Astronomy Notebooks for All

a media and software manufactory for disabled developer experiences.

Jupyter Notebooks play a central role in modern data science workflows. Despite their importance, these notebooks are inaccessible to people with disabilities, especially those who rely on assistive technology. Impacted users must find extreme workarounds or [give up using them entirely.](https://www.freelists.org/post/program-l/Accessability-of-Jupyter-notebooks) Students with disabilities have [reported leaving their field](https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/issues/9399#issuecomment-740524422) once they learn their chosen career’s foundational tools are inaccessible to them. [Space Telescope Science Institute](https://www.stsci.edu/) produces extensive community resources and infrastructure in Jupyter. The Institute has committed to fostering an inclusive environment and has funded this project in 2022-2023 as part of the Director’s Discretionary Fund. Other collaborators include community contributions and work from STEM- and accessibility-focused organizations such as [Iota School](https://iotaschool.com/) and [Quansight Labs](https://www.quansight.com/labs).

goal: start small to discover the needs of affected users

This is a challenging problem to solve. The Notebooks for All project is taking the first steps, initially focusing on static notebooks:

• Running usability feedback sessions with impacted users who rely on a variety of assistive technology
• Capturing what makes notebooks inaccessible with assistive technology, and compiling documents that describe the issues and feedback
• Editing notebooks based on the feedback
• Organizing events to spread awareness in the scientific community about this issue

result: unique open source design assets for iterative testing and reporting

events: accessible notebook hackathon

the first hands on auditting notebook event. focused time to explore auditing testing tools and accessibility features on your technologies. these events seeded the base for accessible notebook authoring guidelines.

recently, venkatesh potluri and myself hosted a similar accessible notebook authoring events at the UW accessiblity + AI hackfest

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events: stsci day of accessibility

event agenda

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talk: jupyter accessibility meeting

Jenn and Erik visited a jupyter accessibility meeting in 2021

• Hello from Space Telescope Science Institute and Astropy!
• Jupyter notebooks aren’t accessible and we’d like them to be.
• We’ve been working with GLAS Education to test our own work with blind and visually impaired people.

goal: retrofitting accessibility for computational is so hard

• Accessibility Issues Needing Addressing for WCAG 2.1 compliance (As of Version 2.2.6) #9399
• Accessibility Issues Needing Addressing for WCAG 2.1 compliance (As of Version 7.0.0a15)

event: jupyter workshops

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remediating nbconvert

nbconvert is a piece of technology that converts notebooks to html.

> how do we fix accessibiity if we don't know what accessible means? > how do we improve the quality of tests with affected users?

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<h2>talk:accessibility and jupyter notebooks</h2>
<p>patrick and jenn went to paris</p>
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talk:accessibility and jupyter notebooks

patrick and jenn went to paris

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<h2>talk: authoring accessible notebooks</h2>
<p>isabela went to texas</p>
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talk: authoring accessible notebooks

isabela went to texas

auditting chat interfaces

we turned our attention to auditting LLM chat interfaces. our prior research is practical in emerging interactive computing systems.

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<h2>non visual data science workshop</h2>
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non visual data science workshop

events: monthly notebooks for all community meetings

the goal of these notebooks for all events to encourage more content made for and by disabled creators to push the needle on accessible open source.