Accessibility Across SIGCHI Conferences Today

Photo by ACS Captions

Earlier this year, the SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC) created a new position for accessibility, the SIGCHI Vice-President for Accessibility, responding to an ask from the wider HCI community, to structurally push forward our efforts towards making SIGCHI accessible. We are deeply grateful to our previous Adjunct Chairs for Accessibility, Stacy Branham and Soraia Prietch, who helped set the stage and expectations for this new role.

Stacy and Soraia have shared previously their vision for “a future in which people with a diverse range of disabilities can participate in all aspects of the SIGCHI community — as SIGCHI leaders, volunteers, and members.” With this blog post below, we aim to foster open communication about SIGCHI’s current accessibility efforts, discuss our plans going forward, and invite our friends and colleagues from the wider HCI and accessibility communities to engage, contribute, discuss, and provide feedback.

Much like how subcommittees are organized within the SIGCHI EC, the VP for Accessibility chairs the SIGCHI Accessibility Committee. Each member of the committee participates in different accessibility roles related to publication, conferences, and communication. The Accessibility Committee works in tandem with other SIGCHI leadership and committees, such as the VP Finance, VP Conferences, the Publications Committee, and many others. Together, we work as a team to shape the overall accessibility of SIGCHI sponsored conferences and events.

While SIGCHI-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences are responsible for catering to individual accessibility requests, the EC seeks to provide additional support through guidelines/policies and initiatives to help the conferences meet these requests. Some examples of our past efforts include:

• A PDF remediation program (w/ Publications Committee): Tagging PDFs for visual accessibility is a daunting task. Requiring authors to tag their own PDFs increases the load on already-burdened authors and the risk of tagging errors caused by non-experts. The Accessibility and Publications Committees therefore introduced a PDF remediation program in 2022, hiring professional vendors to tag and check accessibility of all PDFs. This program was piloted at four conferences (DIS ’22 & ’23, UIST ’22, and TEI ’23) and was enthusiastically received. We now aim to expand to more conferences.
• A working budget for accessibility (w/ VP Finance): Since 2021, the SIGCHI EC has had a dedicated budget for accessibility, which allows us to serve accessibility requests that our conferences are unable to meet (e.g., flying interpreters to conferences from overseas locations). So far, we have successfully met all accessibility accommodation requests received by us.
• Accessibility considerations in the Gary Marsden Travel Awards (GMTA) program (w/ GMTA Committee): The GMTA support SIGCHI members in need of financial support in attending SIGCHI conferences. In February 2023, the GMTA Committee made changes to the program to add mobility aids (e.g., scooters or walkers) and companion tickets (e.g., for personal care attendants) as expenses approved for reimbursement. Our aim is to address a greater range of accessibility concerns that our traveling conference attendees have, but which often have additional associated costs that our conferences cannot support.
• Accessibility guidelines for SIGCHI Development Fund (SDF) events (w/ SDF Committee): The SDF provides financial support for events and initiatives that help strengthen communities across SIGCHI. To support event organizers in furthering EC priorities such as accessibility, sustainability, global participation, hybridity, safety, and equity more broadly, several EC members have worked together to craft event guidelines, which we will soon make public. SDF applicants will be requested to reflect and share which of these guidelines they are able to fulfill, and the SDF Committee will prioritize proposals that demonstrate the greatest alignment with these EC values.

For more details, also see our previous updates and stay tuned for upcoming ones!

Our ongoing plans include building on these above efforts towards initiatives that include:

• Tracking accessibility barriers and opportunities for improvement: We will continue to track and share reports of accessibility barriers encountered by our conferences — by reporting feedback collected via post-conference surveys and from conference leadership — and to identify opportunities for improvement by engaging with the SIGCHI community in upcoming open sessions (such as our Equity Talks session on Making SIGCHI Accessible in 2021).
• Strengthening guidelines for SIGCHI conferences: To standardize accessibility across our conferences and support conferences in delivering accessibility, we will provide clear guidelines and ask conferences to allocate resources for supporting accessible and hybrid participation. We will work with other EC committees (e.g., the Hybrid Working Group) as well as relevant external communities and advocacy groups (e.g., AccessSIGCHI) towards ensuring that we honor any additional accessibility requirements.
• Mentoring accessibility liaisons to support conference efforts: We will establish liaisons within the SIGCHI Accessibility Committee to periodically interface with conference General and Accessibility Chairs to support and guide their efforts. In addition to ensuring that accessibility is successfully delivered at our conferences, we aim to coach our next generation of volunteers in learning about and advocating for accessibility.
• Making community members aware of available accessibility resources: Our conferences are becoming increasingly disabled. This is a good thing and reassures us of our continued efforts to increase diversity. While we have resources available to accommodate accessibility requests, not all members are aware of them. We will work with the SIGCHI Communications Committee to spread awareness about our available accessibility resources and guide our conferences in doing the same.

In coming months, we will do a series of posts focused on each of these specific topics, followed by an open session (on Zoom) to answer questions, collect feedback, and recruit volunteers (similar to our past Equity talks). We graciously welcome community feedback (e.g., from AccessSIGCHI members and the wider HCI community) and commit to continue learning and educating ourselves on how we can serve better. Please let us know of any feedback or questions by contacting us at sigchi-access@acm.org. We acknowledge that accessibility is a continuous process and invite our community members to guide us into an accessible future!