Proposing a discussion on Accessibility in Data Science - potential for new chapters? guide?

[malvikasharan]

Summary

• We currently have some chapters that are buried in different guides, and many aspects of accessibility are currently missing
• In discussion with some organisations and community members, we are proposing a new set of chapters on accessibility
• This will require careful discussions and agreement on where these chapters will sit
• I personally see a potential for new guide, but this is up for discussion with the project governance

What needs to be done?

• Scope out the accessibility chapter overview/landing page
• Brainstorm ideas for different chapters that can be added in their
• Identify current chapters that need to be moved over

Who can help?

• @Arielle-Bennett and I have been working with GCHQ to get their draft on accessibility included in The Turing Way
• Anyone from the community who has lived experience and working experience around accessibility in data science

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Updates

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[malvikasharan]

Tagging @AndreaSanchezTapia and @LizHareDogs for their help with the landing page.

Alt text chapter can be one of them, some previous issues where some links were shared:
#2043

[LizHareDogs]

This looks great and I'm looking forward to the Bookdash and collaborating with everyone.

I'm curious about what you all think about what falls under "accessibility." I've seen it used in two ways in this context. It can refer to the kinds of accessibility practices that we use specifically related to disability. examples are captioning, alt text, andensuring that contrast and size are usable for people with low vision.

There are other things that we do to be inclusive and enhance participation in things, like making sure that folks with older computers and lower bandwidth have access. In some contexts, this falls under "accessibility" and in others
It falls in the broader category of inclusion, or DEI.

It would be helpful to know which scope we are talking about here as I think about resources to bring to this writing project. I think it's all important, but I'm not sure which were talking about because I am a newbie to the Turing Way, a USian, and the impact accessibility has on me personally.

[LizHareDogs]

inclusionResources.md
This file contains links to resources on inclusion and accessibility, and some of my talks and slides on alt text.

[AndreaSanchezTapia]

Hi, @LizHareDogs and @aleesteele , I made a push with a markdown file in the accessibility-guide branch: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/tree/accessibility-guide - It's failing all the tests but we can check everything tomorrow.

The landing page would be here and it's very preliminary, but it's based on what we have discussed:
https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/blob/accessibility-guide/book/website/accessibility-guide/accessibility-guide.md

[AndreaSanchezTapia]

The link for the commit is here: fc17a31

[malvikasharan]

Tagging Tom @tv074563, Jess @jo77419, and Sam @sspillard.
Here is the HackMD with the draft with content that can be spread out to the landing page that Andrea and Liz are drafting, and one of the first chapters (Overview for instance): https://hackmd.io/@turingway/BJU7IUroj

As a follow-up, we will be planning a 1-day book dash to work on this - planning will begin in February with the onboarding of a new team member in the project.

[tv074563]

Thanks for tagging us in, we've been thinking about potential topics and structure. We found it difficult to design the overall structure so have produced a list of topics as a starting point that we think could be overall chapters/sections as follows: 

• Intro
  • Aspects of Accessibility
  • How Accessibility intersects with Data Science
• Methodologies for Accessible Design
  • Goal-oriented Design
  • Co-creation
• Accessibility for Data Science Products
  • Visualisation
  • Data
  • Notebooks
  • Web Accessibility/Apps and Dashboards
• Accessible Communication
  • Making writing accessible to a non-technical audience
  • Accessibility guidance for Talks and Conferences, Training material
  • Localisation

I've included a few of the suggestions from our last meeting. It'd be good to decide on a rough outline as that would make it easier to add things in. This isn't supposed to be complete by any means and we're very much hoping there will be other suggestions for what to include.

On the question above of whether we're interested in accessibility practices related to disability or inclusion, I feel like it's potentially both although as a broader topic some aspects of inclusion may be out of scope for the guide.

We'd like this to be a practical guide for Data Scientists to easily find relevant guidance for whatever they're aiming to do, so that should probably influence the overall structure. It would be great to talk about this further, maybe at the next book dash?

