We have a long way to go on poster accessibility

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

This poll from this weekˆs ISMPP annual meeting shows how far we have to go in the field of conference posters:

Almost half of medical communication professionals – people whose job is to make medical research more widely distributed and more powerful – don’t think about make posters accessible.

My quick tip for better accessibility:

Fewer words, bigger.

How many people around you wear glasses or contacts? The world can be blurry for them! Bigger is easier to see!

Incoming: Conference accessibility panels at ISMPP 2025

Are you going to be in London this coming January? Then you may be interested in the 2025 European conference of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals.

I bring this up here because there will be sessions on conference accessibility that I had a small role in planning. Part of those sessions will be talking about how we can make the poster session experience better for people with accessibility needs.

The conference agenda is available. Look for “Making Meetings Better for All” for a brief description of this session.

External links

ISMPP Europe 2025

 

Accessibility doesn’t happen by chance

Today, there is an encore presentation of work on conference presentation accessibility I helped with. This work was presented back in January at the European meeting of the International Society of Medical Publication Professionals. For the annual meeting in the United States, this work got a new version of the poster:

I was not involved in the design of this poster apart from offering a few comments. You can see how it compares to the first version on Figshare. I am quite happy with how this version came out!

Wells JL, Faulkes Z, Hannan N, Messina EL, Morrison M, Petersen A Heather Robertson, Lauren C. Strother. 2023. Conference presentation accessibility. figshare. Poster. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21892881.v5

The conference website has a nice online version of the poster, along with a seven and a half minute explainer video if that’s your jam.

Update, 26 April 2023: This poster won an award! 🏆

New research on conference presentation accessibility

Today at the 2023 European Meeting of International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (#ISMPPEurope2023 on Twitter), new research was presented on conference accessibility. (Disclaimer: I’m a co-author on this project.) 

The major finding was that conference accessibility has a long way to improve. But the survey results also suggest ways to accomplish that. 

An unexpected finding for me was how important online conference resources were for people trying to meet their various accessibility needs.

What we learned about posters was that people want fewer words in bigger text. Not a particularly big surprise to regular readers!

You can view the poster, watch a video summary (11 minutes), and read supplemental data on Figshare.

This information is just the start. My colleagues and I are working on a more detailed paper.

External links

Conference presentation accessibility https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21892881

2022 in review: Face-to-face poster sessions return but covid never goes away

When I think about posters, poster sessions, and academic conferences this past year, all I can think of is this pair of tweets.

“I love conferences,” then, “I have covid.”

I just can’t get forget that.

I saw a lot of variations on those tweets over the year. 

The virtual element of conferences that emerged in the last two years was almost entirely absent from conference tweets. Instead, I saw a lot of people happily sharing pictures of themselves at their posters, at meetings, often in large groups, with no masks on.

Most conferences did not communicate risks or infections to their attendees.

I didn’t go to any conferences this year for a couple of reasons, but part of it was that I didn’t think it would be particularly safe for me to do so. 

Many other people also feel like going to a conference without clear public health guidelines is far too risky for them. This is particularly true for people who are immune compromised or who live with such people. They rightly feel extremely excluded and shut out of a key part of their professional circles.

This was in stark contrast to a lot of discussion about inclusion and accessibility of science.

A few conferences were exemplary in their approach to public health. But most took the “We are back to normal” approach that seem to be the working policy of many governments, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.

In some places in North America, 2022 was the deadliest year of the pandemic so far. Covid deaths in the US were lower than 2020 or 2021, but that country still racked up over a quarter of a million deaths. New Inquiry is running a series of articles about how the United States pretended the COVID-19 pandemic was over even though over a quarter of a million people died from it in 2022.

I was also listening to the Taproot podcast this morning (Taproot podcast, season 6, episode 2), which also discussed conferences. Hosts Ivan and Liz said one of their themes for this season is, “Have we learned from the covid pandemic? Can we do things better?”

I am still hoping that the answer to that is “Yes, we can learn,” but I am not feeling optimistic.

I want to see poster sessions in person again next year. I would like conference organizers to make that less risky to do.

External links

Track post-conference COVID infections

The year the “ended” (Part 1)

Taproot S6E2: The Tension Between Robustness and Efficiency in Biological and Human Systems  

Conference presentation accessibility

I am helping with a project on conference accessibility. I was brought on board because of my interest in posters, but this research is about oral presentations, too.

To get us started on data collection, we have a short (~10 minute) survey on how presentation format impacts people with accessibility needs at academic conferences.

