INCLUSION
Waterloo iGEM wanted to address barriers to equity and representation within STEM, highlighting the importance of an intersectional perspective. Intersectionality refers to the interconnectedness of our social identities; including race, gender, sexuality, ability, and more. These diverse identities create interdependent systems of prejudice and discrimination. A way to remember this is that our whole identity is not simply the sum of its parts, it is more complex than that. We conducted research on the barriers of access that prevent underrepresented groups from participating, learning, and connecting with STEM.
Barriers to access exist in more ways than one may initially think. Publicly acknowledged barriers include discrimination in hiring, socioeconomic status, and the glass-ceiling effect between marginalized folks already immersed in STEM fields. However, our research pertains more specifically to macro-level, institutional barriers disproportionality impacting marginalized adolescence.
Academic streaming in Ontario occurred in secondary schools until July 2020 (James & Turner, 2017). Academic streaming separates core courses (Math, English, Science, etc.) into either Academic, Applied, or Essentials streams from Grade 9, which prepares students for university-level content, college-level content or simply reaching diploma requirements, respectfully. A review on race equity in education in the Greater Toronto Area showed that Black students were two times more likely to be enrolled in Applied streams, and three times more likely to be enrolled in Essential streams compared to White students. High school graduation rates between streams are as follows: 82% for Academic, 39% for Applied, and 20% of Essentials. Streaming from the ninth grade disproportionality deters Black students from the educational resources that potentially prepare students for STEM-related disciplines following high school. When addressing representation in STEM, it is important to consider the systems that initially prevent the entry of marginalized groups into these highly-esteemed fields in addition to barriers affecting those already occupying academic spaces. The listed statistics only applies to students on the basis of race; oppression due to gender, sexuality, ability, and socioeconomic status will only exacerbate the differences in accessing the resources required for higher education (James & Turner, 2017). This review also highlighted a very important consideration of the adverse experiences of those with multiple minority identities in the education system:
Certainly the experiences of Black LGBTQ students also deserves further research. I was struck by a conversation years ago in which I was told of a Black student who experienced homophobia in a largely Black school, and he transferred to the alternative school for LGBTQ students. He returned to his home school within two weeks because he felt that the racism he experienced in the alternative school was far worse than the homophobia he had been experiencing. Our focus on LGBTQ students often fails to address the issues facing Black LGBTQ students while our focus on Black students again often overlooks them (James & Turner, 2017).
The end of academic streaming in Ontario is a step in the right direction; however, this does not take away the differential treatment minority students receive on the basis of implicit bias in education. Yet this is definitely beyond the scope of an undergraduate iGEM team, but there are small things we can execute in order to expose students to STEM, early on. (This is to be discussed in more detail below).
You may ask, why is representation important? A study by Johns Hopkins University found that Black students having at least one Black teacher by Grade 3 is related to a 13% increase in likelihood of the student to attend university (Gershenson et al., 2018). This similarly can be said for Professors experienced within universities; representation really does matter. It is easy for it to be overlooked, especially when a majority of individuals in post-secondary institutions tend to fit the specific archetype that is already represented; it doesn’t seem as important for those who have previously experienced faces that resemble their own. In 2016, 21% of all university teachers were racialized in Canada; only 2% of them were Black (CAUT, 2018). Women-identifying individuals made up approximately 48.5% of all assistant professor positions in Canada, but only 27% of full Professors (CAUT, 2018).
There is a certain level of privilege that accompanies iGEM membership. Waterloo iGEM is solely student driven, with no compensation; not all students can dedicate the time to such an opportunity as they may need to work part-time jobs that pay towards their degree. We receive large amounts of funding from our university for the purpose of attending this competition; not all institutions or high schools can set aside that money for student groups. Of course there are opportunities for external funding, however that is not guaranteed. With this privilege comes a responsibility of learning about systems of oppression impacting our fellow iGEM members, folks outside of iGEM, and individuals everywhere yet academia and STEM often resides in a realm detached from advocacy, diversity and inclusivity.
As an iGEM team, we can recognize various barriers and act accordingly, within the grounds of the competition. Education and outreach is a potential medal requirement; we have the chance to design workshops for high school students with marginalized identities, with our allocated budgets, to expose them to STEM and synthetic biology early on. We have the opportunity to acknowledge systemic boundaries impacting students and directly interact with those often deterred from academia. It now depends on the level of importance we place on interacting with the next generation of scientists. Furthermore, iGEM teams have many opportunities to aim team selection and hiring to students that are underrepresented in academia. We can reach out to student groups and equity offices for a callout of diverse candidates and truly prioritize diversity and representation without tokenizing our members.
