add advice following discussions with Liz Hare

.gitignore

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+.Rproj.user
+.Rhistory
+.RData
+.Ruserdata

Advice for event organizers.md

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+# Improving the accessibility of your event
+
+The following is a list of recommendations to improve accessibility of your event. Many of the suggestions can be implemented with minimal cost in terms of personnel or money, but require some planning ahead.
+
+## Support for participants with vision impairments
+
+**A formal facility tour:** The rationale was that once an attendee with vision problems has a basic overview of the venue layout, they should be able to navigate with confidence. So making sure that anyone who is interested knows when to attend the tour, at the beginning of the event, would probably be very helpful.  
+
+**Organized walks to the Venue from Satellite Hotels:** The suggestion is that an established time be set from each of the satellite hotels to the main venue in the mornings, and the reverse in the evenings. Navigating in a new city can be difficult. And if an attendee is not outgoing, they might have difficulty finding someone to walk with. This way, there will be an established time and place to meet, and an established guide. The walking buddy will meet the interested attendees on the first day, so they know who will be included in their group.  
+
+**Braille Placards for Food and Exhibit Tables:** Figuring out which food to eat was established as a problem. Having servers helps, but the placards would make blind attendees less reliant on help from the servers or other attendees. Also, the exhibit tables at the NFB conference all had small braille identifiers at the corner of each table. (Always the same corner, so it was easy to find.)  This would probably be a helpful addition to exhibit tables/booths at our conferences. 
+
+**Buddies to assist with food and beverage choices:** Although Braille placards enables blind participants to be more independent, some may still appreciate help navigating food and beverage choices at breaks and buffets. It could be a hotel or catering staff member, or a conference buddy that has volunteered to offer such help.
+
+**Flash talks for poster presentations:** This provides a verbal overview, which is useful for all conference participants to identify presentations of interest, but is particularly beneficial for anyone that cannot access the poster session due to vision or mobility impairments.
+
+**Collect accessible materials for all presentations in advance:** If visually impaired participants have accessible materials (e.g. markdown source) when listening to an oral presentation, it can help them to follow along. In general, participants often ask for materials straight after a talk: if the materials are only collected on the day of the presentation there is often a several-day delay in making the materials available. The deadline for materials should be practical for both presenters and organizers: RSS 2018 asked for slides ~1 week in advance (https://events.rss.org.uk/rss/media/uploaded/EVRSS/event_194/RSS2018_Guidelines_for_Contributed_presentations.pdf), which worked well.
+
+**Provide materials in a conference repository:** The schedule may be hard to navigate for people using screenreaders; providing a repository of slides/other materials can make them more accessible. Potentially participants could contribute their materials directly to the repository rather than using email.
+
+**Link to accessible materials from the videos:** If presentations are recorded, make sure the video descriptions have a link to the accompanying materials.
+
+**Make the schedule accessible:** The schedule of events should be available in a simple electronic format that can be read on a smartphone or computer. PDFs with fancy tables are hard to navigate and sometimes hard to understand.
+
+## Support for participants with hearing impairments
+
+**Provide microphones for all presenters and question-askers:** When speakers decline to use microphones because they feel they can speak loud enough, it's often not loud enough for people with hearing impairments. Therefore speakers, panelists and audience members asking questions should use a microphone even if the session is not being recorded. This should include tutorials and other formal conference events.
+
+**Provide live captioning:** Live captioning by specialised captioners is more accurate than auto-captioning and more universal than sign language. It is also appreciated by hearing participants, especially those for whom the conference language is not their first language. This requires budgeting for early on.
+
+## General
+
+See the NumFOCUS DISCOVER cookbook for more on making the event accessible to all.
+
+**Advertise initiatives taken to make the event accessible:** If inclusion efforts are not advertised, disabled people may assume that the event will not be accesible to them (or no more accesible than the typical scientific conference/tech meetup). Avenues for advertising include: blindRUG, the conference website, https://www.confa11y.com/). In particular, it is far better to put accommodations/facilities etc on the conference website than for people to have to ask.
+
+## Thanks
+
+Thanks to Jonathan Godfrey and Gina Griffin, who contributed suggestions after attending the National Federation for the Blind Conference, in Orlando, Florida (2017, July 10-15).

Advice for flash poster presentations.md

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+Your presentation is an advert for your poster. People that are interested will want to know your name and poster number so they can follow up in the poster session or at a later time. Therefore
+ - Include your name and poster number on your slide
+ - State your name and poster number at the start of your presentation
+
+When creating the poster
+ - Design graphics with high contrast and with attention to ensuring contrasts are visible to people with various types of colorblindness. [we could expand on this/link to further resources]
+ - Add alternative text descriptions to graphs, plots, and flow charts, which are usually not accessible.(Goring et al, 2018)
+
+
+TO BE EXPANDED ON:
+
+Provide poster in both markdown and PDF for inclusion on the website *prior* to conference. Markdown will probably need to be a recommendation as I expect many people use other ways to produce a poster. Providing a guide to packages/examples might encourage adoption.

