SciPy 2022 Accessibility Awareness Programs

It is SciPy this week! It's one of the biggest community events in our corner of the world. We are so excited for the festivities, the talks, and to see & hear all our friends' new ideas.

Events, and technology, are increasingly more complex these days. This year SciPy is in-person and virtual, and we wanted to bring y'all two things that fit these constraints:

1. We're introducing a pilot open source scavenger hunt where you can:
   1. Contribute to popular open source projects.
   2. Improve the alt text of open source documentation.
2. A free digital and limited print zine called How to Write Alt Text for Scientific Diagrams and Visualization by @marsbarlee.

The scavenger hunt.

First, we need to acknowledge the four projects participating in this pilot:

1. Project Jupyter¹
2. SciPy
3. Dask
4. Bokeh

Thank y'all for taking the time to prepare for the scavenger hunt, and wanting to improve your documentation.

How to participate.

• Follow each link/code to a pull request.
• Follow the pull request instructions to modify the respective alt text in markdown or rst format, as appropriate.

JupyterLab 1	SciPy	Dask	Bokeh

Why participate?

• low barrier to entry to participate in open source projects
• improve the accessibility of open source documentation
• learn more about alt text

What next?

• Start submitting and improving your alt text!
  • Working Jupyter alt text guide
  • Chartability heuristics for accessible visualizations
• Stay tuned later this week to learn how you fight inaccessibility with our zine release.
• Use more alt text in your social media and documentation.
• Give the project maintainers time to merge your submissions.
• Enjoy How to Write Alt Text for Scientific Diagrams and Visualization

Footnotes

1. These alt text events, which started in Project Jupyter, have been a community mainstay for over a year. In these low-code workshops we have been able to remove the complexities of git in contributing to open source and thus expand participation. These events have been run in the past with several communities. ↩ ↩²