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-
accessibility@listserv.acm.org—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