My experience at RSAA25

This year I joined again the Research Software Asia Australia Conference from the 17th to the 19th of September 2025 as a speaker and chair in one of the sessions. And, like last year, it was one of the best online conference I’ve been part of.

This is an online conference that invite research software people around Asia, Australia and New Zealand to talk about success, challenges, new tools, how the research software looks like and, this year, “Connecting with Community”. It’s always interesting to see how engaged people were, the conversations in the chat and the interesting talks.

I presented Bridging Climate Science and Collaboration Through Software tools at the Global km-Scale Hackathon where I shared my experience helping organised this event just after I started working as a RSE or as the abstract promised:

By connecting researchers, tools, and best practices, this project demonstrated the critical role of RSEs in enabling cutting-edge research. Our work helped lower barriers to entry, fostered new collaborations, and empowered participants to focus on scientific discovery. This talk reflects on the lessons learned, the challenges, and highlights the importance of RSEs in building bridges between domains, disciplines, and people.

A note on accessibility

RSAA has always had a particular interest in making the event accessible to everyone. This year the 3 Accessibility Fellows prepared guidelines for speakers to help them prepare their talks and materials. These guidelines established 3 levels of accessibility, from less work (if you didn’t have much time) to producing slides + and accessible document with the content of your presentation.

So, I tried that. First I though that giving the slides to chatGPT could help me extract the text and alt text from the slides and return it as a markdown document. It half worked, I got the general structure after a few tries and more or lest the styling. It seams that the model can’t access alt texts and it get confused when the slides doesn’t have any text. I end up editing everything by hand.

I think is important to have accessibility in mind when we do things and I don’t mind expending a little more time on this. The BEST thing this time, is that I got some feedback from one of the Accessibility Fellows! That means that:

1. I know for sure that it was useful to someone.
2. I was able to improve a few things and I can use that the next time.

It was a great experience and I look forward to next year edition!