Thoughts on HR Workshop: Avoiding Bias in the Hiring Process

Last Friday (September 15) I attended a workshop put on by the HR department called Avoiding Bias in the Hiring Process. Mikael Villalobos gave the presentation, which was totally interactive, thought-provoking, and informative. My main motivation for attending this workshop was to increase my awareness of diversity issues and to help me recruit student assistants in the most equitable method possible.

I learned that bias happens because each of us is a product of our experiences, which have conditioned us to hold certain beliefs. We cannot rid ourself of bias completely. Accepting the fact we all are biased allows each one of us to have an authentic conversation about it, and can only help us work to mitigate bias.

We did an exercise where Mikael flashed photos of different people on the projection screen, and we jotted down the first thoughts that came to mind. I was embarrassed of the adjectives I wrote down, words such as woman, happy, black, old, white, sly, demure, professional. I learned that, you know what though? Those thoughts are natural. They are my observations.

Observations are fine. However, I can probe my thought process to determine if I am creating a story in my head around those observations based on my socialized values. If so, that story is bias. If I make a hiring decision based on that story I've created, I am enforcing my bias.

On the other hand, by exercising awareness I can go through the process of interrupting the circuit between observation, story, and action which results in enforcing bias. This can cause me to experience dissonance, which happens if I take a step back and acknowledge the system of inequalities/marginalization that clashes with my socialized values. Dissonance can be disorienting and uncomfortable, but it is also my learning edge, and is very valuable!

To apply the theory to the hiring process, I can employ interviewing approaches that mitigate bias. For example, I can ask interview questions that challenge or confirm the "dilettante/renaissance" persona of a candidate; I can conduct reference checks to ask questions about qualifications rather than creating my own story about qualifications; I can set up role playing exercises to allow the candidate to actively demonstrate whether or not they are able to perform a certain job duty.

In total, it feels liberating to recognize the bias we all carry, and I am already able to put new thought processes in action that short-circuit those stories I tell based on my observations. I feel less guilt while also feel more capable of encountering people from different backgrounds than myself with an open mind.

By Dietmar Rabich - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 4.0

Ebsco Study on Usability for Students with Print Disabilities

Yesterday a group of us at work got together to participate in the webinar EBSCO Accessibility Study on User Experience, presented by Jill Power, Ebsco technical product manager.

This webinar was not only enlightening regarding the ways in which students with print disabilities use Ebsco products, but in general how they do research, navigate graphic user interfaces, and what tools they use to do so. 

Here is a brief digest of the findings:

• WCAG compliance ≠ accessibility 

• Accessibility ≠ WCAG compliance 

(For example, strident use of alt tags with images can impede the use of a webpage if they do not bring value to the visually impaired user. Ask yourself the question, what value do these alt tags bring, or are they repetitive?)

• No vision users use screen readers

• Low vision users use magnification and text to speech 

• Accessibility a journey, not a destination--there is always room for continue improvement 

• Ebsco Discovery Service (Fusion at my library) provided a positive experience for the participants in the study. The ease of doing some tasks should be improved, but overall, users could get what they needed and trusted the academic scope of the content. 

• Manual testing should still be employed, regardless of advances in automated testing. Each user drew on different tools and techniques and insight into those behaviors was enlightening. 

One visually impaired student said she really likes Google because the result display is high contrast and very well organized. I think as librarians we tend to think of reasons to use or not use Google for different reasons (mostly related to the content of the search results, questions of credibility of results, and mercenary driving forces like Google ad revenue). However, the Google result page still displays dark blue, dark green, or dark grey text on a white background (high contrast), unlike many sites that have switched to light grey text; furthermore, the Google result page is not muddied with floating ads or pop-ups urging viewers to sign up for an email list or another call to action, which often confuses the screen readers that visually impaired users employ.  

Screenshot of Google result page from August 3, 2017

The takeaways:

• Focus on accessibility rather than compliance

• Take a hands-on approach

• Remember the student's goal (write the paper)

• Consider the overall experience 

Some free tools:

• Accessibility tools that come in Mac OS 

• WAVE browser plug-in 

• NAVD screen reader -- free alternative to JAWS

After the webinar, a few of us discussed the webinar's takeaways in context of our workplace, and our role vs. that of the office of Student Disability Services. Sounds like there is interest in hosting the SDS folks for a library presentation to find out more! 

My own personal takeaway is to look into changing the text color on my blogs and website to improve the contrast--I am guilty of using grey text for both! 

Libraries and Accessibility for Print Disabilities

I have been working with the campus communication and marketing office to revise our print user guides, and I became concerned about the accessibility of the back panel (featured to the left) for people with print disabilities. Print disabilities are types of disability that affect people who are blind, vision impaired, dyslexic, etc. Due to the low contrast of white on yellow, people with vision impairment could not read the text. While the campus office of communication and marketing attempted to address my concern in one of the revisions, it became clear they do not employ standards of accessibility for the university's print marketing materials.

Accessibility is a diversity and inclusion issue. What campus departments are responsible for accessibility outside the office of student disability services or academic support services? Surely the web services department is a stakeholder, but what about the office of communication and marketing, IT, or the library?

This question got me interested in the issue of libraries and accessibility for print disabilities. To continue my education on the topic, I watched a video from the Spring 2017 CNI Project Briefings meeting called Advancing Accessibility through Libraries.

Advancing Accessibility through Libraries from CNI Video Channel on Vimeo.

One accessibility issue facing institutions of higher education and their libraries involve print disabilities--making course texts and library materials accessible to students with print disabilities. This is in addition to many other concerns, chief among them audio accessibility, which comes into play with captioning videos and providing transcripts for live panels and discussions; however, this is a specific topic for another post.

Image from Brailleworks.com

When it comes to providing reliable machine-readable text for students with print disabilities, texts must be scanned with OCR and then fine-tuned so that a DAISY Talking Book or the JAWS software, as two examples, can read the text aloud to the student. In the past, in my department (the Reference & Research Services Department), vision impaired students were often limited to doing research in the full text databases because the texts could be read by JAWS or the built-in database tool. If the student wished to consult a print book, they would need to build in extra time for the Student Disability Services office to scan the book or chapter.

In the CNI presentation, Laura C. Wood points out it is important to build collaboration within institutional departments (e.g. student disability services and library) as well as between institutions. The future may hold some exciting partnerships building shared repositories of accessible materials (e.g. scans of most used text books or files containing captioning of videos), which could eliminate double efforts. Also in the CNI presentation, Laura C. Wood communicated Beth Sandore Namachchivaya's part in Beth's absence, which reports on an exciting project between HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and University of Illinois to offer DAISY files for some of the textual items held in HathiTrust. The project is just getting going but it seems like it will be able to avoid copyright issues by nesting the DAISY files under the texts, which will not be viewable in general searches, and only available to print disabled readers when they are logged in.

Next week a group of us from the library will be participating in the EBSCO Accessibility Study on User Experience webinar. Considering that we subscribe to EDS as our discovery service and have therefore shifted to Ebsco as a vendor for many of our databases, I am glad they conducted this user study and very much look forward to seeing what they found out.