ASSETS 2019 accessible posters and demos report

Abstract

The ASSETS conference is a leading HCI venue committed to making computing accessible for people with disabilities. Increasingly, the venue itself has become more accessible as the ASSETS community strives for improvement. For example, the conference provides ASL interpreters and live captioning, and the ASSETS community strongly emphasizes the importance of accessible papers and presentations. However, posters and demos have rarely been accessible to attendees who are blind or low vision. As Posters and Demos co-chairs for ASSETS 2019, Accessibility co-chair Dhruv Jain reached out to us with an idea to make the poster and demo sessions more accessible to blind and low vision conference attendees. Following Dhruv's lead, we added audio summaries and alt-text descriptions to the posters and demos web pages for the conference. Attendees could go to the ASSETS 2019 website, find each poster or demo title, and access a short 1-2 minute audio clip describing the poster and alt-text for imagery that appeared on the poster. In this article, we summarize our approach to making poster and demo sessions more accessible, provide some informal feedback from conference attendees about their experiences, and offer suggestions for future Poster chairs to make their poster sessions more accessible.