[trallard]

Hello all - issue lurker here sharing my 2c.

I'm curious about what you all think about what falls under "accessibility." I've seen it used in two ways in this context.

Thanks for raising this question @LizHareDogs.
My team and I have moved to use the terminology of "access-centred" rather than accessibility as a catch-all, precisely to avoid this context confusion.

The access-centred term better reflects that the end goal is disability justice and inclusion and implies a radical approach centred around intersectional access. At the same time, accessibility is a practice that falls under that access-centred umbrella and serves as a foundation to build upon.

See Access-centred movement for more details https://accesscenteredmovement.com/what-access-centered-means/

Now onto the topics

Accessibility for Data Science Products
Visualisation
Data
Notebooks

Some of us (colleagues and I) have been working on these topics. For the last few months, we have been conducting user research/testing with the disabled scientific community. Some of the outputs of this work are authoring guidelines for accessible notebooks. This sounds very much in line with this - so I'd like to explore ways to reuse/collaborate rather than duplicate content (thinking about sustainability and best practices alignment).

[malvikasharan]

@trallard Thanks for bringing this up. I had not come across this term before but I think this will actually reduce the confusion and 'specific notion' around what accessibility means.

I had been largely thinking about accessibility/Access-centred chapters in terms of these three areas:

1. Digital Accessibility in the contexts of:

• Design and Digital Infrastructure - as listed by you/your team's work and @tv074563
• Training and education (relevant contribution from The Carpentries instructor training community)
• Teams and Collaboration

3. Access based on Geographical contexts

• Considerations for access from different parts of the world
• Frugal/low-resource/limited internet technology
• Considerations for the access in Global South
• Consideration for different policies that may enhance or limit access

5. Consideration for Disability and Neurodiversity

• Some of these are discussed by @LizHareDogs

These can broadly cover different elements of EDI principles as well as support structures (funding/grants, tools, guidelines, etc.).

[EstherPlomp]

Based on a discussion with @LizHareDogs yesterday I went through the book to see where we could link the Accessibility Guide with existing content. My suggestions for the Guide for Reproducible Research are probably more extensive because there is more content and I'm more familiar with it.

Guide for Reproducible Research

• Open research should contain a link to the accessibility chapter, probably in the form of open participation since it is relevant to any of the Open topics. (Open Research should probably still move to the communication guide)
• Version control. Should include some information to make comments more legible.
• Licensing: how to ensure that your licence is machine readable or that you add alt text to license images in your research objects?
• RDM: visualisation and particularly documentation and metadata + sharing and archiving data. Perhaps also mention with FAIR principles (should also add something about CARE..).
• Code Style and Formatting (under Code quality)
• Checklist for code reviewing (Code Reviewing processes)
• Detailed Recommendations for Code Reuse (Reuable Code)
• Research Compendia

Project Design

• Overview of Project Design
• Personas and Pathways
• File naming convention (capitalise certain things and perhaps other relevant information?)
• Guidelines for Code Styling (Code Styling and Linting)
• Informed consent (Managing Sensitive Data Projects). How to handle informed consent when people can't read/sign a printed form? How to ensure your informed consent form is accessible?

Guide for communication

• Probably a mention everywhere. Maybe not the Binder one?

Guide for collaboration

Again, probably everywhere a mention/link. Exceptions could be

• Starting with GitHub
• Research Infrastructure Roles
• Shared Ownership
• Sustainability of Open Source Projects

Ethical Research

• Maybe in the Introduction to Research Ethics and Activism for Researchers. The other chapters are perhaps less directly linked.

Community Handbook

• Code of Conduct could have a mention
• Style guide can have a mention with further details why certain things are important
• Giving a Turing Way Talk

[LizHareDogs]

These are great! I do think there is room for some comment on accessibility when talking about git and particularly GitHub. GitHub is difficult to navigate for *everybody* whether using a screen reader of not. For people who are used to using the command line, it's a way better way to interact with your repo than navigating the complex screen. Accessibility is always enhanced when there is more than one way to do something.

