Transcript from Day of Accessibility on 4/13/23, 10:00-10:10 am
Session #1
Welcome to the "Day of Accessibility" at Space Telescope Science Institute. My name is Mark postman. it's a pleasure to welcome you to this meeting today. We want to enable the world to share in the wonder of space telescopes, either orbiting the earth or the sun as we speak -- last time I checked. The Hubble space telescope and the James Webb space telescope are the two that are currently operational and in the 2026 time frame, the Nancy Grace Roman telescope will be another amazing addition to the flagship fleet we have up there. Of course, in the mid-future range, what will we be doing? We are thinking about yet another amazing space telescope, allowing us to potentially find evidence for life on planets around other stars. That's an amazing future to look forward to. I hinted at one of them already, the flagship missions, the other three are equally important, advanced state of the art astronomical research and tools for scientific discovery, make the world's astronomical information accessible to all and promote an inclusive, equitable workplace and cultivate a diverse, engaged workforce. I believe great ideas and innovations about how to achieve those great ideas are not limited by where you are, who you are, what your physical capabilities are, great ideas exist everywhere. The more people we can include in achieving those goals, the better we will be in the better we will find things we could have imagined yesterday or today. With that, I'm very excited to hear how we are going to make sure that what we do here in terms of software, notebooks, other types of tools to explore the universe are made accessible for all. With that, I welcome you to this meeting. I'm going to turn it over to Jen. Thank you.
Jennifer: Hi, everyone. I am so, so excited to welcome you today. Let me pull up the other slide. Okay. Welcome to the "Day of Accessibility" here at Space Telescope Science Institute, my name is Jennifer Kotler and I work here as a user experience designer. The last few years, I've been immersing myself in accessibility and science and design. This is my coorganizer, Patrick Smyth.
Patrick: Hi, I am Patrick, I am a blind coder, teacher, and writer, and chief learner at the Iota School.
Jennifer: We have people that designed and used various adaptable technologies, we have scientists, technologists, writers, designers, both local and federal, librarians, accessibility advocates and a bunch of students. In fact, later, we will have a whole cohort of students. Some of you are students here in Baltimore and others are streaming in from online. Even internationally. For those in person, a few quick notes about the facilities, feel free to move between the lobby, auditorium, bathrooms, cafe, there's a patio back there as well. All the other areas in the building will require card access. They are only for STScI employees. If you have an accessibility concern or any questions, please feel free to ask me or Patrick or anyone wearing a badge colored in with a yellow highlighter. Ask anyone for help. We will all help each other out. A couple of notes for those online, a link to the closed captioning has been posted in the chat so you can open that up in a browser to follow along. There are links to the schedule for today and to the slides for the talks at that schedule. This, today, has been organized by a project called Notebooks for All. We have a link to the web site. It's in the slides. Okay. I will quickly go over the schedule. We are going to start a talk by Notebooks for All in a couple minutes and have a 15-minute break. Then we will have a talk about accessible text descriptions, alt text and James Webb images, we will have another break then the keynote by Josh Miele, we will have lunch in the cafe. We will have a lot of touchable graphics. We will an astronomy data saponification talk, we will learn how to use a screen reader, close with being an advocate and be along our way, back into our lives. Jupyter Notebooks are a foundational tool for astronomy, data science, and many other STEM fields but they are currently not accessible to screen readers and other assistive technology, Tony and Isabela are going to give a background on that and share more about the project, addressing that problem. Please give a warm welcome to Isabela and Tony coming all the way from the West Coast. Thank you. [Applause]