The Equersa Accessibility Fellowship aims to encourage individuals with disabilities - such as those who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, have low vision, or have other disabilities - from within our community or adjacent communities to join one of the three regional conferences held under the Equersa umbrella: Research Software Asia Australia (RSAA26), Research Software Africa (RSAfrica26), and Research Software Latinoamérica (RSLA26). Their involvement will help ensure we are held accountable for the accessibility of these online events.

Given that some members of the organising committees are blind or have low vision, we will give additional consideration to applicants who are deaf, hard of hearing, or have other types of disabilities. This will help us bring diverse perspectives to our accessibility efforts across all regions.

Each fellow will provide a short open access blog/report after their respective regional event that could be put into Figshare or Zenodo and would be provided as part of the event summary report. We would encourage fellows to create a Mastodon account and post during the conference as a way of sharing information in real time and then using this as the basis of their blog/report.

You can see previous reports from Accessibility Fellows on rseaa.org at https://rseaa.org/seaumul and https://rseaa.org/safaet_hossain. 

Our selection criteria will give equal weight to the following:

1. The applicant is deaf, hard of hearing, blind, has low vision, or has another form of disability and uses a screen reader, refreshable braille display, or alternative communication system;
2. This person has had career disruptions such as other disabilities, caring responsibilities, medical conditions, unemployment, limited or no access to facilities and resources;
3. The applicant is a member of a research software engineering community in Asia, Australia/New Zealand, Africa, or Latin America, or has some level of technical background in open science, open source software, software development, data engineering, data curation, or data analysis.

It is expected that the successful fellow may not fulfill all of these selection criteria. We encourage people to apply even if they feel that they do not meet all the selection criteria.

Each successful fellow will receive an initial payment before the event, a free ticket to attend their regional event, and a final payment after their blog/report has been published.

Application deadline: June 26, 2026

Apologies - we have used terms such as "blind" and "has low vision" as well as "deaf" and "hard of hearing". We are happy to change these to alternative terms if they are considered offensive by any community we serve.

If you prefer to fill out this form in Spanish, please use this form: https://forms.gle/VzyJxvdVBtxZsVC56 

If you have any concerns, questions, or complaints, please email info@rseaa.org with your feedback.