HOW TO MAKE YOUR CONFERENCE ACCESSIBLE – AND WHY YOU SHOULD CARE!

SOCIAL EVENTS

Conference often have official social events in the evenings. There are also social events organized by sponsors or attendees. These events are part of the conference experience, whether official or not and should be as accessible as possible. When selecting a venue for a social event, whether it is the speaker’s diner or a networking meetup, keep in mind the accessibility of the venue, like you would for your conference venue.

I remember being invited to a speaker dinner, held on the second floor of a posh restaurant that had no elevator. There were a couple tables setup on the ground floor for “overflow”, and that is where I ended up eating, with a handful of other people. It was an embarrassing experience for me, and I imagine for the event organizers as well.

TRANSPORTATION

If you offer transportation from the airport to the venue, consider whether or not the shuttles are wheelchair accessible. It is obviously not always possible to organise accessible shuttles or busses (lack of availability or high cost). When that’s the case, think of alternate solutions: Can you organize taxi vouchers for your attendees/speakers who are using wheelchairs? Can you rent an accessible van to organize pick up and drop off at the airport?

SCENT FREE

More and more people are having problems dealing with scents. Some people may have allergic reactions that cause lips to tingle, nausea, severe headaches, or full blown asthma attacks. Even for those who don’t have such strong reaction, it can be really unpleasant to be sitting near a guy who bathed himself in Lynx!

Make your event scent free. Advertise this on your website and on the registration form so everyone is aware ahead of time.

How have you made your conference more accessible for all people?

If you are interested in learning more about Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) or how to make accessibility a natural part of your business through the application of Corporate Social Responsibility, please contact Sandra Broekhof @ 416-579-1035 orsandra_broekhof@sympatico.ca

HOW TO MAKE YOUR CONFERENCE ACCESSIBLE – AND WHY YOU SHOULD CARE!

SLIDE DESCRIPTION

I like to ask at the start of each presentation I give if there are people in the audience that would benefit from a description of the slides. If they have a vision impairment, even if they sit in the first row, they may not be able to tell what is on the slide. If anyone signals that they would like it, I take a few seconds to describe the visuals on the slide.

HANDOUTS

Are there handouts available during the presentation? Ensure that speakers provide them in alternative formats. Braille is an expensive proposition, and while it’s always neat to have that available if you have someone who could benefit from it (only about 10% of people with sight impairments rely on Braille as their primary reading medium). A more affordable method would be to provide the handout in electronic format on a website – as long as the site itself is accessible and the handout text is also accessible (especially if it’s a PDF).

This goes for speaker evaluations often handed out at the start/end of each presentations.

QUESTIONS

If questions are permitted, ensure that the speakers repeats or rephrases the question before answering it. A lot of people, even without hearing impairment, can’t hear the questions being posed, particularly when they are seated towards the back of the room.

Alternatively, provide portable microphones with volunteers to deliver the mikes to people wanting to ask questions. This is better than a microphone on a stand at the front of the room as moving to the microphone may not be easy.

VIDEOS OF THE PRESENTATIONS

If you film the presentations and make the videos available afterwards, consider providing closed captions and/or transcripts. This will help people with hearing impairments, but also those of us who don’t have time to sit through a video and can read faster than listen at a whole presentation. It will also help people who do want to watch the video, but are in large open offices or busses that either can’t have the sound turned on or can’t hear the sound well because of the environment they are in.

How have you made your conference more accessible for all people?

If you are interested in learning more about Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) or how to make accessibility a natural part of your business through the application of Corporate Social Responsibility, please contact Sandra Broekhof @ 416-579-1035 orsandra_broekhof@sympatico.ca

HOW TO MAKE YOUR CONFERENCE ACCESSIBLE – AND WHY YOU SHOULD CARE!

PRESENTATIONS

Accessibility can be improved in many ways during presentations.

INTERPRETERS

People who are Deaf or hard of hearing may require the assistance of a sign language interpreter to benefit from the presentations. Hiring interpreters to cover all sessions may turn out to be cost prohibitive if you have a particularly large event. Or you may even have a hard time finding interpreters in your area to cover all events. Where possible, all efforts should be made to ensure interpreters are available, if you know that you will have attendees that need interpreters.

Instead of interpreter, you could organise for CART (Communication Access Realtime Transcription). Basically someone is typing what the presenter says and the transcription is projected on a screen near the main display screen. This has the added advantage that you end up with a transcript of the presentation that you can use to create subtitles for your videos (more on that later), or simply to provide for the attendees after the presentation.

Or you could rely on some imaginative use of technology. This can be tricky, so make sure you thoroughly test whatever solution you come up with ahead of time and in context. For example, I once setup Dragon NaturallySpeaking at a church a Deaf colleague was attending. The church could not afford interpreters, yet they had a few Deaf and hard of hearing parishioners that would have liked to attend services but couldn’t. So a used laptop was donated, a cheap overhead projector was acquired and Dragon was trained for the priest. His sermon were projected on a screen and people who couldn’t hear him speak could read the text. They discovered shortly after they implemented that system that many of the elderly parishioners also benefited from this reasonable accommodation. And the priest realized he now had access to all his sermons in electronic formats, indexed, searchable, etc. As with CART, you’d end up with an exact transcript. BEWARE! This solution worked well in the context of one person speaking in one environment. It may not be optimal when speakers haven’t had time to train the speech-to-text solution.

Accessibility often requires lateral thinking.

SLIDE COLOR SCHEME AND FONT SIZES

Remind speakers that their slides should rely on colors that would be easy to distinguish for the roughly 8% of people who are color blind.

Also, less text per slide, with bigger font is generally better and easier to read. For everyone!

How have you made your conference more accessible for all people?

If you are interested in learning more about Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) or how to make accessibility a natural part of your business through the application of Corporate Social Responsibility, please contact Sandra Broekhof @ 416-579-1035 orsandra_broekhof@sympatico.ca