[andreaczhang]

There could be a chapter under Communication on teaching data science/technical skills to people with no/little IT knowledge, for example medical doctors who want to do their own analysis. At universities there is definitely a high demand of basic data/IT capacity, yet some (or many) universities don't seem to invest enough in training programs in their curriculum.

The format of The Carpentries is great, and there should be more (only a few sessions per year, long waiting list). I think education and training is very important for reproducible research but unfortunately has been overlooked.

I can help with this chapter (on teaching) if we decide to write one.

[LizHareDogs]

Hi and thanks for this terrific idea! I used to work in human psychiatric genetics and I agree! One point I'd like to make at the intersection with sensory disability is that instruction should be IDE-agnostic because, for example RStudio/Posit is not screen reader accessible. (* Yes, I know they are advertising that it is "more accessible" now but I've seen no evidence of usability). Liz Hare, PhD Dog Genetics LLC ***@***.*** http://www.doggenetics.com <http://www.doggenetics.com/>

…

On May 23, 2023, at 11:16 AM, Chi Zhang ***@***.***> wrote: There could be a chapter under Communication on teaching data science/technical skills to people with no/little IT knowledge, for example medical doctors who want to do their own analysis. At universities there is definitely a high demand of basic data/IT capacity, yet some (or many) universities don't seem to invest enough in training programs in their curriculum. The format of The Carpentries is great, and there should be more (only a few sessions per year, long waiting list). I think education and training is very important for reproducible research but unfortunately has been overlooked. I can help with this chapter (on teaching) if we decide to write one. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2730 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AMVDYUDZVHUIFYXG56TMDVLXHTIELANCNFSM6AAAAAARFHXZBQ>. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.

[LizHareDogs]

Hi all,

I'm looking at the HackMD mentioned above. I'm sorry I'm unable to edit HackMD documents.

The first paragraph, with its focused on "impairments" and "needs" is not written from a disability rights perspective.

The focus on impairment is related to the deficit model of disability. https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5236/4475

The Deaf community, in particular, rejects being called "hearing impaired."

Framing disabled people as "needy" isn't helpful. The community "needs" to be open to everyone.
It's not an image that promotes inclusion, collaboration. It encourages a mistaken assumption that disabled people and their needs are "burdens" to everyone else.

[aleesteele]

Hi all, just flagging that this draft was reviewed with @LizHareDogs and Laura Ascenzi at Metadocencia.

We are reviewing the HackMD both in this document: https://hackmd.io/C-LCbjSOQrmEcQl4zlKy-Q?both
as well as this pad: https://pad.sfconservancy.org/p/ttw-guide-accessibility-draft

[LizHareDogs]

Oh thank you for the pad link! Liz

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On May 24, 2023, at 4:02 PM, Anne Lee Steele ***@***.***> wrote: Hi all, just flagging that this draft was reviewed with @LizHareDogs <https://github.com/LizHareDogs> and Laura Ascenzi at Metadocencia. We are reviewing the HackMD both in this document: https://hackmd.io/C-LCbjSOQrmEcQl4zlKy-Q?both <https://hackmd.io/C-LCbjSOQrmEcQl4zlKy-Q?both> as well as this pad: https://pad.sfconservancy.org/p/ttw-guide-accessibility-draft <https://pad.sfconservancy.org/p/ttw-guide-accessibility-draft> — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2730 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AMVDYUBHLM6FUZUTRBVALQTXHZSOTANCNFSM6AAAAAARFHXZBQ>. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.

