Accessibility and inclusiveness 

Fostering an accessible and inclusive environment at the EGU General Assembly

The EGU is committed to providing a safe, open, accessible, and respectful environment at its annual General Assembly. Our communications and approach are non-judgmental, non-biased, and inclusive. In turn, the EGU expects meeting attendees to exhibit professional and respectful conduct at all times. We require that all meeting participants accept and follow both EGU's Code of Conduct and the EGU General Assembly rules of conduct.

At its General Assembly the EGU strives to have diversity among conveners, attendees, organizers, and presenters, including with respect to career stage, gender, geographical origin, and scientific approaches. We encourage conveners and programme committee officers to keep this approach in mind while conducting all EGU activities.

This webpage details actions that the EGU has undertaken to facilitate an accessible and inclusive conference where every individual feels welcome. We encourage all participants to read this page and to help whenever appropriate.

Communications

• The EGU uses gender-neutral language.
• The EGU does not use titles or gender-based salutations on name badges.
• Since 2019 we have offered pronoun and Pride EGU pin buttons.
• The EGU has issued the following guideline for conveners: "EGU strongly encourages conveners to build their teams and organize their sessions considering and promoting under-represented demographics, in particular including: (i) multiple countries and institutes, (ii) different career stages, with particular attention to the participation of early career scientists, (iii) different genders and all other forms of diversity, and (iv) diverse scientific approaches."

Arriving at and moving about the Austria Center Vienna

• The Austria Center Vienna (ACV) is located 350 metres from the metro station Kaisermühlen-VIC. The metro station has escalators and elevators to access the station platforms. The route from the metro station to the ACV is paved and wheelchair accessible. There are markings to help the visually impaired up to the forecourt of the ACV (status as of autumn 2019).
• Travel guidelines for visitors to Vienna who have special needs can be found at https://www.wien.info/en/travel-info/accessible-vienna. This site includes detailed descriptions of most of the city's metro stations.
• The ACV has parking spaces for people who need to drive.
• The ACV is fully accessible for wheelchairs as a 2016 attendee has shared at http://blog.rtwilson.com/attending-egu-in-a-wheelchair/. The ACV has elevators and escalators between the different floors. The locations of elevators and escalators are marked on the floorplans, which can be downloaded from the General Assembly website.
• The ACV provides accessible toilets for attendees with physical disabilities.

Parents/families at the General Assembly

• Since 2008 the EGU has provided free, on-site childcare for children ages 3–8.
• A kids' corner provides a bouncy castle and some tables and chairs, where all children can play when accompanied by a parent.
• In 2020, the EGU will offer family rooms for parents with older kids who are not at childcare to rest and spend some quality time.
• A breastfeeding room is provided and equipped sufficiently.
• Please find all details at our webpage: Parents at the GA.

A safe and respectful environment

• The EGU is committed to providing a safe, open, accessible and respectful environment for participants at its meetings. In turn, the EGU expects professional and respectful conduct of attendees at all times.
• Discrimination, harassment, bullying, coercion, intimidation, censorship, and plagiarism of any kind will not be tolerated.
• All participants at EGU's General Assembly are required to follow EGU's Code of Conduct and the EGU General Assembly rules of conduct.
• Should you observe violations against these rules please contact the General Assembly programme committee chair at programme.committee@egu.eu or the person of trust at the EGU Information in the Entrance Hall (Yellow Level 0 – ground floor) during the General Assembly and/or send an email to conduct@egu.eu. Messages to this address are treated confidentially. They are read by the EGU president and the EGU's person of trust.

At the General Assembly

Physical accessibility

• Rooms for oral presentations that have a stage (D1, D2, D3, G1, G2, K1, K2, E1, E2, F1, F2, B, and C) do not usually provide a ramp. Please contact us at egu2020@copernicus.org at the very latest 72 hours before your talk is scheduled if you are a speaker in an oral session with a stage when you may need assistance getting to the speaker position.
• Beginning in 2020, the EGU will provide reserved seating in lecture rooms. Meeting participants are expected to offer these seats to attendees wearing a "please offer me a seat" pin button. We request everyone to keep in mind that not all needs are visible. Buttons can be obtained from the EGU information desk.
• Poster halls have chairs available for anyone who needs seating while presenting their poster. We offer a mixture of standard chairs and stools.
• The EGU provides step stools in the poster halls (available at the facility desks) to help presenters hang their posters. Conference assistants are also available to help put posters up.
• We will also offer step stools at lecterns in lecture rooms beginning in 2020.
• All PICO spots are equipped with one lowered screen.
• Persons taking care of attendees with reduced mobility are free of charge.

Visual accessibility

• Beginning in 2020, the programme app will be browser-based, allowing default use of larger font sizes through browser settings.
• Laser pointers, in the few rooms that have them, have a green laser beam, instead of red, for improved visual contrast.
• Lecture rooms with lecterns are equipped with enlarged, green mouse pointers.
• The EGU aims to keep name lettering on badges in a large font, with high contrast between letters and background, and clear space around the name.
• We encourage presenters of both slides and posters to use font sizes that are large enough to be read from some distance. This should also apply to labels on figure axes.
• The EGU encourages allowing presentations to be photographed to allow viewers to enlarge the presentation on their cameras or phones. Attendees that photograph for this purpose commit to not sharing materials unless the presenter authorizes it.

Audio accessibility

• Beginning in 2020, EGU will stream the audio signal from all lecture rooms and PICO spots to allow viewers to connect their hearing-aid devices to a smartphone to receive the audio stream.
• In 2020, we will run a pilot on auto-captioning oral presentations in room N1. We are well aware that the automatic subtitling of oral presentations is so far not perfect for technical terms and abbreviations. We kindly ask the audience to keep this in mind and to give us constructive feedback for future improvements through the questionnaires in the room.
• In 2020, we will experiment with live captioning of talks by a stenographer in union-wide sessions.
• Oral and PICO presenters are encouraged to add a one-sentence summary of each slide at the bottom to help attendees follow the presentation.
• All speakers in oral and PICO sessions are required to use a microphone.
• The audience is strongly encouraged to use microphones for asking questions in rooms where these are available either as mounted microphones in the aisles or wireless hand-held versions. When audience microphones are not available, speakers are asked to repeat each question.

Well-being

• We offer quiet rooms for attendees.
• We offer separate male and female multi-faith prayer rooms.
• We offer various seating areas in all foyers and poster halls.

Catering

• The General Assembly offers coffee and tea during the morning and afternoon breaks as well as beer (with and without alcohol) and lemonade at the evening Networking Breaks.
• Water fountains for refilling multi-use bottles are available throughout the ACV. Tap water in Vienna is safe to drink.
• It is possible to buy lunch in the ACV. We continue to work with our on-site catering partner to offer increased selections of vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free food.
• Lunch bags provided at plenary and division meetings have vegetarian sandwiches.

More information

• http://blog.rtwilson.com/attending-egu-in-a-wheelchair/
• https://blogs.egu.eu/geolog/2019/03/22/accessibility-at-the-general-assembly-2019/

Feedback

The EGU welcomes feedback and suggestions about how to further improve accessibility and inclusiveness at the General Assembly. You can provide direct feedback through the annual General Assembly Survey.