Adapted from Liz’s guidelines for the IRL conference.
Dear speaker,
We realised that by asking you to share your pre-recorded talk online, we have the opportunity to make useR! 2020’s program more accessible to R community members who are deaf, have sensory disabilities, or speak English as a second language. Therefore, we would like you to take the following into account, as you prepare your slides, record your video, and prepare accompanying downloadable material for your audience.
When preparing your slides or poster, please
- Use large sans serif fonts (as a guide 22pt or above). This applies to code as well as general text.
- Pay attention to colors that are visible to people with color blindness.
- Use more than color to communicate information (color coding cannot be understood by people who are blind or colorblind).
- In addition to verbal emphasis, one could use bold, italic, underline, asterisksastrices, etc. to convey emphasis. Make graphics simple.
- Provide a text equivalent for graphics, but not for graphics that are only meant for decoration.
When recording your talk,
- Please pace yourself, so the audience can integrate both audio and visual information. Graphics, pictures, videos, and memes should be described audibly.
- Please avoid bright and/or flashing lights or images that could trigger seizures.
- We should ask them to caption or provide a transcript.
When preparing downloadable resources, please consider
- Submitting your presentation/poster in markdown as it will enable blind people to use screen reading software or braille displays to follow the details (e.g. code) of talks.
- Avoid the small fonts
- Pay attention to colors that are visible to people with color blindness. In general, high-contrast color schemes are more visible.
- Consider submitting a simple copy of your talk with large print so audiences can follow along on screen or print out.
- Adding alt-text descriptions for graphics, images, memes, screenshots, and other graphically-presented material.
Further recommendations can be found on the Perkins School for the Blind website and on SIG ACCESS: for presentations and for PDFs.
People with questions about accessibility can ask me (lizhare@gmail.com) and I can try to find answers.