Ordinarily for Global Accessibility Awareness Day #GAAD #GAAD2021 RantWoman would like to focus on some uplifting story of lives transformed by full access to what one needs in one's career or one's life. This is a story of all that being, to put it politely, a work in progress--with respect to the largest Assistive Technology Conference in the Country CSUNATC, informally known as CSUN organized annually at CA State Northridge!
CSUN Conference on Accessibility
"Piffle" is southern for "pitiful." Both are politer than RantWoman's opinion about longstanding accessibility problems for attendees to the CSUN Assistive Technology conference. RantWoman has been reading for years, probably as long as she herself has officially been an assistive technology user about CSUN attendees getting conference materials such as papers in formats accessible to blind and visually impaired users. RantWoman was reminded of "piffle" and "pitiful" in the course of an informal survey of people she knows who attend different academic and professional conferences about current practices as far as distributing conference papers. The sample for RantWoman's inquiry included one blind humanities professor and a number of sighted professionals.
Electronic distribution seems to be the norm, though some disciplines are known for presenters who compile their presentations on the way to conferences. Some organizations have apps that contain all the conference materials. Some organizations have some kind of a high paywall and verbiage about intellectual property in the registration process. In other words, there may be various considerations that the CSUN disability center will need to take into account.
At the same time, in the world of accessibility, shining examples of comprehensive accessibility efforts include #Cripcamp, #Axecon organized by Deque systems. #AccessU organized by Knobility, and the annual #AbilitySummit. For all the ways that matters of accessibility have been vexing RantWoman around local representatives of her faith community, even the faith community came through: a recent all-virtual inernational event not only had all documents and schedules available electronically using Google technology, the tech team modeled several standards of accessible presentation, an important considerations partly because of people attending from multiple countries, not all of which had network capacity to do Zoom as ubiquitously as it is done in the US.
All of these examples make RantWoman think that it should be possible for CSUN to be much more accessible than it is.
RantWoman has been interacting with assistive technology such as screen readers since long before she became a user of such tools, at least grad school. RantWoman worked frontline tech support at the campus computer center and read for a blind colleague in her department. RantWoman's "call the full-time staff" threshold was pretty low, but RantWoman did begin to understand some of how screen readers work and could also assist her avowedly non-techie colleague with many general PC wordprocessing basics.
RantWoman has never in the conference's 20+ years actually gone to the live CSUN event: RantWoman likes to say she would go if someone would pay her way. Even if RantWoman had the foresight to include attendance at CSUN in the budget for some of her nonprofit projects, though, RantWoman's Twitter and email streams have been full for YEARS with complaints about problems getting the conference papers in accessible formats, nonresponsiveness by conference staff and other barriers to accessibility. RantWoman has also learned that CSUN has other accessibility challenges: it is held in large spaces that sound difficult for many people, not just blind people to find their way around. RantWoman can think of a large number of other considerations that might go into some kind of comprehensive effort to improve accessibility at CSUN.
Here RantWoman comes to another angle: what can different parties say that might help address accessibility concerns?
A number of large technology companies send many presenters to CSUN. In one case all the presentations done by company employees are made available through the employer. In other companies, employees may be reluctant to say to their employers "Hi, you are paying a lot of money to send us to this conference. Please help us make sure the result is full access to the content of the event." RantWoman thinks here there could be a role for consumer and advocacy organizations to collect stories of people's experience, encourage people to send comments to the university directly and then consider how to support people who need to ask their employers to do something to support better accessibility.
Companies that send a lot of employees to this event should consider how they might contribute to CSUN accessibility and show off the strengths of their approaches to accessibility at the same time.
In other words, there are lots of ways for everyone to work together to promote better accessibility at CSUN. So now, let's all get cracking because some modest steps should be possible in time for the call for papers for the next conference.
CSUN, you really can do better!
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