Advice for speakers.md

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+Advice to make your presentation accessible to visually impaired participants
+
+[This might be motivated by data from the useR! surveys to demonstrate that people with visual impairments do attend useR!. We can also emphasise that the benefit is felt more widely, for example, people at the back of large lecture rooms or people who are live-tweeting or taking notes also benefit from good audio description.]
+
+ - The oral presentation should contain *everything* on the slides. (Don't show your 'Results' graph and say 'a picture is worth a thousand words' and leave it at that. 
+ - Give the structure of information verbally ("There were 5 requirements for participation in the study. [Read each one]" 
+ - Design graphics with high contrast and with attention to ensuring contrasts are visible to people with various types of colorblindness. [we could expand on this/link to further resources]
+ - Add informative alternative text descriptions to graphs, plots, and flow charts (e.g. "X decreases as Y increases" instead of "graph of X and Y"). (Goring et al, 2018, https://www.earthdatascience.org/courses/earth-analytics/document-your-science/add-images-to-rmarkdown-report/)
+
+TO BE EXPANDED ON:
+
+Provide slides in both markdown and PDF for inclusion on the website *prior* to conference. 
+
+People often have HTML slides these days - if these are deployed on the website, perhaps a link to the HTML version is enough? This happened already for some folks at useR!, e.g. https://www.jumpingrivers.com/t/2019-user-security/#1
+
+I guess we'd still have to give instructions for people using PowerPoint and Keynote - presumably that they supply both the original and PDF version (the latter to ensure it displays correctly on the conference laptop).

Advice for tutors.md

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+**Use the microphone:** Even if you are in a small room and you feel your voice is loud enough, please use the microphone. This enables any participants with hearing impairments to hear you, without having to bring attention to their disability. Similarly, ask audience members to use the roaming microphone when asking a question, or if one is not available, repeat their question so that others can hear.
+
+Advice on slide format would be the same as for speakers.
+
+TODO: add guidance on making the learning activities accessible. Many tutors use different styles: lecture, demo, interactive exercises, group discussions.

Feedback on community contributed shiny apps.md

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+There were two community contributed apps to help navigate the useR! 2019 schedule. It would be good to get feedback from both sighted and visually impaired useR!s on how these compare to the official useR! 2019 schedule table. Possibly a Shiny app could be used instead/as well as these tables at future useR!s. 
+
+Hallie Swan's Shiny app is on GitHub, she welcomes suggestions/improvements/comments
+
+ - GitHub: https://github.com/hallieswan/user_2019_scheduler
+ - Deployed app: https://hallietheswan.com/shiny/sample-apps/user_2019_scheduler/
+
+Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel's Flexdashboard is also on GitHub. 
+
+ - GitHub: https://github.com/mine-cetinkaya-rundel/user2019-schedule
+ - Deployed dashboard: https://connect.rstudioservices.com/content/331/user2019-schedule.html
+
+Garrick Aden-Buie's Shiny app is focused on exploring tweets related to the conference, but includes sortable table of the schedule:
+
+ - Deployed app: https://apps.garrickadenbuie.com/user-2019/
+
+As far as I can see the code is not online, but he provides contact details.
+
+Source data could be obtained from Heather Turner if anyone wants to extend these apps (e.g. incorporating abstract information or other program information such as breaks and social events).
+

Feedback on lineupr app.md

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+https://lineupr.com/user2019/program/
+
+Initial feedback from Liz Hare:
+
+When I followed the link above and then followed the web app link (on iPhone), the page I got had a few links that must have had meaningful images attached to them, but there was no text attached, so I'd have to follow each link and read the resulting page to figure out what they were. They should have text titles. I wasn't able to navigate to the schedule at all.

Feedback on useR schedule on website.md

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+http://www.user2019.fr/talk_schedule/
+
+Initial feedback from Liz Hare:
+
+The table was difficult to navigate with the screen reader (VoiceOver on iOS). I can swipe between the elements of the big table, but there isn't a good way to search for text (like, say, a particular date, presenter's name, or talk title. Navigating a large table with a large number of swipes makes it easy for me to lose my place in the document.
+
+When I follow the link on Mac with VoiceOver, it's much easier to navigate the table without losing my place. It would be helpful to have it broken down into smaller chunks, like one page/file per day, or morning or afternoon.
+
+It would be really helpful to have a verbal explanation of the flow. Are certain tracks in certain rooms? Maybe describe what tracks are what day, when there are tracks and when there is only one presentation at a time (at some co inferences part of the time is spent all together at plenary session(s) and there are other periods of breakout sessions). A verbal overview would really save having to read through the whole table to figure out the patterns.
+
+N.B. When asked for a first review, Liz was only sent the link above. There is also a program overview page (http://www.user2019.fr/program_overview/), which may help to give a better idea of the flow.

README.md

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 # event_best_practices
-Pooled resources on best practices for events (conferences, workshops, RUGS, etc)
+
+Pooled resources on best practices for events (conferences, workshops, RUGS, etc). Work in progress.
+
+This has a lot of overlap with the NumFOCUS DISCOVER cookbook https://discover-cookbook.numfocus.org. We should consider how this fits alongside that, e.g. 
+ - contribute ideas back there
+ - pull out the minimum measures that we expect useR! conferences to meet (and build on each year)
+Currently the DISCOVER cookbook focuses on the logistics of organizing the event, here we are beginning to add advice for presenters to make the content itself more accessible.

event_best_practices.Rproj

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