ACM SIGCHI Creates the New Position of Vice-President for Accessibility

ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) is the leading organization for researchers and practitioners who work in human-computer interaction (HCI). This year, the SIGCHI executive committee created a new position: Vice-president for accessibility. This follows last year’s creation of the SIGCHI Accessibility Committee, which was chaired by SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC) adjunct chair—and AccessComputing co-PI—Stacy Branham.

This elevation of accessibility is the result of hard work by many individuals including AccessComputing partner Jonathan Lazar, who lobbied vigorously for SIGCHI to do more to support its many disabled members in 2014. Later that year, volunteer-based organization AccessSIGCHI, a group independent of SIGCHI, was created with the help of many advocates. Jennifer Rode and Jennifer Mankoff were the founders, with Rode as founding chair. 

After Rode, Jen Mankoff chaired AccessSIGCHI for several years and was instrumental in the creation of the SIGCHI Accessibility Committee. Both Jonathan Lazar and Jen Mankoff were awarded the AccessComputing Capacity Building Award for their efforts in making SIGCHI conferences more accessible. 

The elevation and creation of this new position—SIGCHI vice-president for accessibility—means that accessibility will have permanent leadership on the SIGCHI EC. The new vice-president taking over is AccessComputing partner Dhruv Jain from the University of Michigan. All this bodes well for the improvement of accessibility at all 27 of SIGCHI's sponsored or co-sponsored conferences.