The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). CHI – pronounced 'kai' – annually brings together researchers and practitioners from all over the world and from diverse cultures, backgrounds, and positionalities, who have as an overarching goal to make the world a better place with interactive digital technologies.

CHI 2022 is structured as a Hybrid-Onsite full conference from April 30–May 5 in New Orleans, LA.

Categories
General Program

SV T-Shirt Design Competition

SV T-Shirt Design Competition

Hello everyone,

It’s t-shirt design time! Every year we call on students to design the wonderful t-shirt that our SVs wear! If your design is selected, you get a free SV spot! That means you move off the waitlist, or if you’re already accepted, you can give the spot to a friend (as long as they are also a student). This year the deadline is Friday, February 11, 2022 and your submissions should be sent to svchair@chi2022.acm.org with the subject: T-Shirt Design Contest.

Design Details

You may want to connect your design to the location (New Orleans), or not, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s respectful of local culture, fun, interesting, and can stand out a bit in the crowd.

Please send us front/back designs, noting that we cannot print on sleeves or the extreme edges of the shirts. Designs should be ONE color. In general, this means a black or white design on a colored shirt.

The imprint size is roughly 11″ wide and 13″ high front or back.

You can find the CHI 2022 logo information here: [CHI2022 Design Package]

Submissions Details

Mock-ups should be sent as PDF, JPG, or PNG in medium resolution. If your design is selected as a winning design, we will require the final version in an .eps or .ai format.

You may submit several designs or variations on a single design, should you so desire.

Please follow the following naming convention for each of your designs: lastname_firstname_tshirtdesign.<ext>

The deadline is Friday, February 11, 2022 at 23:59 AoE to submit your designs to svchair@chi2022.acm.org with the subject: T-Shirt Design Contest. We will select a winner in the week following the end of the contest and notify the winner as well to everyone who submitted designs.

Here are some photos from previous SV T-shirts, courtesy of our wonderful past chair Haley MacLeod:

A collection of seven previous SV t-shirts

Thank you and we’re looking forward to seeing your creativity!

Bingjie Yu and Ciabhan Connelly
SV Chairs CHI 2022, New Orleans, LA

Categories
Hybrid Conference

Student Volunteer

Student Volunteer

Become a Student Volunteer

The student volunteer organization is what keeps CHI running smoothly throughout the conference. You must have had student status for at least one semester during the academic year before CHI. We are more than happy to accept undergrad, graduate, and PhD students. We need friendly enthusiastic volunteers to help us out.

The SV lottery will be open on November 19, 2021, at new.chisv.org and will be closed on February 17, 2022. Approximately 175 students will be chosen as SVs, including a number of online SVs and in-person SVs. All other students who registered will be assigned a position on the waitlist. For how the SV lottery works, please check the Student Volunteering page for more details. To sign up for the lottery, please visit new.chisv.org, select the appropriate conference, and follow the steps to enroll.

We are accepting some ONLINE STUDENT VOLUNTEERS. You can apply for being either online or in-person SVs, or both. However, SVs cannot switch their participation mode in-between online and in-person. The registration form can be updated at any time before the lottery is run. We encourage all applicants to update the form once your participation mode is clearer later in the year.

The lottery result will be announced by February 24, 2022 for in-person SVs and March 24, 2022 for online SVs. Once you have a confirmed spot and registration is open you will be required to register, usually in two weeks. You will receive instructions on how to do this with a special code that will waive your registration fee for the conference. You will still be responsible for course/workshop fees.

Important Dates

All times are in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone. When the deadline is day D, the last time to submit is when D ends AoE. Check your local time in AoE.

  • SV lottery registration opens: Friday, November 19, 2021
  • Close lottery
    • In-person SVs: Thursday, February 17, 2022
    • Online SVs: Thursday, March 17, 2022
  • Announce results
    • In-person SVs: Thursday, February 24, 2022
    • Online SVs: Thursday, March 24, 2022

What Will I Do When I Volunteer?

For CHI2022 SVs, you will agree to a volunteer contract, in which you agree to:

  • In-person SVs: Work at least 20 hours; Online SVs: Work at least 12 hours
  • Show up on time to tasks
  • Attend an orientation session
  • Arrive at the conference by Sunday morning at the latest (in person SVs only)

In return, we commit to:

  • For in-person SVs
    • Waive your registration fee
    • Provide 2 meals a day on site (breakfast and lunch)
    • Free SV t-shirt to be collected on site
    • Our fabulous SV thank-you party on Thursday night. When you are planning for your travel we highly recommend that you remember to leave on Friday or Saturday so you can attend the party. There is always food, drinks, dancing, and fun!
  • For online SVs
    • Waive your remote-participation attending registration
    • Free SV t-shirt shipped to you
    • An online SV party
  • More SV benefits TBA…

If you need to reach us, please always use the svchair@chi2022.acm.org address so that both of us receive it. Reply-to-all on our correspondence so we all stay in the loop and can better help you.

A CHI 2022 note: With the rapid changing situation of the current COVID-19 pandemic and CHI 2022 going hybrid, there may be changes to the way the SV program will operate this year. We, the SV chairs, are monitoring the situation and will keep the community up to date on any changes to the SV program. If you have any comments or concerns, please feel free to email us at svchair@chi2022.acm.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

We get a lot of emails with the same kinds of questions, this is not a made up FAQ.

Q: I know the deadline for the lottery is passed, but I really, really want to be a student volunteer. Can you get me in?
A: You may go to new.chisv.org at any time after the lottery is opened or even after it is run to put your name in the running. If the lottery has already been run your name will simply be added to the end of the waiting list. If you will be attending CHI anyway there is always a chance you may be able to be added to the last minute, you never know.