[malvikasharan]

Notes from Tania and Malvika:

• Guide to Access over 'accessibility' will allow broader coverage of concepts and practices
• Content of chapters may include signposting
  • Contextualise by Research lifecycle - at what stage of research cycle are we talking about access
  • Provide stakeholder type: who is this 'work' serving --> who is engaging (user, contributors, maintainers, end users, citizen etc.)
  • Provide what type of access is this about: Digital, physical, hybrid?
  • Who takes the responsibility for access? - developer, users, leaders, teams (ideally all)
• Turing Way has many accessibility related chapters but they are not findable if people don't specifically look for it
• Many projects exists outside the Turing Way but maybe hard to contextualise for Data Science as people care about specific problem in hand
• The Turing Way handbook and Jupyter (WIP - Add Notebook Authoring Guide jupyter/accessibility#127 - such as the Authoring guide) has many info that can be generalised and shared for general purpose

[LizHareDogs]

Hi Malvika and Tania, Thanks for providing lots of context. I wanted to expand on this: Contextualise by Research lifecycle - at what stage of research cycle are we talking about access All stages! Open should mean open for everyone. This means that when we collaborate to do research, we make sure to have inclusive planning, tools, and interpersonal environment from a planning a project through communicating it to the public. Scientiests with disabilities are not particularly visible, but we are here. We are not just end consumers. Also, building accessibility into communications and tools from the start means less effort in the long run. Retrofitting or adapting for access is more costly and time consuming. So I don't think access is limited to a stage. Liz

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On May 25, 2023, at 11:01 AM, Malvika Sharan ***@***.***> wrote: Notes from Tania and Malvika: Guide to Access over 'accessibility' will allow broader coverage of concepts and practices Content of chapters may include signposting Contextualise by Research lifecycle - at what stage of research cycle are we talking about access Provide stakeholder type: who is this 'work' serving --> who is engaging (user, contributors, maintainers, end users, citizen etc.) Provide what type of access is this about: Digital, physical, hybrid? Who takes the responsibility for access? - developer, users, leaders, teams (ideally all) Turing Way has many accessibility related chapters but they are not findable if people don't specifically look for it Many projects exists outside the Turing Way but maybe hard to contextualise for Data Science as people care about specific problem in hand The Turing Way handbook and Jupyter (jupyter/accessibility#127 <jupyter/accessibility#127> - such as the Authoring guide) has many info that can be generalised and shared for general purpose — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2730 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AMVDYUCCXCNQOZPDPXC6T2TXH5X6HANCNFSM6AAAAAARFHXZBQ>. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.

[trallard]

Hi Liz

I very much agree - think there was some missing context on that particular point.

By adding "stage" tags we thought of a way of signaling the "optimal" stage at which a given access tasks/effort should be considered. (my ideal is right at the beginning or planning stage but it is not always possible).
With the caveat that it can be done or implemented at a later stage but retrofitting or remediating would be like you mentioned more costly or involved.

For example - adding alt text to your documentation the ideal point to do this would be right when you are writing the content or adding a new image.
Of course you can do it later (but you might have already negatively impacted some folks' experiences) and will more than likely spend a good amount of time and effort adding or improving the alt text for a bunch of images.

Rather than being used as a way to signal at which point people would need access (because I agree, folks need access at all times).

[malvikasharan]

Thanks for adding the context Tania.
Liz, we totally agree with you. My notes are mostly to structure each chapter as Tania said, with specific stage tag (we are imagining that there will be different accessibility considerations we might wanna take at different stages, and some practices will apply at all stages - very much for the reasons you have described). This kind of signposting will ensure that people can browse small chapters more easily and get informed about specific practices and considerations based on where they are at in their work, who they are engaging with and where they are implementing the practices.

[AlexandraAAJ]

Hello all,
During the accessibility meeting today we revised these points and we will be working on this in the next couple of months with the aim to present something by the summer. We are organising a monthly session (date to be confirmed and informed in the Slack channel) and coworking spaces to work on this. Here you can find our meeting notes: https://pad.sfconservancy.org/p/ttw-accessibility-wg

[aleesteele]

Hi folks, I'm getting started with this to discuss the landing page with the accessibility working group later today! @LizHareDogs @AndreaSanchezTapia - bringing back the accessibility-guide branch in order to do so!