 Thank you for coming, Liz. Can you tell us something about yourself? Hi. Yeah, I have been using R for over 15 years. I am a statistical geneticist, and I do a lot of other statistical work focusing on working dogs and their behavior and health. I'm blind and I use screen reading software. I got interested in accessibility at first because after the conference two years ago, there was a bit of a brag on Twitter about the conference and how inclusive it was. And I kind of pointed out that it wouldn't really be that inclusive for blind people. And they invited me to join forwards. And so I have been working on conference accessibility since then. What kind of accessibility practices make it possible for you to participate in a conference in general? The conference like the user 2021 really accessibility has to be kind of baked into the whole thing from the start. It's also a lot easier and cheaper and less effort to do it if you build it in from the start. My personal needs are screen reader accessibility. I worked with the teams who were doing communication about the conference emails, tweets, things like that to make sure they had all text descriptions for all the cute marmots and other things like that. I worked to make sure that the website was accessible, that the registration process was accessible, that the schedule was something that could be read and understood and navigated with a screen reader. For many people with sensory disabilities or even other visual or auditory processing disabilities, one of the assumptions at a lot of conferences is that the audience will be receiving information on two channels. They'll be hearing the speaker talk about their slides and they'll be seeing the details that are in the slides. When you have a technical conference like R where you're actually showing how to write code and things like that and you're missing one of those channels, it can kind of be a bummer. So one way to make your presentation accessible is to make it available in advance so that I can read along with you on my device. My screen reader will not read slides that are shown in a video on Zoom. So having advanced access is really helpful to me using language that helps me tie what I'm reading in with what you're saying and trying to avoid kind of pointing at things and saying, as you can see from this or this thing over here does this. So using specific language so that everyone knows what you're talking about. Great, thank you, Elise. So as I screen reader user, what kind of things did you check for when evaluating a speaker's slides for accessibility? That's a great question. First, I checked that I could navigate easily through the text and that the text was laid out and used aspects of, in this case, they were all our markdown created slides. So they used aspects of HTML that made it really easy for me, not just to hear the words, but to get the context. So for example, a nested list contains interesting relationships between items and sub items where if you save that information into a PDF, all of that would get lost from the screen reader perspective. So it was really great to just be able to navigate through them and understand the structure and how the different information presented in the slides related to each other and the tables were nicely formatted and easy to navigate. Another really important component for me as a screen reader user is alt text. Alt text is a text description of a data visualization or anything else on the web. And as I mentioned earlier, Sylvia kind of on and I did some work on looking at the alt texts that were or were not included in Tidy Tuesday submissions. And I was able to kind of break down some of the ingredients you needed to have a good alt text. It's really good to give the user an orientation to what type of plot or graph it is. Is it a line graph? Is it a bar chart? Sometimes some of these fancier new kinds of tidy verse charts need a little bit more orientation and description. It's also good if you tell us what's on the X axis, what's on the Y axis, what scale the measurements are on, what kind of numbers are involved. And lastly, and most importantly, you really need to tell us what the data is saying and why you included it. So that information is usually not available in the title or caption of a data visualization, say in an academic journal, but it's really critical for alt text because the person isn't receiving the information visually to tell us how the data are related to each other and what it is that you want people to see in your data visualization. Compared with other conferences, what are the main accessibility challenges that you encountered before and the use are improved in some aspects? One of the greatest and easiest things was that Zoom is very accessible. I was able to navigate all the Zoom things I needed to navigate both as a participant and as a chair of a session. Probably the most challenging part to navigate was that we ended up using Slack as kind of the glue to have discussions, to have announcements about which sessions were in which Zoom rooms. And unfortunately with a screen reader, you can't reliably follow links in Slack. So took a lot of work by this committee on the backend to get me access to kind of the database of talks and where they would be hosted and where the slides were. Other conferences are kind of varied because there's usually several software components that go into it. So earlier this year, I gave a talk with Sylvia Kanalon about the use of alt text in our Tidy Tuesday submissions. And we had already submitted our abstract and everything and then we found out that the conference was gonna be hosted on Crowdcast and I couldn't access that at all. So they had to kind of patch me in via Zoom and I wasn't able to attend the rest of the talks in real time with everybody else. Our medicine is using Crowdcast also so that one won't be accessible. And I have several conferences in my field that I've had to advocate really hard for access to and ones that I'm waiting to hear from that are really resisting telling me what platform they'll be on. So it's a real mixed bag. Because we are not used to think about how to include everybody. Most conferences are not inclusive, right? And people that need to be included, I guess that they can assume fairly that they're not gonna be included in an average. Exactly. So we actually need to not only build the tools and give the material and think about organizing the conference in ways that they are included but we also need to communicate that message to the whole community, to the broad community. How can we improve in that sense? I think we did a really good job by having accessibility information on the website for the conference. There was, under participation, there was a whole section for accessibility. Most conferences have some sort of boilerplate standard legal disclaimer or something if they have anything at all. You often have to get in touch with them to ask. I mean, in the last year and a half, I've had to say, how are you hosting this conference? If it's gonna be on Gather Town or there's another really visual one that is just completely inaccessible and it has neat features where you can, you know, see a map of where the people are and you can see your friends and go up to them and start a conversation and that's great, but not everyone can access it. Facial chat. Yes. Yes, you got it. So the fact that I can find the information for myself that I don't have to request it from anyone, it's really welcoming if you see that it has been considered in advance. I, a couple of months ago, had a call for papers for a conference