<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">Dear all,</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I have just joined FORWARDS, the R Foundation Taskforce on Women and Other Underrepresented Groups. Jonathan is already a member. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Thanks,</div><div class="">Liz</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><br class=""><div class="">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">Liz Hare, PhD</div><div class="">Dog Genetics LLC</div><div class=""><a href="mailto:doggene@earthlink.net" class="">doggene@earthlink.net</a></div><div class=""><a href="http://www.doggenetics.com" class="">http://www.doggenetics.com</a></div></div>
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