By Liz Hare with contributions from Anne Lee Steele and Malvika Sharan

The Society of Research Software Engineering recently sponsored a Fireside Chat on
accessibility and inclusion as part of The Turing Way‘s June Book Dash.

I’m a co-lead of the Accessibility Working Group with The Turing Way, as well as a member of the Book Dash Planning Committee. As a member of both groups, I work with our community to develop resources and practices to help make our community more inclusive.

This Fireside Chat was an opportunity to discuss common barriers to participation in open science experienced by a variety of people who have been historically excluded from these spaces.

Drafted by the Accessibility Working Group, The Turing Way accessibility policy defines accessibility practices broadly as:

• A set of community-wide, behavioural, social, and technical decisions that can be taken to ensure that all are welcome and are able to enter and participate in research, data-driven processes, communities and events despite any barriers for access.

• While accessibility is commonly understood with respect to disability, we – meaning The Turing Way community – define accessibility as giving access to everyone, with specific attention given to ensuring proper access for groups of people that encounter different barriers for participation. Barriers may be anything related to, including, and extending beyond the following:
  
  • Age
  • Disability
  • Ethnicity and race
  • Family
  • Language (written and/or spoken)
  • Geography
  • Nationality
  • Religion, faith and belief
  • Sex and gender
  • Sexual orientation
  • Socioeconomic status
  • Technical or disciplinary background

With this in mind, our team gathered Tania Allard, Lynn Kirabo, and Christopher Kurtz (the latter of which was not able to attend) to discuss barriers faced in open science communities and strategies for building communities that don’t present these barriers.

We asked each other about our positionality in relation to accessibility, barriers to participation in communities like The Turing Way, improvements we’ve worked on or witnessed, and things we wished other community members knew about accessibility. Some of the recommendations that emerged include:

• Make the accessibility policies and practices for your event or community easily available to potential participants. This communication demonstrates openness and avoids requiring people to disclose personal information.
• Use resources from communities that have already developed them. Involve people from marginalized groups and organizations that have been successful. Compensate them for their knowledge and experience. Be aware of knowledge you don’t have and ask questions.
• Hold events that can be attended during varied time zones. Make sure tools are accessible to people with low bandwidth, varied devices, and adaptive technology. Make information available in multiple languages.
• Hybrid or online formats are important because they are accessible to a much wider group of participants who would not be able to travel to attend.
• When conducting research, select research tools and methods that are accessible to a wide variety of participants in order to ensure inclusion and adequate samples.
• When compensating participants for research, speaking engagements, or other contributions, make sure payment is relevant to them. Money is more useful and relevant to everyone than things like gift cards.
• Find empathy for people with invisible as well as visible disabilities.
• Accessibility is not an end goal– it is an iterative process of learning and improvement.

We thank the Society of Research Software Engineering for supporting this event and invite colleagues to use and contribute to The Turing Way community’s resources on accessibility.

This event was sponsored by the Society’s Events and Initiatives fund, which provides financial support for events and initiatives which support our mission statement and charitable objectives.