comments and concerns related to the organization’s websites, publications, or physical accessibility at any SIGCHI-sponsored events, including conferences.

Another example of progress involves video captioning. SIGCHI captures the video and slides of a selection of the presentations at CHI and other SIGCHI-sponsored conferences. These presentations are included with the .pdf of the papers in the ACM Digital Library. Starting in 2016, SIGCHI volunteers began to work with ACM to create an ACM SIGCHI You Tube channel to host much of this content. As part of the effort, the SIGCHI Executive Committee authorized use of SIGCHI funds to create closed captions for all the videos on its You Tube channel. Once a video is uploaded to You Tube, SIGCHI works with a captioning company to develop professional (not automated) captioning. Because the captions are human generated, the time to caption all the videos in a conference can vary depending on the total number of videos uploaded.

 

Suggestions for All Computing Organizations

SIGCHI members surveyed as part of the SIGCHI Accessibility Community Report11 were typically not aware of any SIG or ACM policy or procedure regarding inclusiveness for people with disabilities. This was the case for those with and those without disabilities. For example, respondents reported11 being unable to answer the following questions: How can someone with a disability participate in a mentorship program sponsored by the organization?

What happens when someone who is
blind wants to vote in an election or
run for office? Are the online tools uti-
lized by journal editorial boards acces-
sible? Do the procurement processes
for these large contracts include acces-
sibility? And what policies are used for
remote participation?
Based on the SIGCHI experience,
we can say that professional organiza-
tion inclusiveness begins with explicit
discussions on inclusiveness, and
awareness and discussion represent
an important first step. Executive com-
mittees of SIGs should start the discus-
sion, which should expand to include
conference chairs. Conference chairs
should discuss accessibility with their
technical program chairs. Executive
committees should contact members
of the professional community with
known disabilities and email distri-
bution messages asking for input and
feedback. Conference chairs should
also be aware that some disabilities are
“invisible disabilities” that might not
be apparent (such as learning disabili-
ties and disabilities affecting energy
level, as with Lupus and Lyme Disease).
Starting the discussion produces infor-
mation sharing, which should lead to a
more formalized structure like a policy
or specific committee position (such
as accessibility chair for a conference).
None of these changes will happen
overnight. Becoming more inclusive is
a process that takes place over a period
of years. We thus recommend the fol-
lowing six actions for all ACM SIGs:

Reach out to SIGACCESS. No one within ACM has more experience with accessibility issues than SIGACCESS. At various points, SIGCHI used the SIGACCESS conference accessibility guidelines and portions of the SIGACCESS document accessibility guidelines and consulted with various members of the SIGACCESS Executive Committee who were always happy to help. It may be the SIGACCESS solutions cannot be implemented directly by another SIG due to scalability or lack of expertise, but SIGACCESS has the experience of creating solutions for most accessibility issues. SIGACCESS officers welcome inquiries and contacts from other SIGs.

Encourage proactive involvement and foster bidirectional communication. Make it easy for community members to notify the organization of potential accessibility needs before events like