[BlindRUG] UseR! Conference Accessibility

Liz Hare doggene at earthlink.net
Mon Jul 22 18:42:58 UTC 2019


Dear all,

I have just joined FORWARDS, the R Foundation Taskforce on Women and Other Underrepresented Groups. Jonathan is already a member. 

I've used R for almost 15 years and am almost completely self-taught. I've never attended an R conference, because I imagined that I would spend more time wondering what was going on than learning. There's usually an accessibility problem when someone is giving an oral presentation with slides, because there's an assumption that the audience is seeing it and hearing it at the same time. I am doing an online course right now involving coding and finding it really frustrating to match up my notes on the oral presentation with the available code.

I started a conversation with FORWARDS and they are interested in improving access by, for example, asking that presenters make their slides available in advance so they can be read with a screen reader while listening to a talk. We talked about Markdown being a great format for this. We've also talked about things like providing guidance on  audio description of graphics, using descriptive alt-tags, putting the conference schedule in a format that can be read with a screen reader, etc.

I would really like input from people on this list about what kinds of inclusive practices would make it more likely that you would feel the conference is worth your time. Even if you don't know how to fix them, what barriers are there to your participation in conferences about coding, or any other professional conferences in your field?

Thanks,
Liz



Liz Hare, PhD
Dog Genetics LLC
doggene at earthlink.net
http://www.doggenetics.com <http://www.doggenetics.com/>
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