Like any good hotdish, accessibility is made up of many different ingredients. And, like any good hotdish, there’s no single definitive recipe. Rather than framing accessibility as a set of steps or a list of ingredients, this panel frames it as a suite of potential actions we can take to enact our values around access for our users, ourselves, and our colleagues. Coming from a range of institutions and backgrounds, presenters will examine accessibility from multiple angles, by:
– Exploring the intersection of disability with higher education and the job market, focusing on the structural and societal ways that disabled people are excluded and disempowered, whether that’s navigating school programs, internships, or job precarity and focusing on ways to lower the barrier to entry for archival workers with disabilities whose perceived “replaceability” gives institutions less incentive to accommodate them; – Looking at professional standards and regulations as carrots and cudgels toward advancing accessibility, including ADA Title II and SAA’s Guidelines for Accessible Archives for People with Disabilities; – Making complex digital collections accessible, looking at both the systems being used along with the items themselves; – Demystifying accessibility best practices in the classroom; and – Driving a cultural shift towards greater accessibility within our institutions and broader profession.
You will come away from this session with an increased understanding of how accessibility can be improved in archives, resources for further learning, and strategies/ideas/steps to implement in your home institution.
