I just replied to the same email they sent the survey link to me with. The one thing I wanted to give them as feedback in response to their questions about why I hadn't kept my membership.
"What has kept me from renewing with all plant science professional orgs has been the lack of accessibility & inclusion for disabled people. The ageism towards older students is also not helpful or welcoming."
Please boost in the hopes of reaching someone who can answer:
Can someone direct me to a form and/or a person responsible for ensuring ADA compliance (not a defensive "cover your ass" thing, but actually caring about accessibility) at USDA?
Tired of coming home with a case of "conference crud"? Want to enjoy great talks about science and accessibility? SciAccess is an accessible conference that started among astronomers, but also has talks that are of interest to folks in STEM in general as well.
And you can still register for it and attend despite it kicking off tomorrow!
While I tend to appreciate folks who are working on accessibility, there is a widespread ableist attitude that disabled people should be grateful for whatever scraps of consideration, inclusion, and accessibility we get.
I have no obligation to feel grateful for that. Being considered, included (including in planning), and having my public university that I've paid for all my adult life be accessible to me is my right.
So while I do try to recognize folks who are putting more effort into dismantling ableism than others, I want to folks to resist the idea that a disabled person should just be happy a given thing isn't quite as harmful as it is in worse places.
Systemic oppressions train us to think this way - to defend hegemons, defend the systemic oppressions, and attack those marginalized for not being happy & content with the marginalization. #DisabledAndSTEM#UCAccessNow#PlantScience@plantscience
1st questioner asked how they knew to look at ferns for sources.
Their research time did lit review and found that in the 1970s there had been promising research on ferns, but they didn't have the technology at the time to make good on the promise.
Next speaker is Danelle Seymour from
University of California, Riverside on Mutations in citrus breeding and genomics. The opening slide is about Asian Citrus Psyllid and temperatures needed for "permissive spread". (Me: So you can see how climate change affects where an insect vector can be.) #DisabledAndSTEM #PlantScience #UCAccessNow #UCDPSS2024
There's a short break where in-person attendees can network and enjoy each other's company, but online attendees have no chat area or other tools to do that because #Ableism
I guess you can visit the "virtual" poster presentation area, though...
I appreciate the hard work of the student volunteers, but UC Davis Plant Sciences has been made aware of the inequity and inaccessibility of its events for > 4 yrs now.
Organizing the student-run symposium has been steered to the prize students of certain PIs at UC Davis, reducing the opportunity for input from marginalized students, including disabled ones. @plantscience#UCDPSS2024#DisabledAndSTEM#UCAccessNow
"I can't read that sign - I'm colorblind!" - Dr. Gaut, good naturedly.
Folks don't think of themselves as disabled, but accessibility is important at all times. Even when our institutions fence disabled people out, there are still disabled people in academia and our communications, infrastructure, and culture need to be accessible.
That's probably it for me today. The lack of consideration for disabled members of this department and school, the lack of equity in being able to ask questions live make it so tha tI might as well watch this shovelware on YouTube where it'll be uploaded later.
UC Davis' Plant Science Symposium is tomorrow. They didn't consider accessibility to disabled scientists despite knowing they had disabled scientists here at UC Davis, but I'm posting it because it's free & maybe folks can still get something out of it. @plantscience
This is one of the reasons auto-captions are not good enough. The presenter is talking about Adiantum trapeziforme.
When you book a professional human captioner, and you have presenters submit slides and a glossary to the captioner ahead of time, you get much better quality captions, which helps Deaf & hard-of-hearing folks, people with audio processing issues, hearing people who are viewing in a loud environment, and English learners. #DisabledAndSTEM#PlantScience#UCAccessNow@plantscience
@plantscience There can be far more serious mistranscriptions, some which will actually make the meaning the opposite of what was meant by the speaker. I've experienced this in courses I've taken that use auto-captions ("craptions") instead of human-made captions. #DisabledAndSTEM#PlantScience#UCAccessNow#UCDPSS2024
A disadvantage of how this Zoom webinar format is working is that the screensizes are set. The viewer cannot change their size to expand the one they most need to see.
STEM slides often cram a lot of charts and small text in one slide, which means you really need to have the slide at as large a size as you can get.
Inspired by Biotweeps, do any of the biology folks here want to work on putting together an accessible online conference using Fediverse tools?
I'm thinking anti-ableist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, etc.
I, like many disabled scientists, have been left out of so many workshops, symposia, conferences, etc. due to inaccessibility. Especially since the pandemic began.
I think we could build some community on Mastodon.
@plantscience Actual inclusive as possible for us to achieve online conference-planning. Pushing the date far enough out that we can do this without stressing the hell out and with enough time to fundraise for ASL interpreters, captioning, etc. #DisabledAndSTEM#Biology
@academicchatter I'm thinking anti-ableist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, etc.
Actual inclusive as possible for us to achieve online conference-planning. Pushing the date far enough out that we can do this without stressing the hell out and with enough time to fundraise for ASL interpreters, captioning, etc.