As a presenter at the annual meeting, we request that you plan to include the following accessibility practices a part of your presentation. This will make your session and the entire meeting more accessible and expand your audience to include all members. Thank you for joining us in our efforts to be a more accessible meeting!
During your session in Tampa or virtually, please:
- Introduce each speaker the first time they speak. State who you are and any affiliations and an optional brief description of yourself.
- Visual descriptions of any images that you use that are important for understanding the subject. If there is an image on your slide which you are speaking about, please describe the image in a few words for your audience.
- Read out loud any writing that you include on your slides that is important for understanding the subject. This will allow members with low vision to fully experience your materials.
- Speak slowly during your presentation.
- Always speak into your microphone and ensure that members of the audience who participate in the session also speak into a microphone. This will allow d/Deaf and hard of hearing individuals as well as English as a second Language attendees to more fully engage.
- Add captions to pre-recorded content. If you are preparing a pre-recorded video as your submission or a part of your live session, please enable captioning so that it is included in the recording.
- Provide PDFs of your slides, transcripts, or other materials. This is highly encouraged, but on a volunteer basis. You will have until a few weeks before the meeting to upload copies of your materials to the speaker resource center (exact deadline coming soon). These will be made available to attendees in the program app. Providing PDFs of these resources allows attendees to access them on their personal devices and greatly improves accessibility and your reach to the audience. You can also provide printed, physical copies of these to your audience on the day of your session if you choose to. Printed copies are appreciated by the members of our community with accessibility concerns.
We also strongly encourage you to review and prepare your presentations and posters using the AAA Guidelines for accessible materials.
All annual meeting presenters, whether in-person or virtual, are encouraged to join us in supporting our efforts to have a meeting with accessibility built into the fabric of the meeting. This includes members of the disabled community, members whose first language is one other than English, and many more. One in five people need accessibility accommodations of some kind, and by creating a sessions with that in mind, we can expand the reach of our work and our audience to as many people as possible, allow for more rich and diverse participation and more seamless inclusion. Thank you for working with us to make your session and the entire annual meeting as accessible as possible!
