First day of my conference! Access is a dumpster fire, as usual, but maybe this can be a learning experience for my fellow academics. See thread for the gory details. #WhyDisabledPeopleDropOut

1) The company the organizers contracted to provide live captioning for the conference has apparently been delaying on sharing caption links for the last week and is not reachable at their office number. So no captions for the live plenary talk.

I am *sort of* following a long using a high quality automated captioning app that I pay for to cover this kind of situations. Thanks @AvaScribe

Bear in mind that in an equitable world, disabled people do not pay for their own accommodations. Have I mentioned that the majority of hearing aid costs are not covered by health insurance?

Disabled people tend to be underemployed, and less financially able to cover the hidden costs of access, so any serious inclusion of disability needs to focus on embedded, universal accessibility for everyone rather than case by case.

2) The organizers discovered only two weeks prior to the conference (remember, I emailed them abt #a11y 2.5 months in advance) that the conference platform, @cadmiumcd does not enable closed captioning on their prerecorded content.

Because apparently @cadmiumcd prefers that organizers pay to use their low accuracy automated captions (deaf people call 'em craptions) rather than use closed captions that are corrected by a human for accuracy.

If 85% accuracy doesn't seem so bad, take the time to google "craptions" and see for yourself. That missing 15% tends to be the words vital to understanding the meaning of the sentence.

Am I angry? Yes. Am I surprised? No. Accessibility continues to be an afterthought in design and planning, which makes it borderline impossible for an organizer to provide real access unless they have extensive professional experience providing accessibility.

In academia, most of the organizers are academics who are already juggling teaching and research plus whatever else life throws at them, so unless they have skin in the game they generally are at loss when it comes to accessibility.

You really need a dedicated access expert as part of the organization - universities usually have several, which why they are actually doing well access-wise.

And if I am an attendee at your event and you mess up, I get it. Accessibility is hard. But do not ask me to do unpaid accessibility work for your organization immediately after.

Lastly, the opening plenary was on diversity and inclusion in wildlife biology. The irony's not lost on me.

We need to listen to the marginalized voices in science - and they need to be accessible.