The union of advocacy work and STEM is vital for the inclusive conversations needed to facilitate lifelong relearning of implicit bias. The lack of communication regarding oppression and access to STEM directly affects the relationship between systemic barriers and acceptance of diverse folks within STEM.
Some iGEM teams do not know how to make their project wiki accessible, or they believe it takes too much effort and time to make it accessible. We wanted to educate the iGEM community about the importance of making science education and research accessible to a greater range of people, and how they can easily incorporate accessible design into their wikis with minimal effort.
What is accessibility and why is it important?
Before we dive into what accessibility is, let’s understand what it isn’t. So imagine this. One day, you are walking down the street when you smell the aromatic scent of your favourite dish coming from a restaurant nearby. Your stomach grumbles. You walk over to the restaurant to check out their menu posted on the window, and they indeed serve your favourite dish. Just as you’ve made up your mind to eat here, you notice a problem. This restaurant has no doors. The only way to enter is through teleportation. Obviously, you can’t teleport (but let’s pretend the majority of people in this world can). Doesn’t that suck? There’s a barrier that excludes you from accessing a product/service that almost everyone else can access with ease. This discrimination, whether it is intentional or not, is called inaccessibility.
Accessibility = inclusivity. According to Accessibility Services Canada (2016), “accessibility refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people who experience disabilities.” In more general terms, accessibility is the ability of all people to access and benefit from a certain system without barriers. According to the World Health Organization (2018), approximately “15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability.” This is a huge portion of the world’s population that is excluded and discriminated against when we don’t provide accessible products, services, and education. The main categories of disabilities include but are not limited to:
Visual Impairment:
- Blindness
- Low-level vision
- Color blindness
Hearing Impairment:
- Low hearing levels
- No hearing at all
Motor Skills/Physical Disabilities:
- Physical issues (e.g. no limb or paralysis)
- Limited control of limbs; difficulty making precise movements (e.g. using a mouse)
Photosensitive Seizures:
- Conditions that can cause seizures when triggered by bright, flashing lights (e.g. epilepsy)
Cognitive Disabilities:
- Intellectual disabilities
- Learning disabilities (e.g. dyslexia, ADHD)
- Difficulties with thinking and remembering (e.g. aging, dementia)
- Mental illnesses (e.g. depression, schizophrenia) (Gapunenko, 2020; Ellice, 2020)
How does accessibility relate to science and iGEM?
When it comes to online learning, science has one of the biggest barriers for people with disabilities. While science can be taught through a multi-sensory experience to enhance learning and increase accessibility to scientific knowledge (e.g. as demonstrated through this Youtube video), this is much harder to achieve through an online environment, such as working on this year’s iGEM project virtually or learning about an iGEM project through a wiki.
Since scientific topics can often be complex, many charts, images, and diagrams use abbreviations, colours, or symbols to convey their information in a concise manner. However, these are often not accessible to those with disabilities. For example, for the visually impaired, it is very difficult for screen-readers to read non-text elements such as colours and symbols that are used to convey information. Similarly, abbreviated words that are read aloud using an automatic screen-reader often don’t make sense to the listener. The careless use of abbreviations, colours, and symbols to display important information can also confuse those with cognitive disabilities. For example, a person with memory issues or intellectual disabilities may have trouble reading a chart if everything is coded in symbols. Although the chart coded in symbols may be more concise and easier to read for the majority of people, people with disabilities may have a hard time remembering or making sense of which symbol represents what, and how they relate to one another.
In addition, unlike photos of boats or animals, whose vague shape is enough for them to be easily identified using computer recognition, most scientific diagrams in image formats are difficult for computers to read and decipher. Scientific diagrams tend to require precise interpretation of the details in order to grasp the information (e.g. comparisons of pathological specimens), but this can often be beyond the ability of ordinary computer image-recognition software (Sorge, 2017). Thus, important information can be lost, and the knowledge becomes inaccessible to users with visual impairment.
