Abstract
Citizen science is about democratising access to science for all citizens. A crucial question in this respect however is, whether democratisation of access to research in terms of reaching and involving diverse citizens actually takes place in citizen science projects. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case. The EU funded project Reinforce adheres to principles of inclusiveness and monitors and evaluates whether these principles are being met. Safeguarding that citizen science projects are inclusive means addressing technical as well as psychological and sociological aspects. On the technical side, in order for people with visual impairments to participate, the Reinforce Citizen Science projects, which are implemented on the Zooniverse platform, have to be made accessible. The software SonoUno has been developed to transform images into sound signals. A second strand for reaching diverse target groups is the participatory engagement strategy of the project. The applied evaluation process systematically targets quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate the inclusivity approach of the project. The paper seeks to discuss the inclusivity aspect of citizen science projects in general, to then describe the project Reinforce with its strategies to make citizen scientists projects more inclusive especially for people with visual impairments, technically, psychologically and sociologically. Furthermore, we will share the evaluation framework that has been elaborated to monitor the diversity of participants and inclusivity of the citizen science projects.
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Notes
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The term ‘disability’ has been expanded to definition people’ by the World Health Organization (WHO) ‘diverse functional to express potential co-morbidity that pertains all disabilities [16] and which integrates the ways people perform as well as their participation in society.
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Unterfrauner, E., Fabian, C.M., Casado, J., de la Vega, G., Garcia, B., Díaz-Merced, W. (2021). Citizen Science for All?. In: Antona, M., Stephanidis, C. (eds) Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Design Methods and User Experience. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12768. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78092-0_21
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