You can take the conference presentation accessibility survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2DNJ2NX

Or you can use this easier to remember shortened link: https://bit.ly/ConfTalkAccess (Short for “Conference Talk Accessibility.”)

 

Or you can scan this QR code:

This survey will be available through 6 September 2022.

 

Please take the survey. Please share the survey with others who might go to conferences. Thank you for your support! 😁

Other easy reads don’t use bullet points. Maybe your poster shouldn’t, either.

Bullet points are overused on conference posters. But many people recommend them, often claiming that bulleted lists are “easier to read.”

If bullet points were truly easier to read, you should see them in publications aimed at wide readership.

Like People magazine.

Here’s the first few paragraphs of an article on the People website about Selena Gomez.

Here’s the start of an article quoting Laila Ali.

But maybe you think People is still too high brow? How about the infamously goofy tabloid, The Weekly World News?  

Here’s a recent article about bird attacks:

Huh. No bullet points there, either.

How about a magazine specifically aimed at novice readers? You know, for kids? Like Sports Illustrated Kids? If bullet points are easier, surely they would want to make their magazine accessible to kids?

From an article about their “Sportskid” of the year:

Again, you don’t really see bullet points. 

Kids magazines are kind of holdouts in mainly being in print and not online, I can’t find a current issue of Ranger Rick online, but here’s a sample of a 2016 article (the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary).

You should be expecting it by now. No bullet points to be seen.

So professionals who are genuinely trying to make things easy to read because that is their specific target audience do not use bullet points. I think we are reaching the point where we can say that “bullet points are easy to read” is a myth. Or if not a myth, not standard practice. It seems to be academics in particular who have a bullet list fixation.

I think the only reason this advice comes up so often for posters is because PowerPoint is so often used to make posters.

Related posts

Bullets versus sentences

Link roundup for February 2022 

Academic conferences need "Codes of Public Health"

2020 was a year of conference cancellations.

2021 was a year of online conferences.

What will the 2022 conference season be like? I’m not sure.

On the Better Posters Twitter account, I have been tweeting people’s reactions to the prospect of the return of academic conferences in person. And people’s feelings are... all over the place. 

On the one hand, I see people’s pent up desire to get to meet their colleagues again. This is consistent with reports I’ve seen that air travel volume is at an all time high. People want to get out. Some people are gushing about how the face-to-face interaction is so much more productive and inspiring than video calls. Rebekah Rogers tweeted:

In person conferences are like a breath of fresh air. New ideas and collaborations from incidental discussions. New colleagues with different perspectives.

There's just no match for that community in the online world. Hoping we can keep it going for years to come.

On the other hand, some people are freaking terrified. The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over. It’s now clear than about one in twenty people who get COVID-19 get symptomatic long covid, It’s debilitating and we don’t know how many people will recover or when. Long covid is not something you want to screw around with.

While this tweet isn’t about academic conferences, I think this sentiment from Chelle P. holds for academic conferences:

Hearing about an SF/F con where folks tested + for COVID and still blithely attended panels and meals really continues to hammer home that people like me aren't going to be able to participate in events again anytime soon. Because other humans just cannot fucking be trusted.

People who have kids who can’t be vaccinated, people who are immune compromised, are feeling left out and upset that conferences are going to push back to face-to-face with no consideration for them. Sebs Echeverri tweeted:

Super cool to see lots of conferences rolling virtual attendance back to a stream of the keynotes and maybe some plenaries, with limited or no ability to present research.

Totally excellent that academia has doubled down on punishing poor / disabled / immunocompromised scientists.

As if to exemplify this, Katie Greifeld tweeted that she had COVID-19 a mere four days after tweeting that she loved conferences.

And on top of that, there are a bunch of people who have found that online conferences have big advantages. They enjoyed the greater flexibility and accessibility and (often) lower costs. When you taste success, the tongue wants more.

Christopher Neugebauer is on to a really important idea: a public health code for conferences.

Public health policies are just as important a tool for in-person conferences as codes of conduct. They're a contract with the community that organisers are making to provide a safe place to gather.

I hope the community starts treating these as non-optional, just as for CoCs.

In the last decade, academic societies and conference organizers realized the importance of having a conference code of conduct. It was important for them to take public positions against bullying and harassment.

It’s shaping up to be a very fraught, complex, and conflicted year for academic conferences.

