For the role of President and Vice President, the candidates are Quigly and Burnett; or Kumar and De Russis. We interviewed both sets of candidates about their plans for accessibility and looked at their candidate statements. Neither set of candidate statements directly mentioned accessibility. Both sets of candidates responded to our interview questions with strong commitments to accessibility.
– Kumar and De Russis mentioned three areas of priority and how accessibility contributes to each of them. This shows an understanding that accessibility is an important part of every aspect of what SIGCHI does. They also provided some details on how they plan to communicate with steering committees and build on the work that the disability community has done to detail some of the important opportunities and barriers for addressing access needs at the conferences. They also emphasized regular communication as a way of identifying and learning about mistakes.
– Quigly and Burnett include accessibility as one of their top three areas of priority, alongside transparency and openness to the global community and using inclusive design to improve decision-making processes. They talk about including accessibility as a strategic and operational priority within SIGCHI and advocacy throughout ACM for accessibility, as well as supporting the VP for accessibility. They have plans to use HCI methods to develop an education program and documentation to help conferences improve access and to iterative revise policies using HCI methods.
We appreciate the wish to study accessibility needs using HCI methods central to Quigly and Burnett’s platform, however, the AccessSIGCHI community has already done significant human-centered work to understand issues and concerns. Their statement does not reference any of the work done by our community. In Kumar and De Russis’ platform, we appreciate the emphasis on openness, transparency, and strong commitments, such as in their proposed conference budgets. In addition, as incumbents, we have seen their willingness to collaborate with, support, and communicate with the disability community over the last three years, including working to establish the position of VP for Accessibility in the bylaws of the SIGCHI Executive Committee. We have complete confidence that continuing to work with them will lead to further positive progress on accessibility.
For the role of VP of Accessibility, we endorse both Dragan Ahmetovic and Fernando Loizides as we believe both will make substantial contributions towards improving SIGCHI. Through our interviews with both candidates, we consider them highly qualified for this role and welcome the opportunity to continue working with both candidates. Thus, we have decided to endorse both candidates fully, and we are grateful for their ongoing commitment to accessibility.
AccessSIGCHI 