Aaron Quigley and Margaret Burnett
What are your top 3 priorities, and how does accessibility fit into those plans during your term?
Our top three priorities for SIGCHI include
(1) to make SIGCHI more open, transparent and inclusive for our global community
(2) greater respect and embrace diversity, by ensuring a greater involvement of our diverse membership in decision making and by introducing HCI’s inclusive design methods into our decision making processes (more on this is below in Q4);
(3) Improve the accessibility of SIGCHI for all members from publications to conferences.As one of our top three priorities we aim to embed accessibility as a strategic and operational priority in everything from the development of new infrastructures to support volunteerism to building bridges beyond SIGCHI. An important aspect of this will be advocacy to the ACM to ensure our contributions to knowledge and platforms offer the highest level of accessibility. While SIGCHI and other SIGs can lead by example we need longer term change.
Key to this will be supporting the work of the VP for accessibility, accessibility committee and accessibility chairs while warmly welcoming community input and engagement through an open-door policy for consultation with AccessSIGCHI and other volunteers.
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?
Knowledge:
Documentation and handover from year to year remains a challenge for SIGCHI conferences. Our first priority will be to develop a living knowledge base which captures the work undertaken over the past few years and is maintained and enhanced. We will also make this knowledge base widely available, so that these volunteers know about its existence and can easily access it. We know new volunteers often struggle and feel lost as accessibility plans develop and requests come in. This knowledge base can also inform SIGCHI events beyond conferences which can often suffer as there is no inter-year coordination.
HCI Methods with Education:Working with the VP for accessibility we wish to design an education program, consisting of videos and/or other resources along with structured onboarding and offboarding of volunteers. The key here is to base this on what knowledge needs to flow, so it’s not just a small group of accessibility chairs carrying the volunteer work forward.
Advocacy:
The work undertaken in SIGs such as SIGACCESS and SIGCHI need to inform and shape what the ACM does. Advocating and supporting changes with ACM policies, practices and ways of working will help improve the consistency of accessibility across all SIGCHI events in the long term.
What role do you see for policy in improving accessibility within SIGCHI? What specific policies would you advocate for?
Survey:
There are a number of policies and guidelines which SIGCHI currently relies upon. Our first step will be to survey these in terms of the ACM statement on diversity and inclusion, ACM accessibility statement and the Accessible Conference Guide. This will help us identify where existing policies need to be revised and integrated.Develop and Evaluate Iteratively:
Further, we expect SIGCHI can develop new policies on accessible information and communication, use of accessibility guidelines and accessibility standards in SIGCHI events. For any new policies we need to develop, we will draw upon established inclusive design methods to iteratively evaluate and improve them. We believe this is a necessary step to any new policy/standard,, before we can expect the community to effectively follow them..
There is much to be done to make SIGCHI accessible, and mistakes will inevitably be made that harm the disabled SIGCHI community. During your term, how will you proactively identify these mistakes, and how do you approach addressing these harms?
Bringing HCI methods to our processes, to ward off mistakes early:
First, we need to know what has been going wrong. So the first thing we have to do is collect from you, the AccessSIGCHI community, accessibility chairs, and accessibility committees, things SIGCHI are not even trying to fix yet, as well as things we are already trying to do that are not working or not enough.From this start, we have a list of things to fix proactively – but how? It’s great that SIGCHI already provides guidelines and requirements to ward off common accessibility problems (in some conferences more than others), and we intend to continue these things. Still, this is far from enough, and can easily go wrong.
It’s well-known that some community members have trouble with the workflow various mandates require of them in making their conferences/materials/papers/sites/etc. accessible (e.g., the many TAPS issues). To help such mandates really work, we intend to view them through an HCI lens. More concretely, we intend to bring HCI’s inclusive design methods to SIGCHI’s own mandates, guidelines, and decision making processes.
To start, we’ll proactively use HCI inspection processes on the workflows we’re expecting the SIGCHI community to follow. Among the possibilities are to use one or more of the InclusiveMag family (e.g., GenderMag, SocioEconomicMag, AgeMag, etc.), or a suitable Heuristic Evaluation to proactively find and fix ways the workflow can go wrong for the members who are expected to carry it out.
Inspection methods are powerful, practical, and sound. Still, the number of problems they miss can be very high if evaluators do not have strong expertise. For this reason, we will reach out to AccessSIGCHI members to be part of these evaluations.Bringing HCI methods into SIGCHI’s decision processes is not a “silver bullet”, but we think it will bring significant progress to our ability to head off some of the accessibility issues early – before they are released to the world and doing harm to our community.
Neha Kumar and Luigi De Russis
What are your top 3 priorities, and how does accessibility fit into those plans during your term?