Update, 11 May 2022: Katie Mack’s summary of conference season 2022:

Conference hashtag during conference: Talks, updates, photos

Conference hashtag after conference: Rapid test pics, symptom updates, contact tracing

Online conferences offer many benefits, but online poster sessions still suck

Since 2020, most academic conferences have been online. A recent paper on conferences found many positive effects from online conferences. In short:

• More people overall.
• People from more places.
  
• More women.

The paper argues that online conferences also reduced carbon footprint, but do this by calculating carbon emissions of air travel only. They do not calculate the carbon emissions from hosted server space, energy use of uploads and downloads, and so on. As blockchain technology has proved, “digital” does not mean “carbon neutral.”

The paper highlights the problems with online poster sessions in the abstract: “(F)urther development of virtual networking features and poster sessions is necessary to achieve widespread adoption and acceptance of this new format.”

A dive into the main text shows a more complex picture.

Skiles and company go into more details in this excerpt, lightly edited (acronyms removed):

Analysed virtual conferencess had poster authors publish their posters via Twitter, using a web-based iPoster sharing platform, or by uploading a 5-minute prerecorded presentation to the conference website. The poster presentations had high view counts (NAMS iPosters had on average 142 views) but presenters could not tell how many attendees were viewing their posters and features for communicating with poster viewers were not effective. In contrast, Twitter-based poster sessions are increasing in frequency and allow asynchronous communication. However, Twitter is not available in every country, limiting access. Consequently, virtual posters were less popular, with 85% of North American Membrane Society survey respondents and 43% of Photonics Online Meetups 2 survey respondents indicating that they preferred in-person poster sessions to virtual poster sessions.

So they present a sample size of two, with an even split on preference. One crowd preferred face-to-face poster sessions, the other preferred online poster sessions. The “preferred” margin for online poster sessions is smaller in one meeting than the other, but still. I’m amazed that one conference had more than half of respondents favouring online poster sessions.

References

Skiles M, Yang E, Reshef O, Muñoz DR, Cintron D, Lind ML, Rush A, Calleja PP, Nerenberg R, Armani A, M. Faust K, Kumar M. 2021. Conference demographics and footprint changed by virtual platforms. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00823-2

Review: Better Data Visualizations

I ran across Jon Schwabish’s book, Better Data Visualizations, when my editor pointed out how uncomfortably close it looked to an unused cover design for Better Posters.

Once I finished smiling at the “separated at birth” similarities, I realized I should actually read Jon’s book because it was, as they say, “relevant to my interests.”

Better Data Visualizations is very useful.

The bulk of the book is a big ol’ list of different graph types. The charts range from the common (bar charts, scatter plots, and tables) to the more esoteric (Voronoi diagrams, Marimekko charts). It’s not quite an “encyclopedia of charts,” but it is thorough.

There are usually multiple illustrations (in full colour) of each type of chart so you can see them “in action,” as it were. Almost all the illustrations are in full colour.

Every entry has a series of tips of how to avoid pitfalls and maximize the effectiveness of that particular chart type. I particularly appreciated the concise guidelines for making tables presentable. 

Readers of this blog who work in the humanities occasionally ask about techniques for their fields. If that is an interest of yours, you’ll be pleased to know Schwabish has a section on qualitative visualizations. It is slimmer than the section on quantitative visualizations, but given that this is an area that is often ignored completely, this is an extremely welcome addition to this book.

There is a section showing “before and after” revisions of charts that is quite fun.

Lastly, there is a section on developing a style guide. While this is aimed at organizations that make a lot of charts, I realized that it could be extremely helpful for a poster maker to draw up a short style guide for their poster. One of the biggest problems I see on posters is inconsistency. This is usually because people use different software tools for different parts of the poster, and they don’t check to harmonize the graphs and the rest of the poster.

While I was reading, I was wondering, “But how could someone know how to make some of these non-standard charts?” While the appendices are often considered to be extra material that can be removed, the appendix on data visualization tools was extremely helpful for me. (“Microsoft has a graphing site called Charticulator? Cool.”)

Because data visualizations are often the heart of conference posters, there is definitely some overlap in Jon’s book and mine. But Better Data Visualization covers much more territory there than mine does.

External links

PolicyViz

Related posts

Solving the Pokemon problem for posters

Pronouns on posters

My given name (Zen) is an ambiguous gender signal. I know both men and women with the same first name as me. I understand that other people often want to know someone’s gender, and that people may want to explictly state how they like being referred to.

For those reasons and others, some conferences have started adopting the practice of putting pronouns on conference badges. The point is to try to reinforce that different people might have different ways they want to be addressed, thereby creating a more welcoming environment to all.

