A Path Forward for an Accessible SIGCHI: An Open Letter
To ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC),
I want to start by thanking the committee and the wider SIGCHI Community for its growing support for accessibility for its disabled members. There have been substantial positive changes to support accessibility in SIGCHI. Our conferences now consistently have accessibility chairs. Authors and organizers work to make their publications accessible by providing Alt-Text, video captions, and tagged PDFs. CHI provides a substantial budget for accessibility, and the EC consistently has provided financial support for accommodations. While conferences are steadily returning to in-person events, authors who cannot travel can now publish and present remotely through recorded talks. Perhaps the most promising proof that these efforts are making a difference is the growing number of CHI attendees with disabilities. At CHI 2023, 85 people registered as having a disability and needing accommodations. That number alone is substantially higher than in past years and only represents a portion of disabled attendees.
SIGCHI is more disabled than ever, and we must prepare for a new era of conference accessibility organizing. These successes result from hard and unyielding work on the part of a small community of organizers between the EC and Access SIGCHI. A large portion of this community is disabled. As the next generation of disabled HCI scholars becomes more senior, we may expect the pool of dedicated volunteers to grow. Unfortunately, we face an imminent volunteer cliff. The existing dedicated volunteers are largely burned out. Many have already taken on critical accessibility chair positions at multiple conferences and do not have the availability to continue to serve. Without their continued efforts, the next generation of volunteers may be unable to continue within SIGCHI, and current gains may slip out of practice. Our progress relies on experienced accessibility volunteers to fill these roles — we are running out of volunteers.
For a clear example, we can look at my experiences as a microcosm of Accessibility service and activism in SIGCHI. I’m an incoming Assistant Professor and have been an active member of SIGCHI and AccessSIGCHI for my entire research career. I am drawn to accessibility services because I am disabled. Conferences present substantial barriers to me and force me to trade between my health and career. Managing these tradeoffs has drawn me into an extensive community of disabled scholars. Through this community, I helped instigate the 2019 protests at CHI and collected data for the following report. I’ve served the SIGCHI community as an Accessibility chair for UIST 2019 and 2020 and CHI 2023. In 2019, I helped establish UIST policies for collecting authors’ alt-text, established a budget line for captioning in-person conferences, and assisted CHI 2020 chairs in adopting this process. In 2020 I planned an accessible in-person conference, then a replacement accessible virtual conference. To help all SIGCHI conferences make the same transition, I surveyed the accessibility of virtual conference platforms and helped develop the accessible virtual conference guide. In 2023, I was an accessibility chair of the most disabled CHI conference in history. I’ve pestered dozens of conference organizers, trained hundreds of student volunteers in accessibility, and tagged thousands of PDFs — all in the service of SIGCHI accessibility. My mentors frequently advise me that I’ve done enough, maybe too much, service for someone pre-tenure. Frankly, I’m burned out; I doubt I’m the only one.
As a community of volunteers, there is constant pressure to put out accessibility fires. Despite countless hours of effort to make CHI 2023 accessible, I know that I let some community members down — CHI was not accessible enough. However, this pressure is not sustainable as the disabled community within SIGCHI grows. Progress to this point largely relies on the expertise of the accessibility chairs, and since this community is not evenly distributed across SIGCHI conferences, accessibility standards vary greatly. In the past, AccessSIGCHI has requested professional support for accessibility chairs. CHI offers this through Executive Events, and their expertise and efforts were crucial. However, even with professional help, managing a relationship with the disabled SIGCHI community must be the responsibility of scholars from that community. Adding more accessibility chairs without this expertise, even while supplementing them with paid support, is ultimately a recipe for burnout and disappointment.
We need to adopt new strategies and set a clear set of priorities. Our goal should be to standardize as much accessibility work within SIGCHI as possible. We can use this to train more community members on accessibility and provide pathways for junior disabled members to access service work without overburdening them or taking advantage. Our goal should be to put the most complex and difficult service decisions on senior members of this community rather than asking them to take on individual conference roles with minimal longitudinal impacts. Here are a few recommendations–starting points–that I hope both the EC and the Access SIGCHI community consider.