While we shouldn’t diminish the importance of simplification and conciseness in conveying complex information, nor avoid the use of images and diagrams, we should be considerate of the way different people experience different things. In order to foster inclusivity, we can include alternative means to access the same information. Abbreviations, colours, and symbols can be coded in a way that they can be properly read and interpreted by assistive devices, and be delivered to anyone in a clear and meaningful way. Image-formatted diagrams can have meaningful alternative text to convey the same information.
How can we make our iGEM project wikis more accessible?
There are many best practices you can exercise in your wikis and websites to make it more accessible. Here are some of the basic qualifications of an accessible website/wiki (Gapunenko, 2020):
1. Content is PERCEIVABLE
- All non-text content should have clear and meaningful alternative text.
- If possible, write important diagrams in text format on the wiki instead of inserting an image that is unreadable for computer recognition or read-aloud devices.
- All videos and audios should have captions or a transcript.
- The reading sequence of text should be organized with a clear hierarchy both visually and in the wiki code.
- There should be a high contrast between the background and the wiki content (including text, images, buttons, bars, etc.), or between anything that’s meant to be distinct and differentiated from one another.
- The contrast ratio should be at least 4.5:1. Teams can calculate theirs using an online website such as WebAIM’s Contrast Checker.
- Don’t rely solely on colour, shape, or sound to operate the content. Use a combination of elements to label and differentiate content. It’s best to include text labels.
Be mindful of colours:
Certain colour combinations can be difficult to differentiate for people with a certain type of colour-blindness.
For example, you decide to use red in the explanation of the dangers of your project’s problem space and green in the explanation of your solution’s benefits. However, readers who have protanopia or deuteranopia would not understand the connotation you are trying to infer with these colours because red and green look very similar to them.
2. Content is OPERABLE
- All functionality should be operable solely through the keyboard.
3. Content is UNDERSTANDABLE
- Be consistent with your navigational system and functional components to prevent confusion.
Accessibility Toolbar
Although it is very difficult to make our iGEM wikis and projects perfectly accessible to everyone due to certain limitations, there are many ways we can make it more accessible, and more inclusive. For starters, we’d like to introduce our Accessibility Toolbar. Our Accessibility Toolbar can be enabled by mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts, which are visibly displayed under each label. With our aim to make science education more accessible, we’ve made our Accessibility Toolbar open-source so that any iGEM team can incorporate it into their wikis.
Our first version of the Accessibility Toolbar features:
- Read-aloud screen-reader (play, pause, restart)
- Adjustable font size controller
In future iterations of the Accessibility Toolbar, we want to include:
- Repeat or skip to next paragraph in read-aloud screen-reader
- Word-highlighter (as the screen-reader plays)
- Customizable colour palettes (for various types of colour-blindness)
Resources
To present our above work in a shareable format that iGEM teams could save for future reference, we created a downloadable wiki accessibility handbook. iGEM teams can add our Accessibility Toolbar to their future wikis using our Github repository.
References
Accessibility Services Canada (2016, April 05). Definitions. Retrieved from https://accessibilitycanada.ca/aoda/definitions/
Carlson, T. (2013, October 22). 10 Majorly Successful People With Disabilities. Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/famous-people-with-disabilities_n_4142930
CAUT (2018) Underrepresented & Underpaid: Diversity & Equity Among Canada’s Post-Secondary Education Teachers. Available at: https://www.caut.ca/sites/default/files/caut_equity_report_2018-04final.pdf.
Centre for Universal Design Australia. (2019, November 11). Colours for colour blindness. Retrieved from http://universaldesignaustralia.net.au/colours-for-colour-blindness/
Ellice. (2020, July 24). 10 Ways to Make Your Website Accessible - DreamHost. Retrieved from https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/make-your-website-accessible/
Gapunenko, I. (2020, February 18). Why accessibility is important? Retrieved from https://www.adcisolutions.com/knowledge/why-accessibility-important
Gershenson, S., Hart, C. M., Hyman, J., Lindsay, C., & Papageorge, N. (2018). The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers. https://doi.org/10.3386/w25254
James, C.E. & Turner, T. (2017). Towards Race Equity In Education: The Schooling of Black Students in the Greater Toronto Area. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: York University.
Sorge, V. (2017, April 26). Making Science Accessible. Retrieved from https://abilitymagazine.com/making-science-accessible/
World Health Organization (2018, October 16). World report on disability. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/2011/report/en/