Access-centered support for events

The Turing Way hosts a variety of events throughout the year: virtual Collaboration Cafes, coworking calls, Book Dash events and onboarding sessions.

All of The Turing Way community calls are hosted on either a remote-first and/or hybrid-basis.

In order to enable the widest participation possible, and overcome any possible barriers that may prevent paricipation or negatively affect their experience, we aim to provide the following support for each call.

All our community calls adhere to the project’s Code of Conduct.

Access and inclusion-related support we provide for virtual events

1. Comfort breaks: Virtual discussions can be tiring! For calls like our coworking calls and Collaboration Cafes, comfort breaks are built into the pomodoro working format, with a variety of optional and gently-enforced breaks to ensure that participants are taking sufficient breaks during extended time on virtual calls. For our trainings, workshops and onboarding sessions, we make sure build in comfort breaks throughout the sessions.

2. Co-hosting: Our workshops and trainings are generally co-hosted by default in order to ensure ease of facilitation for both trainers, as well as provide support to answer additional questions by participants, and/or solve IT or interpersonal issues that may arise during the call. Coworking calls and Collaboration Cafes do not generally have two hosts, but are attended widely by community members that can help with any issues that may arise.

3. Reference material: Before and/or after each call, we aim to share slides, links and other reference materials to ensure that that the material can be referenced before or during the call. Many of our community materials and presentations are uploaded to our Zenodo community page, and are licensed CC-BY for use by others.

4. Transcription: Our virtual and hybrid calls are hosted on the Zoom platform, and as a community, we use the built-in zoom transcription feature. Due to IT limitations from our hosting organisation, we do not currently use any additional transcription support (such as Otter.ai), but hope to do so in the future.

5. Recordings: Community calls like the coworking call and collaboration cafes are not recorded by default, though the notes from each session are uploaded in our repository. Workshops and trainings may be recorded at the discresion of the organisers, and/or if participants request.

6. Alternative forms of engagement: At our community calls, we tend to encourage (but absolutely do not enforce!) a video-on culture at our community calls. However, we recognise that this may be both bandwidth-intensive as well as exclusory to those who would not like to engage in this way. At our trainings and workshops, we encourage folks to engage in the ways and mediums that they would like.

Access and inclusion-related support we provide for in-person events

This accessibility support is provided for events hosted in-person at the Alan Turing Institute, which is based at the British Library.

1. Run a venue tour: Before we choose the venue of the event, we do a tour to make sure that it is accessible to and for everyone. We consider whether or not anyone with a wheelchair or needing walking support should be able to enter the venue, move through its corridors and use the toilets with minimum support. We also make sure that venue provides a space for: a well-being room, children friendly area, breast-feeding room and praying room.

2. Be mindful of sensory needs: We provide quiet spaces, and make attendees aware if there will be loud sounds, videos or special lighting.

3. Catering: We request dietary information from all attendees and provide a wide range of foods including gluten- and allergen-free, as well as vegetarian/vegan, options. We make ingredient lists available.

4. Breaks: At meals and breaks, we make sure that someone is available to help blind and low vision people to navigate food and beverage choices.

5. Pictures: When people register in person, we ask them if they have a problem with being photographed and then place a sticker on their registration badge that allows us to meet their preferences.

Access and inclusion-related support we provide for Book Dash:

As of December 2024, we currently are able to offer the following monetary support for our bi-annual Book Dash events:

1. Food & Drink: We are able to offer support for food & non-alcoholic drinks up to £50 for virtual participants, £25 for partially in-person participants.

2. Technology Requirements: Up to £75 is available for the rent or purchase of small hardware items such as headphones, webcams, or temporary boosts to internet to enhance participants’ overall experience, subject to prior approval.

Support we would like to provide in the future

Currently, we are not able to support the following practices within community calls.

1. Live transcription and/or translation: While we have previously hosted social sessions at our biannual Book Dash in Spanish, the vast amount of our trainings and community calls are hosted in English. We would love to support more calls in more languages in the future.