Dragan Ahmetovic
What are the top 3 accessibility priorities you plan to address during your term?
1) Scaling the accessibility resources (e.g., PDF remediation, budget support) to a greater number of SIGCHI conferences. Currently, the PDF remediation program and the budget support for conference accessibility needs are very appreciated, but still limited to a handful of conferences. A key priority is working towards providing these supports to all SIGCHI events. Standardizing the accessibility requirements and acquiring the relevant services at SIG level (as previously done for sign language interpreters for example) could help to make them more cost effective and easier to implement. For many aspects, including PDF remediation or accessibility support during conferences, we also need a large, motivated and well prepared volunteer workforce and there need to be adequate incentives and acknowledgement for these volunteers.
2) Separate accessibility roles and processes for conferencing, online presence, and publications. Most conferences identify a single role to address all the accessibility concerns across the conference. Namely, the key tasks involved are the accessibility of the conferencing aspects (venue, presentations), the accessibility of the publications and, for online/hybrid conferencing, accessibility of the online presence and accessible interaction between in-presence and online aspects. These tasks require different sets of skills, liaising with different stakeholders, and occur at different stages of the conference organization. Thus, it would be reasonable to separate these roles while maintaining coordination when needed. As an added benefit, this could make the training of the separate roles easier and quicker. During my service as the general chair of Web For All conference in 2022 we tried to achieve something similar by separating the accessibility tasks between the program chairs, the online chairs, and the hybrid/local chairs. A similar proposal was advanced by Megan Hofmann, with the support of AccessSIGCHI in a post on Medium (“A Path Forward for an Accessible SIGCHI: An Open Letter”, June 20th 2023).
3) Accessible reviewing. While the accessibility of the camera-ready versions of the manuscripts is either requested or provided through PDF remediation program or through external providers, many SIGCHI conferences, including CHI, expect (but do not require) the initial submitted manuscripts to be accessible. As a result a reviewer can discover that an assigned paper is not accessible only late in the process. The CHI policy in this case is that “Papers flagged as inaccessible by a reviewer will have to be reassigned”, which results in reviewing process delays and it is an inclusivity barrier in the fairness of the science production process. Thus, another priority is to ensure the accessibility of the manuscripts for the reviewers during the entire reviewing process.
How do you plan to engage AccessSIGCHI and other community organizations in your work to support and improve SIGCHI?
Regular meetings and interactions with AccessSIGCHI and other relevant community organizations (e.g, SIGACCESS) are fundamental in order to factor also the work of these organizations and their agenda in the process of planning the improvement of the accessibility practices in SIGCHI. AccessSIGCHI in particular has a key role in promoting and supporting accessible conferencing in SIGCHI through resources provided for conference organizers and attendees. Most importantly, the support and guidance it provides to the accessibility chairs, in particular through training sessions, could be central to the process of standardizing accessibility practices across the SIGCHI events. Thus, I think that it would be strategic to explore ways for supporting AccessSIGCHI in this endeavour, possibly making these training sessions scalable to a greater number of conferences.
Given that the 25 SIGCHI conferences are each run by different steering committees and have a different conference chair every year, how do you envision ensuring consistent accessibility across all SIGCHI events? What are some challenges to this vision?
While conference chairs change every year, they “inherit” guidelines and best practices from previous years’ organizers. Thus, introducing rigorous and consistent accessibility practices into conference organization is fundamental, but also it is expected to have lasting effects. Also, the steering committees are relatively stable across the years. Thus, liaising with the steering committees is strategic to ensure that the accessibility is always on their radar. The main challenges are introducing the accessibility practices in the conference organization in the first place, and keeping the organizers up to date with the evolving accessibility practices. Indeed, while most of the conference organization checklist varies little year to year, accessibility practices, in particular related to on-line and hybrid conferencing, may need constant revision. Advocating with the conference organizers for implementing accessibility practices, and intervening on the policies at SIG level could help to spread accessibility practices to conferences that are still not fully involved. At the same time, providing a reliable point of contact to support the conference organizers in correctly implementing these accessibility practices is important to maintain consistency. The SIGCHI accessibility committee and the VP of accessibility already constitute a preferential point of contact for the accessibility needs of the organizers of SIGCHI events. AccessSIGCHI also provides resources, guidelines and training for the conference organizers and, in particular, for the accessibility chairs. Ensuring that these resources are provided to the organizers and implemented consistently will require regular checks by the committee for each conference.
Short and long-term barriers to conference attendance will continue to differentially negatively affect many in our community, such as accessibility needs, visa issues, and parenting obligations. For people who cannot attend in-person conferences, hybrid conferencing has been a poor substitute. Since conference steering committees are conference-focused, any real solution for including them will need to come from the EC. How do you envision contributing to improved networking and visibility opportunities for SIGCHI members outside of conferencing?