1. Make publication accessibility a separate role.
Let’s start with the simplest recommendation. The role of an accessibility chair is too big for one team, and distinguishing between publication and conference accessibility is a good first place to split tasks. Publication accessibility requires chairs to ensure alt-text and captions are gathered from authors at all stages of the review and publication process. It then requires chairs to ensure that the final publications are accessible by paying the publisher to tag pdfs, ask authors to do it and check and remediate their mistakes, or train and supervise a team of student volunteers to do this work. It is an incredibly time-consuming role that spans from two months before paper submissions to the month before the conference. It requires a unique set of skills and a deep understanding of the publication process. It rarely interfaces with disabled attendees but has an outsized impact on the accessibility of SIGCHI by ensuring the next generation of researchers can access published works. Publication accessibility is an investment in disabled scholarship.
We can make this role more feasible through two options. First, each conference can have a dedicated publication accessibility chair under the supervision of the paper chairs. Alternatively, this role could be under the EC and handled across all conferences. This would require all conferences to execute the same accessible publication process and go through an EC subcommittee. The second option can make policy consistent across SIGCHI without relying on all conferences to find this expertise in-house.
2. Develop standard accessibility features and policies for all conferences.
Much of conference accessibility planning is specific to individual accommodations that can only be handled around the early registration deadline, a mere few months before the conference. For example, it is best to hire sign language interpreters only if a person requests them, but booking these services that close to an event can be difficult and more expensive. By then, many of the best and most affordable options are out of reach. To adapt to this, an accessibility chair may try to anticipate a set of accessibility features they should plan for in advance. However, if these features cost money, the accessibility chair faces a difficult decision. Spend their precious budget on accommodations that may go unused, or save it for the more expensive last-minute accommodations that come up at registration. Depending on the chair and the conference, there is no good way to answer this dilemma.
Instead, as a whole SIGCHI community, we should agree on what accessibility features should be universal to all conferences and ask accessibility chairs to spend most of the year executing these requirements. This way, less experienced chairs will have a clear to-do list and, over time, be able to pass guidelines down to future organizers. General chairs could anticipate a large portion of their accessibility budget. Attendees could review these features well before the conference and decide if these policies meet their needs.
The community should discuss what accommodations go on this list, but here are some starters: automatic captioning in all hybrid, virtual, and in-person sessions; vegan, gluten-free, and nut-free food options at all conference meals and clearly labeled; reserved accessible seating at the front back, sides, and alleys of all session rooms; reserved social seating in common areas; 1–2 wheelchair or scooter rentals available at larger venues; a quiet room; no flash policies or flash areas; sensory kits with ear plugs and sunglasses for people with sensory processing impairments; and remote presentation options. Each of these types of accommodations can cover a variety of impairments and come at a relatively low cost to conferences if they are prepared well before the early registration deadline. The equivalent accommodations may be very expensive if doled out individually (e.g., customized meal plans), ineffectively implemented (e.g., captioning for individuals), or impossible to reserve on a short timeline (e.g., wheelchairs).
3. Define the boundaries of conference accommodation policies.
One of the greatest challenges for accessibility chairs is defining what is within the scope of a conference and what is the responsibility of individuals and their institutions. Based on past SIGCHI policies, the line can be unclear. For example, at CHI 2023, we provided many sign language interpreters for different sign languages. Interpreters are compensated for their housing and travel, and the conference pays their fees directly. However, we only provide free registration for personal care assistants; individuals and institutions are responsible for all other costs. Many attendees asked for assistance with accessible transit and housing; however, we could not offer support beyond providing links to local information and the SIGCHI travel grants program. Different chairs may make different decisions, especially if they have flexibility in their budget. However, both attendees and chairs would benefit from a clear set of policies about what can be provided by the conference. These policies must be developed under the advice and consent of the SIGCHI-disabled community. What lies outside those boundaries must be the responsibility of institutions.
Attending conferences as a disabled person often costs more money than attending as a non-disabled person. For example, I quickly learned that cheaper housing far from venues is inaccessible to me. As a Ph.D. student, I put this cost on my advisors, and now I put it on my fundraising responsibilities. Room blocks provide greater access for me, but it is ultimately my responsibility to acquire accessible housing. Some people may experience institutional barriers to accessing these accommodations. At some level, attendees must find these barriers within their institutions and push back. After all, not all disabled researchers are going to SIGCHI conferences, and they will benefit most from localized activism. However, SIGCHI can provide another option for people who need these accommodations when the institution is not up to speed. Like travel awards, I propose the EC provide accessibility grants to individuals to help pay for disability-related costs of attending conferences. Accessibility chairs could direct attendees who do not have institutional support to these grants and even advocate for their funding. This approach may balance the need to push more responsibility on institutions while not leaving people at less supportive institutions behind.
