Last updated on 01 February 2020.
Outline specific actions that event organizers can take to make the events as inclusive as possible.
Diversity starts with your organizing team. You need a diverse group of people to come up with ideas to bring in a diverse group of speakers and cater to a diverse group of attendees. This is step zero. Make sure that you have an empathetic, educated, enthusiastic, organizing team from a variety of backgrounds. This will also assure your attendees and speakers that you have some understanding of their needs. Having a shared lived experience is valuable.
The AdaCamp Inclusive Catering guide is a robust list of everything involved in catering for diverse groups. Yet, it's also an expensive proposition.
When money is an issue, first address attendees with restrictions because of allergies or religious beliefs. If only one type of meal can be served, choose a vegan/gluten-free/kosher/halal meal that everyone can enjoy. No one will be harmed by the lack of ingredients and everyone will have their dietary needs met. This is an example, make sure you are meeting the specific dietary needs of your attendees.
Much has been written about the role of alcohol at technology events. AdaCamp gathers many of the links here. The easiest solution to make an event safe from the dangers of conference drinking is to not allow alcohol at any official events. This means no alcohol sponsors, no after-parties at breweries, no kegs in the conference hall.
Alcohol at events excludes many. Those who do not drink for religious reasons, because they are sober, for personal reasons, and because they are underage! Eliminating alcohol opens up your event to a wider audience, which is much more inclusive.
Consider at least holding alcohol-free after-parties for those who do not drink. Make them as fun and market them equally with alcohol-centered events.
Another method of inclusiveness is ensuring that attendees with hearing loss are able to fully take part in your event. Hiring interpreter services is one option. A better option is real-time captioning, or CART (Computer Assisted Real Time Transcription). This option that benefits everyone. A great write up of real-time captioning demonstrates how it benefits more than d/Deaf/HoH attendees. CART also provides transcripts of talks. Washington.edu provides a good description as well. There is also a link to a post on "where to find in your area" from dmcp.org. Lastly, a gathered list of available (and Department of Education certified) vendors: https://dcmp.org/ai/10/
A list of free captioning tools gathered by the National Center for Accessible Media: http://ncam.wgbh.org/invent_build/web_multimedia/tools-guidelines
One more option, though imperfect, is to use the [closed captioning tool in Google Slides] (https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9109474?hl=en) when presenting. It will automatically create captions as you speak. The downside is that they're obviously not perfect and the font is rather small, but they can be made available later on a video. But, they cannot be edited like captions added to a YouTube video can be.