Accessibility Guidelines for Astronomy and Astrophysics Meetings
Abstract
Attendance at meetings and conferences is a critical component of an astronomer's professional life, providing opportunities for presenting one's work, staying current in the field, career networking, and scientific collaboration. Exclusion from these gatherings due to lack of accessibility and accommodation failure is a reality for disabled astronomers, and contributes substantially to low levels of representation in the senior-most levels of the field. We present a preview of the AAS Working Group for Accessibility and Disability's best practice recommendations for meetings accessibility. Applying the principles of universal access and barrier-free design, we model a paradigm of anticipating and removing accessibility barriers in advance, rather than putting the burden of requesting accommodation solely on disabled astronomers and students. We cite several professional and nonprofessional societies identified as meetings accessibility exemplars, and model our guidelines on their best practices. We establish standards for accessibility budgeting, venue choice, publication of policies online, designating point persons, and identifying barriers. We make recommendations for oral and poster presentations, event registration, receptions and banquets, excursions, and other typical conference activities. For meetings which are constrained by fixed budgets and venue choice, we identify a number of low cost/high reward accessibility steps which might still have a large beneficial impact. We likewise provide adapted recommendations for low budget meetings. THIS IS A POSTER LOCATED IN THE AAS BOOTH
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #231
- Pub Date:
- January 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AAS...23136504M