Accessibility has been, and should continue to remain, a core value for SIGCHI in all its events and initiatives. There are six areas that we are keen for the EC to focus on, building on the learnings from the SIGCHI Futures Summit. We will pick three of these and elaborate:
Enhancing the conference experience: This goal entails taking a systemic view of conferences and ensuring that they are sustainable in a number of ways. A big part of this is making sure that accessibility remains central in the activities that pertain to SIGCHI conferences. Courtesy the VP Accessibility and their committee, we currently have a checklist for conference leaders, as well as a set of best practices. We would aim to build on these resources, connecting when possible to the resources already created and curated by AccessSIGCHI and others in the larger SIGCHI community, so that all conference chairs have access to these before they embark on their chairing journeys. In addition to setting accessibility standards for SIGCHI, we would like to set an example for all ACM conferences. We have added more on this in response to the next question, which is related.
Ensuring open governance: Part of this goal entails ensuring access to information, and the participation of persons with disabilities in how the SIG is governed. We have created an elected role, and been in regular touch with AccessSIGCHI representatives thus far, with Dr. Jen Mankoff also serving on the SIGCHI Advisory Council, to ensure that the EC is doing its best to address accessibility concerns as they arise, and ideally before they arise. We would like to see this relationship and communication strengthen and grow. Consistently making space for and bringing conversations (as well as any associated tensions!) regarding accessibility, and related actions to the SIGCHI community and to ACM when relevant, would be a part of this endeavor.
Centering students and early careers: We aim to ensure that the SIG remains future(s)-oriented, and centers supporting and mentoring our students/early career professionals (researchers and practitioners). With this goal, it is also key to be inclusive of persons with disabilities, and to ensure that our mentoring structures account for all of our pathways to success.
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?
We remain committed to the answers we provided to Megan Hoffman’s open letter, for all 26 conferences in the SIGCHI family, which can be found in our Medium blog post. We hope that the next VP Accessibility will also be willing to take these on, of course iterating on them as appropriate. We share some additional thoughts below.
First, we would aim for a model where the EC (via the VP Accessibility) is regularly in communication with steering committees and conference chairs, possibly through a dedicated SIGCHI Community Advisory Board for Conferences, with adequate representation for addressing accessibility priorities. This Board would focus, among other topics, on whether or not accessibility is being duly addressed, and what we could do to do this better.
Second, we have discussed doing regular (monthly or bi-monthly) onboarding sessions for new conference leaders, to make sure that knowledge on many topics (and including accessibility) is passed on to each new leader in charge of a conference. The SIGCHI Conference Handbook is an effort that could help support and structure these sessions, and be augmented over time as well.
Finally, we would like to encourage all conference town halls to become open to all, not only registered attendees, and make sure that the topic of accessibility and any related concerns are raised appropriately.
As for challenges to this vision: our main challenge is always that there is constant turnover across volunteering and leadership roles, so it is difficult to ensure that knowledge is passed on as and how it should. Culture shifts are indeed hard, but we are committed to staying with the conversation and ensuring that it becomes a much more natural point of focus as we continue to make progress with our vision of making SIGCHI accessible.
What role do you see for policy in improving accessibility within SIGCHI? What specific policies would you advocate for?
Policies are critical top-down drivers of change, even as bottom-up advocacy is just as essential—for input and feedback to policy-making efforts.
There are a few places where we think policy plays a role. First, just awareness of policies that hold—at the local and regional level—is important. This allows us to set participants’ and our own expectations appropriately, for any event or initiative. This also allows us to work with ACM to ensure that we are in compliance.
There are policies and guidelines at the SIGCHI level that we have been working towards, via the VP Accessibility and the Accessibility Committee. Providing more in-depth guidance would be helpful here, for our conferences in particular. This could include, e.g., requiring that all conferences set aside a budget to ensure that accessibility needs are addressed appropriately at conferences. If and when this is not possible, then conferences must be in communication with their communities to understand what approaches should be taken.
SIGCHI policies and guidelines are also important to communicate back to ACM, first to know that we are supported by ACM in setting them, and second to set an example (when appropriate) for other SIGs to follow, given that for many SIGs accessibility is a relatively new concern.
There is much to be done to make SIGCHI accessible, and mistakes will inevitably be made that harm the disabled SIGCHI community. During your term, how will you proactively identify these mistakes, and how do you approach addressing these harms?
Creating a culture of open communication and fostering trust is critical, in any kind of governance, but especially when there have been tensions in the past.
To proactively identify mistakes, we would check in regularly with our conferences (additionally through the post-conference surveys when these exist) to see how they have been doing in terms of addressing accessibility at their events, and create mechanisms for conference leaders to share open feedback with the EC (via the Accessibility Committee). We would also stay in regular communication with the Chair(s) of AccessSIGCHI to know what recent concerns have surfaced.
Once we have identified gaps in understanding and/or execution, we will work with the VP Accessibility and their committee to see what changes are necessary and where, and communicate back with our conference and community leaders as appropriate.
AccessSIGCHI 