Your conference is an opportunity for your constituents to network with other experts, keep up to date with best practices, and continue to develop professionally in your field. Creating language access at your events ensures that conferences meet each of these goals effectively by adhering to adult learning principles, and championing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives by ensuring that everyone can participate fully.
At its core, language access allows participants to participate in conferences in the language of their heart, including spoken and visual languages. For Deaf or Hard of Hearing individuals, this could mean providing American Sign Language or other sign language interpretation; for individuals with developmental and physical disabilities, this could mean providing assistive technology devices or print materials in easy to read for picture and symbol formats; and for individuals who speak different languages, this could mean providing interpreters of different languages.
Diversifying the ways that the conference material is presented not only supports monolingual participants, but it also supports bilingual participants as well. The professional pool is more diverse than ever and while worldwide English remains the most spoken language of the world with 1.121 million speakers (Lingua, 2022), Mandarin Chinese (1.107 million), Hindi (698 million), and Spanish (512 million) were close behind. When an individual speaks different languages, while they may still be able to engage in English, they may prefer and actually engage more effectively in the language of their heart as opposed to English.
How can we help with Language Access?
Providing language access at your conference can seem like an overwhelming task, but do not fret! Events by Boomerang is here to help create an inclusive conference and language access is one step! We can always start small and keep adding as we go.
For your online events:
- Closed Captioning
- We can start by adding closed captioning for those who are hard of hearing or who need visual processing cues. Many online platforms now have the option to add automatic live closed captioning or you can budget a live closed captioner.
For your online and in-person events:
- Accessible Materials
- Readability on your platform is imperative! We’ll make sure to set up your online platform to have readable font, with the right font sizes, color contrast, and compatibility with screen readers.
- Interpreters
- ASL and/or Spoken Language Interpreters available for plenary events and selected breakouts or all sessions, depending on budget and size of event
- We highly recommend working with the Community Language Cooperative (CLC) (https://communitylanguagecoop.com/) for translation services. The CLC works nationally both in-person and virtually.
The needs for each conference will be different and we are happy to work with the needs of the topics, the demographics, and the budget to ensure that your conferences allow everyone to participate fully and equitably.