RMPCMA April Education Event
R3 Regional Hybrid Hackathon
Thursday, April 8 | 1:00 – 5:00pm
Multiple Venues and Virtual

Our Responsibility

In general, meetings are not accessible for large portions of our population and at RMPCMA, we genuinely believe in our responsibility to drive more easily accessible meetings as a standard practice. Based on our communication with many attendees, especially those in the disability community, the resounding message is that they aren’t coming to your meetings, because your meetings aren’t accessible. And the numbers support this. According to the CDC, approximately 1 in 4 adults in the US live with a disability. How many of your in-person attendees claim a disability?

There is A LOT that needs to be done, and we fully realize our conferences have a long way to go in this pursuit. The important thing is to make the commitment to start right now, and to continually think about future steps that can be taken.

Above all, we want to openly encourage better communication about best practices in accessible meeting planning. Do you have requests to make? Ideas to share? Issues to report? Please contact us at [email protected]

Physical Accessibility

 Socially-distanced room sets offer a huge advantage for our attendees with physical mobility challenges. As we start to increase venue capacities in the future, we challenge planners, suppliers, venues and everyone to think of ways to preserve the extra space that allows for attendees using wheelchairs, crutches, etc.

In the hybrid world, presenters are all using microphones to broadcast and record their voices. This is a big win for attendees with hearing disabilities. Many attendees have difficulties hearing the content, and it’s critical to make sure they always use microphones moving forward.

Please visit our Venue Information Pages for more information about their accessibility efforts, room set diagrams and service animal relief areas, where available.

Virtual Accessibility

Attendance Options

Physical attendance at an in-person event can be a challenge for a number of reasons. It could be due to a physical disability, illness, insufficient childcare options, the time and financial commitments of the individual or the organization, or any other reason that makes it difficult or possible to attend. And now, we have coronavirus and a pandemic which increase the list of limitations significantly. Regardless of their reason, taking advantage of the hybrid option opens up the avenue for them to still participate in your experience. And most importantly, if situations change at any point and it’s not legal or feasible to host your in-person event, you have a contingency plan baked in to prevent having to cancel your show.

Captioning and Translation

It is always best to have a human sign language interpreter, if at all possible. We also acknowledge that this can be prohibitive from a cost standpoint. The accuracy of this technology is improving rapidly, as is the ability to integrate this into your platforms and systems with minimal effort. Not only is it the right thing to do for those with a hearing disability, but also for those who simply learn differently and prefer written content over auditory. The software option is one that makes it much more scalable from a logistics and cost perspective.

The case is very similar from the perspective of software-based live translation. For those with an international membership, this is an amazing way to reach them all in a personalized way, without hug investments of time and energy.

RMPCMA proudly partners with Wordly as our captioning and translation service. They integrate with Zoom and other major virtual platforms and simultaneously translate real-time into 16 different languages, which can be accessed by attendees via a web browser on their computer, tablet or smartphone in whichever language they prefer. And in addition to the virtual options, they also have solutions for your in-person conferences. Please take a look at links to our files with Zoom instructions for both hosts and attendees:

• Attendee Instructions
• Host Instructions