4. Establish a pathway through the EC for novel accessibility barriers.
Accessibility is a moving target; it takes substantial experience to find the right accommodation for specific situations. Accessibility chairs must balance access conflicts between different attendees, limited budgets, and constraints of specific venues. To do the job well, chairs ideally have practice working with various disabled people, planning large events, and insider knowledge of SIGCHI policy and politics. This is a rare find among junior faculty, and we often fill the role of accessibility chair with Ph.D. students. The prior recommendations have focused on reducing the complexity of the role of the accessibility chair to expand our pool of qualified volunteers. However, some complexity will persist, and the responsibility for it should fall on the most experienced members of the community. As novel scenarios arise, there should be a defined way for accessibility chairs to seek the advice and support of the EC’s accessibility committee. This would include a policy for extending EC funding to conference accessibility beyond a conference’s budget, assistance in developing accessibility plans, and check-ins following the conference to collect data about accessibility outcomes.
5. Create a how-to guide for disabled attendees.
This proposal is more for Access SIGCHI and, in my mind, the most controversial position. In my experience, both as a disabled conference attendee and an organizer, some accessibility barriers are just better solved by individuals than conferences and institutions. The challenge is knowing how to “anticipate and adjust” to make conferences work. I’ll take an example from my conference struggles. CHI 2019 made me very ill. The combination of international travel, a lack of seating in social areas, and crowds bottlenecked through thin hallways made me weak, and I was having trouble walking. At some point, my advisor lent me her seat cane for a presentation, and on the taxi ride back to the hotel, as I was stepping out, she threw her seat cane out the door, closed it behind her, and continued to her hotel. She told me to return it to her the next evening, making me get used to having it with me throughout the event. I learned something important from carrying around my chair. Even though there could be more seating, there could not be seating everywhere I wanted. I needed a seat almost everywhere: from conversations at posters to lines for bathrooms and food to CHI-adjacent parties in loud bars and whiskey distilleries. Now I bring my seat cane to all public events, SIGCHI and otherwise.
Not everyone will have a disabled mentor, but the knowledge of how to anticipate and adjust lives within this community. For all the efforts to create guidelines for accessible conferences, we have provided little information about self-accommodation. This recommendation comes with one caveat: resources for self-accommodation do not negate the responsibility of SIGCHI and institutions. On the contrary, self-accommodation works best when combined with accessibility policies that support these practices. The goal is to give attendees the tools to participate in this community as our standards for accessibility grow and evolve.
There is more to say about each of these recommendations. More data to back up the claims. More experiences and conversations with the community to render executable plans and drawn-out debates. I have been tempted to write each out and take on roles that would allow me to implement them. Turning down CHI 2024 accessibility chair still keeps me up at night. But I’m making one last commitment to accessibility by keeping this relatively short. SIGCHI accessibility relies on the health of its volunteers. I’m putting these ideas out there and stepping away, hoping they take on new life. Otherwise, they will be there in a few years when I have the energy and opportunity to serve again.
Sincerely,
Megan Hofmann,
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, Northeastern University
Process
The above letter has gone through a few rounds within the AccessSIGCHI community and was delivered to the EC on May 27th, 2023. The goal in writing this letter is to provide an incomplete set of opportunities for the EC to change the structures within this research community that limit access to people with disabilities. Like many efforts to increase equity, the question is not about changing individual opinions but changing the infrastructure of inequity that holds back even the most well-intentioned leaders.
I wrote the first draft of this letter shortly after completing my role as the Accessibility chair for CHI 2023. I sent that draft to the Access SIGCHI mailing list and Slack channel and requested comments and feedback. I considered the feedback and edited it, but I still published this under my name because it does not fully represent the views of Access SIGCHI as an organization. Access SIGCHI is likely to provide a separate response.
I delivered the above version of the letter to the EC and gave them a little over a month to consider a response privately. I’ve had conversations with members of the EC and expect they will provide a public response by the end of the summer. Versions of many of my suggestions are already underway within the EC’s Accessibility Committee. Not a surprise because these ideas reflect years of conversations amongst community members who are deeply engaged in community accessibility and who move freely between roles across Access SIGCHI and SIGCHI’s official positions.
I made this letter public because, while I fully expect the EC will uphold its commitments, I want to capture this moment when conference accessibility is at a point to either choose lasting change or retain a status quo that cannot sustain access. I hope it serves as an artifact for positive reflection in years to come. Alternatively, this is a stake in the ground for accountability.