Rather than a “substitute” for the in-person conference attendance, I view hybrid conferencing as a different, still improvable, conferencing modality with the potential to overcome existing barriers to the in-person conference attendance. In that sense I welcome hybrid conferencing as an opportunity for inclusion for all community members that for any reason cannot participate in-person. Historically, barriers to in-person conference attendance were always present, but deemed as somewhat unavoidable. We are now aware that a different approach is possible, and I believe that we should strive to deliver this service to the community in the best way possible. It is clear that hybrid conferencing poses many additional challenges with respect to in-person conferencing. In particular, the networking aspect of the conferencing is the hardest one to successfuly transpose to the hybrid modality and there is not yet a widely accepted solution to this problem. Still, as creating and sharing knowledge is the main focus of researchers’ work, I think that this challenge should be addressed as part of conferencing and not outside of it. How can we achieve this? Some events provide moments of synchronous interaction between online and in-person attendees, but these have limited success and they are hard to implement due to the strict schedule of the in-person activities, different time zones of the remote attendees, and pre-existing work/life obligations. I think that a possible solution could be, in addition to the in-person activities, promoting asynchronous interaction activities through a stronger online presence over longer time periods, so not only limited to the duration of a conference.
From your perspective, what have been the most effective changes for SIGCHI Accessibility in the last 10 years, and what were the mechanisms that made these possible?
The creation of the position of the AC for accessibility first and its transformation into the role of VP of accessibility afterwards made it possible to intervene at SIG level to introduce lasting accessibility improvements, including a working budget for accessibility in SIGCHI, the PDF remediation program, accessibility considerations in the Gary Marsden Travel Awards program, and the accessibility guidelines for the SIGCHI Development Fund events. I would like to thank the previous ACs and the VC of accessibility for their work in making these improvements possible.
Another important, still ongoing change, is the ACM-wide effort, pioneered by SIGCHI, towards more accessible publications. The process of standardizing publication templates and introducing TAPS as the publication pipeline is not without difficulties. However, the ultimate goal of producing and archiving multi-format accessible publications, independent from proprietary solutions, will help in the long run both the authors and the readers.
Finally, during the COVID pandemic and in its aftermath, the necessity to persevere in knowledge sharing activities and conferencing pushed us towards the pursuit for more equitable and inclusive conferencing, by also experimenting on-line and hybrid modalities. Within SIGCHI, the resulting knowledge and practices for improving the accessibility of the on-line communications and the interplay between in-person and on-line interaction also constitute a significant accessibility change.
Fernando Loizides
What are the top 3 accessibility priorities you plan to address during your term?
First Priority: Enhancing Digital Accessibility Guidelines:
The first priority is to enhance and establish specific accessibility guidelines that will be used as a centre point for any communication the ACM has in terms of organising events such as conferences workshops or talks. Upon discussions with the outgoing vice president there is already a lot of work in material that has been done to this effect and I aim to make sure this is not lost. By completing the material and adding as we go along we will have a substantial yet easy to understand and implement process that we can disseminate. The vital importance of this first priority will be shown when describing priorities 2 and 3.
Second Priority: Increasing Awareness and Training:
Education is key to fostering a culture of accessibility. I plan to implement comprehensive training programs and awareness campaigns to equip SIGCHI members with the knowledge and skills needed to design and develop accessible technologies. This will be freely available to anybody who wishes to use it. Building on priority #1 of enhancing digital accessibility guidelines I aim to make sure that these are implemented from the first step in any event plan. Conferences workshops talks and others are usually organised by individuals who without meaning any harm do not necessarily have the knowledge or are aware of how important accessibility is, let alone how to implement it. I have organised many conferences in the past both ACM and non ACM conferences. What strikes me is that when I write that proposal there is no mandate for me to explain in most of them how I will deal with accessibility. Furthermore when producing a budget for my conferences I was never asked what money I would be allocating to address accessibility within the conference such as interpreters, ability for childcare, automatic transcriptions in talks and even basic things such as PDF accessibility. By creating the above mentioned material we will be pushing for a mandated accessibility responsibility from the proposal stage of any ACM event. Of course this material should go beyond the ACM events and distributed within other organisations as the more we educate and mandate that accessibility be taken seriously then the more opportunity there is for the future when an organiser is undertaking an ACM event two have already been educated of how this is done. Without thinking that there is a necessarily negative or malicious push back to enforcing accessibility, there is often a difficulty in the implementation. Volunteers as well as easy to understand and implement material I believe will improve this systematically.
Third Priority: Inclusiveness and Transparency in Decision Making.
Although often decisions are made by a handful of individuals these decisions should be informed by the community. My third priority area is to make the decision process transparent and to ask for help from communities such as SigAccess and IFIP TC-13 in being actively involved with feedback comments and opinions as well as sharing their best practises and weaknesses with myself and the community in order to create a sort of participatory design decision making process. I understand this will require some time from the community but from my interaction with members of SigAccess and other advocates for accessibility I am confident that they will gladly do so and their time will be worth it. Last but not least we should not forget international fellows and academics in countries who strive for accessibility rights and abilities but are currently not able to reach full potential as the structure of their nation prohibits them from doing so. By including them in our communities and providing as much support as we can trying to also migrate attention to those nations and therefore increasing the spotlight may help our colleagues to affect policy’s within their department’s governments local areas double ultimately lead to benefitting all the people that need it within their area.
