Making ICML Papers, Talks, and Posters Accessible and Inclusive

To foster inclusive culture and ensure that as many people as possible can participate in the conference and enjoy your paper when published, everyone is expected to make their papers and talks accessible and inclusive. Below are expectations around each.

Papers

Accessibility

Having an accessible paper means that your work can be reviewed by all of our reviewers and enjoyed by the broadest possible audience, including disabled and neurodivergent people. Please follow the guidelines below to assure your paper is accessible. We have developed these guidelines in collaboration with the NAACL 2022 team, and the NAACL 2022 blog post contains additional details and resources.

1. Create figures that are high contrast and high resolution, so they remain clear when zooming in.
2. Ensure that fonts are sufficiently large, especially in figures. The font size in figures should be no smaller than the font size of the caption of the figure.
3. Ensure that your visuals are legible to people with all types of color vision by following the recommendations of How to Design for Color Blindness and Color Universal Design:
    
   1. Choose color schemes that can be easily identified by people with all types of color vision, in consideration with the actual lighting conditions and usage environment.
   2. Do not rely on color to convey information, but also use a combination of different shapes, positions, line types, and coloring patterns.
       
4. Ensure that the PDF of your paper is accessible by following the steps in the SIGACCESS Accessible PDF Author Guide. This means in particular:
    
   1. Check that all fonts are embedded in the PDF.
   2. Set the title and language for the PDF.
   3. Add tags to the PDF. Tags capture the underlying logical structure, reading order, etc. and allow the use of assistive technologies such as screen readers.
   4. Add alternative text to all figures, tables, charts, images, diagrams, and other visuals in your paper. This is what will be spoken to readers who cannot see the visuals. Use plain, concise language that captures both the content and the function of the visuals in the paper. Highlight the aspects of the visuals that are salient to the paper, rather than merely describing the visuals or repeating their captions. Follow the SIGACCESS guidelines, which include several examples. For further examples see Appendix F of 2kenize: Tying Subword Sequences for Chinese Script Conversion.
   5. Set the tab order for the PDF.
   6. Mark table headers in the PDF.

Author Names and Citations

Many authors (in particular, transgender, non-binary, and/or gender-diverse authors; married and/or divorced authors; etc.) can change their names during their academic careers. You show respect to the authors that you cite by using their updated names. Not using their updated names produces ongoing harms, such as a violation of privacy, denial of credit, denial of dignity, ongoing corrective epistemic labor, epistemic exploitation, and exposure to abuse and trauma, and can even constitute hate speech. Please take the following steps:

1. Ensure that you are using updated author names by checking their website or Semantic Scholar page.
2. To obtain bibliographic entries, do not rely on platforms such as Google Scholar that do not properly support author name changes.
3. Use tools such as Rebiber and manually check your work to spot and fix outdated bibliographic entries and in-text citations.
4. For works that include examples from citation networks, academic graphs, etc., manually check that none of the examples contain incorrect names, which can occur in publicly available academic graphs.

It is critical that you follow the above steps in all drafts of your paper, not just in the camera-ready version. Any version of your paper that you upload to arXiv or submit for open review can be indexed or scraped, and if it contains incorrect names, it can result in the harms mentioned above. If you discover or are notified that any of your papers contain incorrect names, make the appropriate corrections immediately.

Inclusive Language

Use inclusive and respectful language throughout your paper:

1. Use examples that are understandable and respectful to a diverse, multicultural audience. It is acceptable to include offensive content when it is relevant to the focus of your paper (e.g., to provide examples of toxic data). In this case, we recommend including a trigger or content warning at the beginning of your paper (for an example, see Harms of Gender Exclusivity and Challenges in Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies).
2. When talking about people and their individual characteristics including age, caste, disability, gender, neurodivergence, racial and ethnic identity, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, etc. follow the APA style guide.
3. If your paper discusses accessibility issues or refers to people with disabilities, please follow the SIGACCESS Accessible Writing Guide.
4. Avoid inherently sexist language, such as generic “he” and gendered professional titles (e.g., use “firefighter” instead of “fireman”). Also, avoid using combinations such as “he or she,” “she or he,” “he/she,” and “(s)he” as alternatives to the singular “they” because such constructions imply an exclusively binary nature of gender and exclude individuals who do not use these pronouns. See RECSYS guidelines for additional recommendations.
5. Consider adding your pronouns (if comfortable) under your name in the camera-ready version to ensure that you and your co-authors are referred to appropriately when your paper is discussed. This practice additionally normalizes pronouns, which creates a more welcoming environment for trans, non-binary, and/or gender-diverse folks. For an example, see Harms of Gender Exclusivity and Challenges in Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies. If you are not familiar with pronouns, see the oSTEM guide to pronouns. 

The lack of compliance with accessibility and inclusiveness requirements can be brought up during the review and we will check for compliance before papers are published. Following these requirements should not take very long (likely no more than an hour or two) but you should be sure to budget time to accomplish them, particularly if you are not used to going through these steps.

Talks and Posters

There are many great guides to making accessible and inclusive talks and posters; we advise everyone to consider all the points made in the RECSYS guidelines, the ACM guide, and the W3C guide. In particular, we would like to highlight the following items:

1. Keep your slides and posters clear, simple, and uncrowded. Use large, sans-serif fonts, with ample white space between sentences and paragraphs. Use bold for emphasis (instead of italics, underline, or capitalization), and avoid special text effects (e.g., shadows).
2. Choose high contrast colors; dark text on a cream background works best.
3. Avoid flashing text or graphics. For any graphics, add a brief text description of the graphic right next to it.
4. Choose color schemes that can be easily identified by people with all types of color vision and do not rely on color to convey a message (see How to Design for Color Blindness and Color Universal Design for further details).
5. Use examples that are understandable and respectful to a diverse, multicultural audience.
6. When beginning a talk, introduce yourself with your chosen name and pronouns (if comfortable), and describe your appearance and background so that blind and visually impaired individuals can picture the talk. Every time you start talking after another person was just talking, say “This is [insert your name],” so that blind and visually impaired folks can easily know who is talking.
7. When welcoming, referring to or interacting with your audience:
    
   1. Do not use: ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, men and women, brothers and sisters, he or she, sir/madam.
   2. Instead, use: esteemed guests, that person, friends and colleagues, students, siblings, everyone, the participants.
   3. Do not assume the pronouns of any audience member, or publicly ask audience members for their pronouns. Instead, use singular “they” to refer to audience members.
       
8. Avoid inherently sexist language, such as generic “he” and gendered professional titles (e.g., use “firefighter” instead of “fireman”). Also, avoid using combinations such as “he or she,” “she or he,” “he/she,” and “(s)he” as alternatives to the singular “they” because such constructions imply an exclusively binary nature of gender and exclude individuals who do not use these pronouns. See RECSYS guidelines for additional recommendations.
9. Avoid intentional and casual ableist language, such as “Oh, I’m dumb!”, “I’m blind”, “Are you deaf?”, “I’m so OCD about these things”, “I hope everyone can see this”, etc. This language alienates and harms disabled and neurodivergent people.
10. When speaking, do not assume that all audience members can see the slides: cover everything important in what you say, even if it's already on the slide. Be kind when asked to say content on your slides (especially equations) out loud.
11. Before responding to an audience question, slowly repeat the question so that everyone can catch and process the question. When speaking, repeat important words and ideas to allow everyone to follow along.
12. For virtual talks and poster sessions, monitor the chat for questions.