in my field. There was no accessibility information on the website. I got in touch with them to ask what platform they had chosen and luckily they hadn't chosen one yet. Hopefully that's gonna work out, but people don't realize that when you screen share on Zoom that the screen readers can't read that kind of video content. If I go on a website and I see that somebody kind of understands that basic stuff and, you know, that the slides will be available for me to listen along to while the person talks so that I can have both channels of information and things like that, it's really great. And having a contact which we had all along, we had, you know, people could email for email their questions about accessibility, having accessibility information available in multiple ways, for example, for people with different sensory disabilities, you wouldn't wanna have a video that wasn't captioned explaining to people what accessibility steps you were taking, you wanna have it both in writing and in video. It is much more welcoming when the guidelines are already in place. I think it was a huge achievement that we asked presenters to agree to follow the accessibility guidelines. They didn't all, but it really signaled to the community that we were gonna take this seriously. For people that have never really thought about accessibility and want to start thinking about it now, could you explain what are the issues with chat platforms in general and what are the points to improve? Every commercial or even open source software project has different accessibility issues. I hope someday that when someone decides to launch a product like Slack, they build accessibility into it from the ground up because it's less work, it's more inclusive, it doesn't involve as many kind of hacks and things from both the programmers and the users. With Slack for a long time, I haven't been able to follow links if somebody says, hey, join this Zoom meeting, I can't. I'm actually only able to use the mobile version of Slack for some reason, the desktop and browser versions are even worse with the screen reader. And then there are little things in Slack like that depending on which update you're on, you don't get access to the emojis that people post in response to your messages and stuff. And that seems really peripheral, but when you're working fast and you're working with a larger group of people and you propose to do something and you wanna know if it's okay with everybody, a lot of that communication happens through those emojis. So sometimes the things that seem really peripheral are not as peripheral as they might seem and they're still important to have access to. I am also involved with the mirror community, minorities in R, and we have an accessibility committee and we use Discord because it is more accessible than Slack but the other day someone sent me an invitation and I couldn't open that one there either. So these things are being updated all the time and it's impossible to know which features you'll gain and lose access to each time. Slack had a job opening for an accessibility person a few months ago, but the problem is that that person can't necessarily implement and what they wanna implement without everyone else agreeing with them. So depending on the company, they may be in kind of a consulting role or they may really be able to change how things operate. That's why it's so important what you're saying about starting to build the accessibility features from the get go. Yes. Yeah, thinking about accessibility from the start. Yes, and a lot of times designing things to be accessible improves the overall design of them. My other day I heard an explanation of if it's too hard to write an alt text for your data visualization then there's probably too much going on in your data visualization. Same with a website. If you keep it accessible, it will be streamlined for everybody. As Rosia was saying in the introduction, you were a valuable member of the organizing team. So as a volunteer organizer, which moments felt most challenging and is there something that could have made you easier? The most challenging moments were the weekend before the conference started when Frans Van Dene and Elio Compiteli and I worked on a chat platform for the conference and we worked with the developers of that chat platform. It's called The Lounge. And we worked on making that much more screen reader accessible and had we been able to launch it, it would have been way more accessible than Slack. We worked for at least nine months on this and when people began to join, we found that the software could not handle the number of people logging on and joining multiple channels. Frans was able to give it a really big server to run on. It wasn't any issues like that. There really wasn't any kind of fix for it that we could implement in time. So we had to go to Slack for the chat and that was pretty disappointing because I had already been working on Slack for a year in preparation for the conference and having to ask people to email me links and things like that. So that was the hardest part. Despite those challenging moments, which moment felt most rewarding of these organizer roles with regards to conference activity. One of my favorite times was seeing people logging on from all around the world and joining and introducing themselves. This is really kind of an unprecedented experience. I don't remember how many countries were represented, but over the process of organizing this conference and in the conference itself, I've been able to meet people that I never would have been able to meet. I haven't ever traveled to in our conference in person. It's just not something I usually would have the funds for. So I just think the efforts that were made, the fact that we had the first keynote in Spanish, that was really great to listen to too. So I would say it was kind of the diversity in community. Do you have any advice for people who have never talked about making accessible presentations, but would like to start? This committee has done a terrific job of putting together accessibility guidelines on the website for USAR 2021. And it's a great place to start because it has a lot of links that explain things like how to measure the contrast and making sure that you have enough contrast in your presentation, how to make sure that you are not using colors that can be easily confused by people with color blindness and how to write good alt text. There's all kinds of resources there. You should look to consult with a person who actually has the experience using those accessibility features because there's really no substitute for someone who is very familiar with using a screen reader and navigating, for example, websites or presentations. There's really no substitute for the knowledge of people who are solving these problems for themselves every day. This team has been awesome and it's been really fun meeting everyone and working with people who have the intention of making it really happen and doing the detail work that has to go into it. And I understand that getting the captions set up and getting the captioners into all the Zoom rooms and everything was a really huge undertaking. I know a lot of work was done by Jocelyn and Andrea to get me access to things in those first few days when we realized I wouldn't have access to them through Slack. Unfortunately, a lot of other conferences in my field I'm having to advocate really hard to even have them occur on platforms that I can get into. So I just really appreciate this team and this community. Thank you so much. Thank you, Liz. It was our pleasure to be here. It was fun.