Nelson Stauffer suggests extending this practice to posters.

Approach to pronouns on a poster? Just add more superscript characters.

Nelson tweeted this image as an example.

I’m not crazy about this particular implementation of the idea, because the symbols that Nelson used (a dagger and a double dagger) are hard to distinguish in this particular font, particularly at small size.

Is this a good idea more generally?

Probably.

Adding pronouns adds visual complexity. You have to match the symbols, the pronouns, and the names, and do a dance back and forth between the three for each author. That’s a lot of cognitive load to ask someone to take on in a busy poster session.

The suggestion here is to put the symbols and pronouns in the title bar, part of the poster which can be overloaded with authors’ names and affiliations.

A good general rule in graphic design is, “Put information at the point of need.” People are most likely to want to know preferred pronouns when they are having a conversation with someone. That makes an excellent case for putting pronouns on name tags because if you can read someone’s name tag, you’re close enough to be having a conversation with that person.

If pronouns are already on name tags, putting pronouns on the poster is duplicate information. If pronouns are not on name tags, the argument for putting those pronouns on the poster is much stronger.

Similarly, adding pronouns for the poster presenter makes a lot of sense. Again, knowing pronouns can be valuable when you are conversing with someone, which is most likely when you are speaking to a presented.

Adding the pronouns for all presenters may be overkill. If you have a poster with a long author list, there may be many authors who are not at the conference at all. So on the one hand, adding pronouns for all authors is consistent. On the other hand, are the pronouns of all the individuals participating in a project – who may or may not be at the conference – something that a viewer needs at that moment?

Some authors may not want their preferred pronouns on the poster. Authors who are not at a conference may not want to disclose something about their pronoun use to everyone in attendance.

Some people have argued for going in the opposite direction (more with scientific papers than posters) on pronouns. That is, some prefer to display only initials rather than given names to downplay gender and minimize bias. Many women writers (like Star Trek’s Dorothy Fontana) used their initials for their author credit for this reason.

If you want to include pronouns, many of the tips regarding showing institutional affiliations might be helpful here.

Related posts

Showing authorship on posters

Poster sessions for wheelchair users

I’ve visited the issue of poster accessibility on this blog, but mainly in the context of visual issues, like colour blindness and dyslexia. Of course, these are not the only challenges the people might face attending a scientific conference. Amy-Charlotte Devitz, a.k.a. The Bendy Biologist on Twitter, has a great blog post talking about navigating a scientific conference in a wheelchair with a service dog. The conference at hand is the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting this month in Tampa, Florida.

Here’s an excerpt, focusing in on what she says about poster sessions (emphasis added).

100+ posters were on display and you had a chance to interact with those who had made them. These were admittedly a bit of a challenge to navigate in a chair. It was crowded, meaning it was very hard to move around, and with so many people around I wasn’t able to get a proper look at many of the posters. The alternative was to come and look at the posters before the official sessions started, a time when very few people were present, so I did this often. The downside of this was that one, the presenters weren’t there to speak with and two, it meant skipping other events to come look at the posters. Improvements in accessibility could be made by the increasing the space between rows of posters as well as the posters themselves to open things up a bit. This may be limited by the space available in the venue, but it something to consider.

As I said in the beginning, my focus in this post would be on accessibility for individuals for mobility impairments, but I have a few points left to make. For one, almost every talk I saw used color-blind friendly color palettes in making their slides, and most used large fonts that were easy to read even from the back of the room. Encouraging these in all talks and posters would assure someone colorblind or visually impaired could view any material.

Full disclosure: I was the chair of the Student and Post-Doctoral Affairs Committee during this meeting, so I have a professional interest here above and beyond the usual. I was supposed to attend this meeting, but could not due to unexpected events.

It’s worth noting that SICB’s poster sessions used to allow people to have eight foot posters. Here’s one from 2017. In 2018, this was reduced to less than four feet of space for a poster. I do not know how far apart the poster boards were placed in those years, but it seems likely that the square footage of poster viewing space was probably about halved by this move.

That square footage of viewing space is extremely important for wheelchair users. Whatever reasons there are for shrinking the poster size (and there are probably reasonable ones), this does not change the fact that it virtually guarantees that the poster session is a worse experience for everyone, even if wheelchair users are a little more affected than most.

There is a lot more in Charlotte’s post, and I recommend it highly to you.

External links

SICB 2019 – An accessibility perspective