Accessibility Guidelines & Information

Helping all users from around the world participate and engage in the NESF & ELS.

Questions? Contact our team.

An illustration of a presentation

Presentation Guidelines

Oral and Poster Presentations:

  • Choose a color scheme that has sufficient color contrast, and is discernible by colleagues with color-blindness. Free tools that can help with this include the Colour Contrast Analyser and Color Oracle (a color blindness simulator).
  • Use easy-to-read, simple fonts; fonts that are sans serif are found to be easier to read for people with dyslexia. Make sure that text is sufficiently large and avoid all-caps if possible.
  • Avoid flashing content or excessive animation that can induce a seizure, migraine, or other type of illness.
  • Speak at a reasonable pace, and try to avoid jargon as far as possible.
  • Use more than color (e.g. words, annotations) to communicate information, and verbally describe images and plots.
  • If you are using Microsoft PowerPoint to make slides or posters, PowerPoint’s inbuilt Accessibility Checker (described here) may be useful.

Poster Presentations (additional considerations):

References

Michele A. Williams et al., Accessible Virtual Conferences, SIGACCESS, 2020.

Divya M. Persaud and Eleanor S. Armstrong, Space Science in Context, 2020.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

FAQs will be updated as more information becomes available. Please continue to check back, and let us know (using the contact form below) if you have questions that are not addressed on this page.

What software will be used for NESF & ELS 2021?

We plan to use Zoom for oral sessions, and Gather.town for poster sessions and as a virtual conference space. We will organize orientation sessions closer to the meeting to familiarize registered participants with these platforms. General information on accessibility features is available here (for Zoom) and here (for Gather.town).

Will talks be captioned?

NESF&ELS will include American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation for the initial and final plenary sessions, and a highly-rated automated closed captioning system (Rev) for the remainder of the meeting. For Gather.Town interactions, we recommend using Chrome in order to take advantage of the browser’s live captioning capability (see this page). Oral presentations will be recorded (with presenters’ consent) and made available via the conference website after the meeting, with automated (YouTube) closed captions at a minimum.

What is the conference schedule like?

The detailed NESF & ELS 2021 program will be available soon. The conference will take place from July 20-23 (Tue-Fri), 2021. Each day will consist of approximately 6 hours of scheduled programming (oral and poster sessions), with 15-minute breaks approximately every 1.5-2 hours. Poster PDFs and talk recordings will also be made available (with presenters’ consent) via the conference website after the meeting. Since this is a joint edition of NESF and ELS, with participants spread across a wide range of time zones, the conference schedule was devised in the spirit of making real-time participation accessible to as many participants as possible.

Accommodation Requests and Questions

NESF & ELS 2021 aims to be an inclusive and accessible conference. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to address barriers to your full participation in the conference, or if you have any questions. While we cannot guarantee that all needs will be met, all requests will receive serious consideration.

Join the conversation.