2019 Access SIGCHI Report

Jennifer Mankoff, University of Washington, CSE, jmankoff@cs.washington.edu
Anne Spencer Ross, University of Washington, CSE, ansross@cs.washington.edu
Cynthia Bennett, University of Washington, HCDE, bennec3@cs.washington.edu
Katta Spiel, TU Wein, HCIG, katta@igw.tuwien.ac.at
Megan Hofmann, Carnegie Mellon University, HCII, meganh@cs.cmu.edu
Jennifer Rode, University College London, Knowledge Lab, j.rode@ucl.ac.uk

1. Introduction

SIGACCESS has been on the forefront of hosting accessible scientific conferences and providing guidelines for other ACM SIGs. However, promoting and assessing adoption of best practices is an area that benefits from shared work and attention across multiple SIGs. For the past five years, Access SIGCHI, a growing community of Human-Computer Interaction scholars who advocate for accessibility in academia, has been working with SIGACCESS and leadership and volunteers within ACM SIGCHI to promote accessibility within SIGCHI. As one of the two largest special interest groups within ACM, and the largest with a focus on Human Computer Interaction (HCI), SIGCHI sponsors 20 conferences and over 40 in-cooperation conferences and other such gatherings. Interest in accessibility-related research has seen recent growth across SIGCHI conferences, as indicated by the introduction of a “Health, Accessibility and Aging” subcommittee at the flagship CHI conference in 2017. This article shares results from Access SIGCHI’s third bi-annual report on the status of accessibility practices and policies within SIGCHI, including progress to date and recommendations for continued improvement. 

Notably, the report finds the percentage of SIGCHI conference organizing committees that have an accessibility chair has increased from 16% in 2015 to 79% in 2019. Although there are many continuing accessibility challenges at conferences, video accessibility is increasing, and PDF accessibility may be improving for conferences that require authors to input alt text for images at time of submission. Concrete gains include a commitment to hiring an accessibility consultant on the SIGCHI Executive Committee and the establishment of a budget for accessibility at the flagship conference, CHI. In addition, the full report offers practical recommendations for conference organizers towards more accessible conferences and content, appropriate handling of accommodation requests, and increased representation of people with disabilities in scientific communities.

Below, we provide a brief preview of the report’s recommendations, drawing out insights that may be most valuable to the general SIGACCESS audience. Successes listed below represent overall gains seen in accessibility. They represent a mix of volunteer work of the Access SIGCHI community and also parallel efforts by ACM and SIGCHI leadership. We are grateful to all of the many people who have made this a priority and put their energy into seeing these gains achieved.

Efforts to realize these recommendations are ongoing under Access SIGCHI, which has an active Facebook community and mailing list, and meets monthly on second Thursdays at 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern. The community welcomes feedback and dialogue around the report and is also seeking new members at all levels who wish to contribute. Please contact Jennifer Mankoff, jmankoff@cs.washington.edu).

Recommendation 1: Achieve Conference Accessibility

The goal of this recommendation is to ensure that 100% of SIGCHI conferences are accessible, continuing to encourage participation by SIGCHI groups to achieve accessibility consistency across conferences. Other aims of this recommendation are to have an accessibility policy, and a clear chain of command for addressing accessibility issues, including shifting tasks to professionals where appropriate, and encouraging adoption across ACM.

Successes 

• Increased budgetary commitments
• Accessible seating, quiet rooms, livestreaming
• More accessibility work by SVs (aided by Access SIGCHI guidelines for training SVs)

Goals

While great progress has been made toward achieving conference accessibility across SIGCHI, several goals have not yet been met, including having an accessibility chair for every conference. In re-evaluating the target goals for the recommendation to make conferences accessible, several new goals have been identified:  

• Training accessibility chairs – Create mailing list and organize quarterly meetings to spread knowledge and training of accessibility chairs 
• Develop and Document Best Practices – Increase documentation dissemination to better support accessibility at scale across SIGCHI conferences. Including developing a Student Volunteer training manual and videos, creating a timeline for accessibility chairs, writing content and wording for registration, and disseminate privacy guidelines for registration. Access SIGCHI continues to collaborate with SIGACCESS to refine the Accessibility guidelines for conferences.
• Include accessibility accommodation in conference budgets, such as planning and providing for on-screen transcription of presentations (Specific items listed in the original report Appendix B). 

Recommendation 2. Achieve Content Accessibility

The goal of Recommendation 2 is to ensure that 100% of new content, such as videos and papers, meets established standards for accessibility. Aims of this goal include developing a process for achieving accessibility across ACM, for example, make alt text a standard part of submitting papers, improve accessibility of online materials (websites, apps). 

Successes 

• New HTML 5 proceedings format (CHI 2019)
• Piloted requirement for alt-text (UIST 2019) (volunteers aided with fixing inaccessible PDFs)
• Ongoing video captioning adopted for SIGCHI’s video program

Goals 

Goals for content accessibility that have not yet been met include assessing the current status of content accessibility across conferences because of the difficulty in collecting data; a volunteer team continues to push for ways to address this challenge. In assessing the target goals for the recommendation to make content accessible, several new goals have been identified:  

• Work with SIGACCESS to ensure that SIGCHI’s scientific reports are produced accessibly. This includes providing input to new report formats, as well as developing a proposal to address existing reports, making alt-text a requirement for images, and seeking professional support for implementing accessible publication practices. 
• Achieve conference website accessibility toward 100% compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA standards, create a PowerPoint checklist of web accessibility best practices, work with SIGCHI to ensure mobile app is accessible.

Recommendation 3. Handle Accessibility Requests

With this recommendation, we aim to create a process for handling accessibility requests within SIGCHI, including developing better documentation for training and support. This work also includes increasing social media visibility of accessibility requests and encouraging a better understanding of legal context.   

Successes 

• Slack channel to handle real-time requests (CHI 2019)
• Access SIGCHI mailing list
• Started legal analysis on compliance for US and international venues

Goals

Several target goals remain to be addressed for this recommendation, for example, a study of the legal context for ACM contracts is underway with the aim to help accessibility and conference chairs to better understand where attention is needed. We plan to work with the ACM Diversity & Inclusion Council in establishing quarterly meetings for Accessibility Chairs.

Recommendation 4. Increase Representation of People with Disabilities within SIGCHI

The focus for this recommendation is to encourage and support increasing representation of people with disabilities within SIGCHI leadership and community.

Successes 

• Disabled scholars are now more regularly publishing at CHI venues. 
• Accessibility representation in the SIGCHI Steering Committee

Goals

Several ongoing initiatives include a networking event and outreach to increase representation of disability leaders in SIGCHI.

Next Steps and How to Participate

Over the past two years, Access SIGCHI has made progress toward its goals surrounding accessibility within SIGCHI conferences. Important gains were made around accessibility planning (consultant for the Executive Committee), budgeting for CHI, content formatting (author-submitted alt text, HTML5 proceedings), and on-the-ground accommodations (volunteer guidelines, Slack coordination). Looking forward to the next two years, the group seeks to spread some of these gains to other conferences within SIGCHI, coordinate training of conference accessibility chairs, scale up video captioning efforts, and develop a new checklist for conference website accessibility, among other goals. Readers who have questions or feedback about this report, or who would like to contribute to the goals and mission of the group, are encouraged to contact Jennifer Mankoff (jmankoff@cs.washington.edu).

About the Authors