Q: I want to skip orientation, or work way less than 20 hours, or arrive on Monday, can I still be an SV?
A: No, sorry these are minimum expectations we expect from everyone. If after you commit extenuating circumstances appear (like volcanoes erupting and other strange things) please communicate with us (to svchair@chi2022.acm.org). All we ask is for you to communicate what your circumstances are as early as you realize a situation has come up.

Q: I didn’t get your emails and/or forgot to register by the deadlines you guys sent us and I lost my spot as an SV, can I get it back?
A: If this is due to you just not reading your emails, not taking care of your responsibilities, not keeping your email up to date in our system, forgetting or similar things then the answer is NO, no you may not. If there are extenuating circumstances, please communicate with us (to svchair@chi2022.acm.org). All we ask is for you to communicate what your circumstances are as early as you realize a situation has come up. (Yes, we’ll repeat this often).

Q: I was nominated for an SV spot by someone and got in, will I have to do the same kind of work as other SVs?
A: Yes, the obligations are the same.

We are looking forward to meeting all of you!

Bingjie Yu, University of Bath, Bath, UK
Ciabhan Connelly, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, U.S.
Email: svchair@chi2022.acm.org

Categories
Accessibility

CHI 2022 Website Accessibility

CHI 2022 Website Accessibility

We are trying to make all the aspects of CHI 2022 as accessible as possible to everyone. Making the CHI 2022 conference website accessible is part of that effort. In this blog post, we share what members of the organizing committee have been doing to make the website accessible.

An accessible web site is one that can be used efficiently by people in a variety of ways. Some of our community members use large fonts, high contrast color settings, or screen magnification. Others listen to web pages and navigate them using a screen reader. Some people use only a keyboard, or a braille display. Some of us have color vision differences, or are sensitive to animation or clutter. Some rely on captions or transcripts to receive audio information. Our goal is to make information about CHI easily accessible and easy to navigate, no matter how each user approaches it.

In the process of making and deploying the CHI 2022 website, the Web Chairs designed the site with accessibility in mind, and the Accessibility Chairs evaluated the site’s accessibility. All pages on the website were designed and generated using WordPress; the Web chairs edited the WordPress’s HTML templates to adhere to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1), more specifically WCAG 2.1 AA standards. Accessibility Chairs then assessed the accessibility of the landing page and subpage that were generated from those templates. Following the SIGACCESS Accessible Conference Guide and IBM’s Accessibility Checklist, Accessibility Chairs evaluated the website with the four-step process, which involved:

  • Automatic test of whether the pages met basic accessibility requirements (e.g., presence of alt text for figures) using Equal Access Accessibility Checker, Lighthouse, and Wave tools.
  • Manual test of whether the controls (e.g., links) can be reached and operated just with a keyboard.
  • Manual check to see if magnifying the content and changing the contrast break the design of the web pages.
  • Manual test of the navigability of the web pages with screen readers using NVDA on a Windows desktop computer and VoiceOver on a MacBook Pro.

We identified a few minor accessibility issues that would not prevent people from using the web site. We reported those minor issues to the Web Chairs.

Automated Accessibility Check

Lighthouse and Wave allowed us to identify accessibility problems in the early version of the WordPress templates. Lighthouse, a tool that can be used through Google Chrome’s DevTools, provides a score of how accessible the page is and reveals accessibility problems if any can be automatically detected. Wave is another tool that allows us to inspect the accessibility of a web page. We used the two tools to uncover as many accessibility problems as possible. Although automated tools cannot find all accessibility problems, they are an important first step.

Keyboard Accessibility

Some of our community members use a keyboard and no mouse, so we manually tested whether we can navigate the web page with only a keyboard to assess keyboard accessibility. We:

  • Checked to see if a user can use a Tab key to navigate through interactive elements (e.g., links).
  • Assessed intuitiveness of keyboard-based navigation order and comprehensibility of website sections.

All the links on the page could be reached using a Tab key (and Shift+Tab) alone, and we could jump to the target web page by hitting Enter key. The structure of the web page was simple and intuitive to navigate. Because there were no custom widgets like dialog boxes and form elements, we did not test their accessibility.

Magnification and Contrast Cadjustment

We manually tested if controlling the font size and contrast would affect the accessibility of the web site. We used the operating system’s built-in zooming features (e.g., magnifier in Windows, macOS’s zooming feature) and the browsers’ zooming features (e.g., Google Chrome’s zooming feature). We visually inspected the DOM reflow at 200% zoom level on Google Chrome; WCAG standards require that readers should be able to increase the font size up to 200% without breaking the page layout. We did not identify any breaking issues with the page layout.

We also used Google Chrome’s “High Contrast” feature to invert screen color, greyscale and adjust contrast to see the visibility of the web contents. Manual inspection of the color inverted and contrast adjusted content showed that the web page contents are legible even after the adjustment.

Screen Readers

To assess the accessibility of the website with a screen reader, we manually inspected with VoiceOver and read out the web page content on macOS and iPhone. We used NVDA to assess the screen readability on Windows. We found that the reading experience was good and did not identify any noticeable accessibility problems. The Assistant to the Accessibility co-chairs, who is blind, evaluated the site with a screen reader.

Questions or Concerns

If you have any concerns or identify accessibility issues, please contact our Accessibility Chairs, Dhruv Jain, Garreth Tigwell, Zainab AlMeraj, and Kotaro Hara by email: accessibility@chi2022.acm.org, and someone will respond to you shortly.