Feedback collected regarding accessibility

[annajiat]

Polling and time zone:

• some of us may be still using Doodle for polls which may be inaccessible to some of the participants
• sometimes the polls are missing the option to select time zones from the responders' view
• sometimes abbreviated time zones may cause confusion: BST/BDST both have been used for UK and Bangladesh Time
• some meeting notifications are missing the UTC time
• instructor sign-up, workshop page, community discussion, meetings often refer to the event using major time zones

Recommendations:

• confirming if the poll link is accessible to all or use alternatives e.g., whenisgood.net, recommended reading
• using time zone names associated with a city/country instead of the abbreviation
• remembering to enable and select time zone
• in addition to the local time zone, mentioning UTC timing may be preferred for accessibility
• mentioning both local and UTC time zones in the websites for the benefit of helpers and instructors not in the same time zone and updating website template accordingly
• similarly mentioning both time formats during instructor sign-up, community discussion, meetings, emails, etc.

Workshop Calendar

• current workshop calendar treats events as an all-day event and has less scopes for notifications

Recommendations:

• improving Google calendar to have a start/end time instead of an all-day event
• allowing to download ICS files
• adding option for other calendar services

Reducing language barriers and accommodating learners (non-native/different accent)

• it may not be easy to understand some learners/instructors/helpers
• often receive requests for recordings and that may not be possible due to lack of prior consent
• some hosts are utilizing auto live closed captioning available for Zoom rooms, or external live transcription services by actual human

Recommendation:

• enabling zoom's default live auto-captioning in carpentries rooms may help Reference

Language of written instructions:

• it is exciting to see that the guidelines in the community discussion has been translated to a local language, Spanish but as we no longer have the English version, others are having difficulty in understanding the connection information/chat Reference

Recommendations:

• while translating, we may choose to preserve the original language as well
• seems to have been fixed for now, but we may need to explore how to better accommodate multiple languages as well as how to prevent similar mistakes while welcoming the translations

[sheraaronhurt]

Annajiat, thanks so much for all of this feedback. I will be taking this back to the Workshop Admin Team to discuss each item.

[maneesha]

Since I was included as an assignee -- is there anything you all need from me on this now?

[sheraaronhurt]

@maneesha it's on our agenda to discuss for WAT

[fmichonneau]

Additional context about the section on Language of written instructions

Either during or soon after the text displayed at the top of the Etherpad for community discussions was translated in Spanish, the English version went missing. Members of the core team recovered the English version of the text.

The fact that the English version of the text went missing was not intentional.

In any case, I agree that if we want to provide instructions at the top of the Etherpad in languages other than English, we may want to explore other ways of doing so.

[annajiat]

Should we create additional etherpads for each language and link to those from the our existing etherpad and keeping the existing etherpad for English only?

[fmichonneau]

Should we create additional etherpads for each language and link to those from the our existing etherpad and keeping the existing etherpad for English only?

It seems that it would be better if the instructions live outside Etherpad to limit the chances of accidental deletions. We could set up a GitHub repository that holds the instructions in multiple languages for instance.