Guide to a Successful and Accessible CHI 2022 Presentation

CHI 2022 aims to ensure that its meetings, communications, and other activities including documents, papers, and publications shall be accessible to any and all persons, and will make every reasonable effort to accommodate their needs for attendance and participation.

Congrats on having your paper accepted. Now on to your next accessibility journey!

This document includes steps you as an author can take to ensure your presentation is well organized and accessible. These instructions are based on previous CHI presentation guidelines, the SIGACCESS Guide for Accessible PDFs in Word, Adobe Acrobat, and W3C WAI to represent the CHI 2022 vision.

Comprehension

Make sure to ensure that even people who have little familiarity with your sub-area of HCI can understand at least the main points:

what questions you addressed
why those questions are important
what methods you used
what your main results were
why those results are interesting

In fact, even the experts in your area don’t need to understand more than these points; for the rest, they can read the paper.

Varied Content

It is best to present a series of “exhibits:” images, videos, system demos, diagrams, graphs, or tables. You can explain and elaborate on these exhibits while people are looking at them. In general, you don’t need to write what you say on the slides. Anyone who wants to see the points you made in black and white can read your paper. Carefully preparing an exhibit can take at least 10 times as long as dashing off a bulleted list, but your audience deserves nothing less.

Keep Text to a Minimum

Use text sparingly: Keep your points in short, concise, outline form. This will inform the viewer about the topic, and will also help you remember your key points for discussion.

Considerations for Visual and Sound Effects

Please avoid using effects in your video that could trigger an adverse reaction. For example, flashing lights can induce seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Avoid using complex animations (e.g., simple appear/disappear is ok, but aggressive flickering should be avoided), unsteady camera work, flashing strobe lights, loud sounds, or repetitive alarms. If you include components, such as police car lights and sirens, consider warning viewers at the start of the video or right before the content so they can look away or mute their computers. The Trace Center offers an analysis tool to help authors assess whether their video is safe for people with photosensitive epilepsy (https://trace.umd.edu/peat/).

Polishing the Details

Pay special attention to types of material that often turn out to be illegible: screenshots and complex graphics. If an exhibit like this can’t be shown legibly as a whole, find a way to zoom in on individual parts of it as they are discussed.

Present only material that helps you to convey your points effectively. If you must include your institution’s logo on each slide, make sure that it is not the most conspicuous and interesting element on any slide.

Make the text, images, graphics and their media large enough to be viewed comfortably while sitting at a distance from the screen.
Choose a font type that is easy to read from a distance. Avoid fancy fonts.
Ensure the color contrast in your slides are sufficient. This means that background colors and foreground text need to be sufficient so that people can see them.

Check the color contrast guide
Check contrast evaluation tools

Only consider motion and animation if it is necessary. Certain motions can be distracting to the viewer, confusing or even make them ill.
Captions are very helpful. CHI will offer this feature on the platform. However, if you are presenting videos then ensure their captions are visible on the screen.
If you have resources to share, please make sure all documents are accessible. Refer here to the CHI2022 guide on accessible formatting as needed.
It is important to consider accessibility issues in your videos as many people may have issues understanding what is happening if they can’t see it. Here are some resources about captioning and describing video content.
If you are including activities, ask ahead of time to make the activities will be accessible to all. Audience polls for example are accessible to some but not all people.

And finally, provide your accessible presentation:

to the attendees ahead of time (i.e., a link at the start of your talk work). This can help people in many ways, one of which is to read through the slides while your presenting so they don’t miss stuff you don’t verbally mention in your talk.
to the captioners and interpreters so they prepare to help you and the audience more effectively.

While Practicing the Presentation

Well done on making it this far! If you have followed all the content described above this will help everyone feel more included when you present your paper.

Rehearse your presentation before attending CHI, and cut content if you’re cutting it close.

Tip: When practicing your final presentation, ask your practice audience to help you identify if anything in your talk would be inaccessible to people who are blind or have low vision, or who are deaf or hard of hearing, have a cognitive disability. Raising awareness is key!

During the Presentation

Arrive 20 minutes before your session to test your presentation setup with the session chair. If you transfer your presentation to present on someone else’s laptop, do everything possible to maximize its portability, and test the presentation at the earliest opportunity, leaving plenty of time to fix any problems (e.g., replacing missing fonts).

Make sure your microphone is on, and your voice is heard clearly.
Aim to speak clearly and enunciate to help the audience who are not all native speakers of English.
If you are presenting remotely, make sure you appear prominent in the video and there is sufficient contrast between you and your chosen background.
Simplify your words as much as possible. You’re the expert but the attendees may be beginners.
Mention everything that comes up on your slide. For example, describe visuals and tables if you have them.
Speak at a good pace (i.e.,don’t speed through the content. If you feel that you have a lot to cover and can’t pause or give time for people to process then reconsider what is on your slides and eliminate somethings to shorten what you will cover verbally.
Finish within your allotted time. Pay attention to the Session Chair’s countdown cards. If you’re behind, just say “I’ll stop here and take questions”.

Answering Questions

Conclude with a slide that helps the audience remember your talk the way you want them to remember it. This is typically achieved by summarizing your main contributions; this is a rare case where a bulleted list may be appropriate. This slide will help people to think of important questions to ask, and will help them remember the key points of your talk, so they can go tell their colleagues how great it was.

Answer each question directly and concisely, without digressing into related topics. Give others a chance to ask their questions as well

Accessible PDF Author Guide

Some of you may choose to create a PDF of the presentation, keep in mind that changing fonts, titles, sizes can be done easier in the .PPT format and then made PDF again. We recommend you follow the steps above that apply to your content.

For details on how to use Adobe Acrobat Pro XI to ensure your PDFs are accessible, please follow the detailed SIGACCESS Guide: http://www.sigaccess.org/welcome-to-sigaccess/resources/accessible-pdf-author-guide/

These include:

You may also wish to explore the cool Adobe Acrobat Pro Accessibility feature to find and fix all accessibility issues (note this may be difficult to follow but knowing your errors is the first step to fixing them – reach out to the accessibility chairs if you have questions accessibility@chi2022.acm.org): https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat/using-acrobat-pro-accessibility-checker.html

Additional Resources for Accessible PDFs

Need Help

If you have any questions or concerns about creating accessible content, please contact the Accessibility Chairs at accessibility@chi2022.acm.org.