How do you plan to engage AccessSIGCHI and other community organizations in your work to support and improve SIGCHI?
I intend to start by contacting AccessSIGCHI by doing an open forum where I will present the priorities end the process by which I intend to implement what I have said. I will ask for time during the general meetings and follow up with specific task groups. I would also like to expand to further community organisations that have a an international role within the human computer interaction society and can also benefit from cross collaboration opportunities to promote the accessibility standards and processes that we create. This includes IFIP TC13.3 which is an association looking at accessibility in general and also frail individuals. The flagship conference of this community of which I am an active member is INTERACT. I believe by inviting some members between the two communities we should be able to streamline and improve SIGCHI AcessSIGCHI and flagship conferences and events around the world. Once this has been established a common working place to share activities opinions best practises and material will be established so that there is a constant and real time communication between all members of the different communities rather than consultation before ACM meetings. I believe the more transparent the process is the more active the community can also contribute to it. Looking to countries which are under represented in terms of accessibility who may have people struggling solo to be able to advocate for rights should also take centre stage.
Given that the 25 SIGCHI conferences are each run by different steering committees and have a different conference chair every year, how do you envision ensuring consistent accessibility across all SIGCHI events? What are some challenges to this vision?
I have already mentioned as one of the priorities the creation of the material that can be used in such conferences. I’ve also mentioned the need for a simplistic way of being able to enforce this from stage 1 which is the proposal stage. The conference chairs of most conferences change every year. However the committees that run the conferences and decide how the proposals of those conferences are made and judged do not. Steering committees should be targeted in the first instance so that they implement the material within these events. I want to stress that this should not MP implemented just for conferences but also smaller events like workshops talks meetings and focus groups. I believe that having a two stage model of step. The first being creating a mandatory accessibility requirement for any event endorsed by the ACM. This will allow for a controlled environment where accessibility is addressed. The second stage will be to make it easy for the organisers on what is required of them and also the solutions that they can implement. Although people’s time is limited and there are dozens of conferences that need to be addressed, we need to produce enough user friendly material and have enough time to educate more advocates to help us teach this material. I am confident that once an organiser is supports it well enough and realises that accessibility implementation is both doable and beneficial we will start to see this resonating in other places as well.
Short and long-term barriers to conference attendance will continue to differentially negatively affect many in our community, such as accessibility needs, visa issues, and parenting obligations. For people who cannot attend in-person conferences, hybrid conferencing has been a poor substitute. Since conference steering committees are conference-focused, any real solution for including them will need to come from the EC. How do you envision contributing to improved networking and visibility opportunities for SIGCHI members outside of conferencing?
It is true that in person attendance carries many benefits. Most of the collaborations that have led to international change have been through talks over coffee having serendipitously met someone for the first time. Although the pandemic has been a terrible in the last five years it has forced everyone to improve their online game. Tools are improved, transcripts are more accurate, speeds of speech are clearer. The issue we are facing is that the tools facilitate abled people in making faster connections. The human aspect of this is often lost. Questions do not turn into conversations after a talk. People are marginalised outside of the community if they are not able to communicators effectively or even attend another meeting in person. Essentially the time that someone who cannot attend an impression conference in the proverbial spotlight is extremely limited. So, the question we need to ask ourselves is what are the network opportunities the visibility opportunities and the goals that people would like to have if they cannot attend in person conferences. I believe that promotion of virtual or remote participation in terms of allowing more time and different opportunity for remote participants should be reworked. Furthermore, we must not forget that there is a significant difference between experienced members of staff and those that are more new to a community. The confidence levels of earlier career members is limited and so I believe one of the utmost important tasks is to provide the appropriate mentorship to these individuals and support them through guidance and also exposure. Changing some events from real time into non real time will also benefit in creating a very different process whereby everybody plays by the same rules. All the above are aimed to improve network and visibility of participants who are not able to attend in person events. We are also able to mandate that some sessions run completely online. Lastly, identifying under represented communities globally and supporting those communities in joining international groups will benefit countries which are not able to at the moment and force accessibility or inclusion as much as they would like to.
From your perspective, what have been the most effective changes for SIGCHI Accessibility in the last 10 years, and what were the mechanisms that made these possible?
This will be an opinion rather than substantiated in complete evidence. I believe that one mechanism that has severely improved accessibility in general in the last decade and therefore has produced the ability for SIGCHI accessibility To push for a major changes is that of legal requirements. The USA leads mandatory requirements such As for example all online forms from agencies that adhere to public regulations be made accessible. As these legal requirements came into play the community has benefited from being able to advocate for stricter guidelines and rules towards how material and interaction should happen. Other effective changes that I notice include creating more structure in terms of the working groups that have contributed to the development of international guidelines (WCAG and ARIA).
There has also been an increased growing body of research focused on accessibility and inclusive design and this has been spearheaded by the sigchi community.I believe the path that dedicated accessibility tracks within conferences and events has been paramount in focusing the attention of many industry and academic researchers within workshops fostering collaboration and inclusion as well as exposure to a wider community.
All the above have laid the groundwork for putting into place measures that will benefit people internationally and especially those from underrepresented groups.
AccessSIGCHI 