accessibility

Bringing Disability to the Forefront

It’s been a busy semester at the reference desk. Amidst the busyness, I was elated to see that some of my coworkers created a display of books relating to chronic illness and disability. I was even more thrilled to see that students were often stopping by to look at the display, telling their friends about it, and checking out some of the books that were featured.

March is Disability Awareness Month, and my library makes sure to create displays and programming relating to chronic illness and disability throughout the month. But with more and more people, including college students, becoming disabled due to Long Covid, it is more important than ever that we consider the needs of disabled students year-round. It is also more important than ever that we as academic librarians highlight books by chronically ill and disabled authors throughout the year, and not dismiss displays and programming as options that solely serve the needs of school and public libraries.

Chronic illness and disability are personal to me, as someone who is disabled because of chronic illness, and whose disability is considered invisible. Some days are better than others, which means I use a mobility aid on some days, but not others. It is often said that disability is the only group that anyone can become a member of at any time.

Katie Quirin Manwiller, who has written two previous posts on Conferencing while Chronically Ill and The Inaccessibility of ACRL 2021, recently presented on Reasonable Accommodations from the Employee Perspective for the Pennsylvania Library Association 2022 Conference. Her research cited 26% of Americans living with disability prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as 1 in 5 adults who will experience Long Covid.

However, we never know truly how many of our students, faculty, or staff are living with either chronic illness, disability, or both. There is still significant stigma attached to either, leaving many people to decide not to disclose. Also, no one is under any obligation to disclose to us, as librarians. We should make an effort to prove that we are capable of meeting the needs of disabled students without requiring them to disclose personal information they might not feel comfortable sharing.

What does this look like in practice? On my end, it looks like:

Continuing the practice of masking. While there is no longer a mask mandate on my campus, I and many others on staff have continued masking. Working at a busy reference desk, I feel more comfortable interacting with people while wearing a mask, and I’ve found that many students have appreciated that we are still masking, and are also choosing to wear a mask themselves.

Staying up-to-date on the evolving language of disability. Language is constantly evolving. Not all websites have caught onto the fact that disabled people have reclaimed Identity-First Language, as opposed to People-First Language, and often refer to themselves as disabled not as a person with a disability. I’ve found that the best way to stay current on disability language is to follow disabled people on Twitter. Even lurking will allow you to gain a better understanding of issues facing disabled people, which undoubtedly includes many of your students.

Promoting materials by and about disabled people. The display at my library includes a combination of memoirs by disabled writers, sociology books on the history of disability, and even ready-reference on disability history. There are also plenty of electronic resources that contain information on disability history, which I’ve been working to familiarize myself with over the past couple of months. This is a work in progress for me; keeping in mind that resources can and will become out-of-date.

Being mindful of library space. I’m always conscious about how my library physically meets, and doesn’t meet, the needs of disabled students. In practice, this looks like ensuring that aisles are kept wide and clear for users with mobility aids and offering study areas with varying amounts of light in order to accommodate students with sensitivity to light and/or sound. However, being mindful, for me, also means continually learning and keeping in mind that there is always room for improvement.

With this in mind: How have you met the needs of disabled students, and how should libraries improve going forward?

The Inaccessibility of ACRL 2021

This guest post is provided by Katie Quirin Manwiller, MLIS, Instruction & Assessment Librarian at DeSales University.

After the 2019 ACRL Conference, I wrote a guest ACRLog post about conferencing while chronically ill and the challenges I faced attending my first national library conference. At the time, I thought it was my responsibility to adapt to the conference setting if I wanted to be professionally active. After spending the last two years studying disability in librarianship and coming to terms with my own disabled identity, I realized that the accessibility of our national conferences should not be left up to the individual library workers with illness and/or disability. It is the responsibility of those putting on the conference to provide an accessible and inclusive experience. And while some aspects of the ACRL 2021 were indeed more accessible than 2019, it fell far short of providing equitable access to disabled librarians.

On face value, an all virtual conference is much more accessible for me. I live with Hypermobility Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (hEDS), fibromyalgia, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS). I have daily symptoms that include musculoskeletal pain, chronic fatigue, and cognitive difficulties (also called brain fog). These symptoms make the physicality of national conferences almost unbearable: traveling to and from the city, navigating hotels and conference rooms, and being mentally engaged in session content and professional interactions. Not to mention sick time off to recuperate from the experience. Attending a conference from my bed with supportive pillows and a heating pad eliminates most of those concerns. I can easily rest when I get mentally fatigued and do not need to worry about crossing expansive conference spaces in search of the one quiet room.

So when ACRL 2021 was announced as virtual I was excited. Not only would I be presenting my research on academic librarians with invisible illness and/or disability and moderating a panel of librarians with invisible disabilities, I wouldn’t have to navigate the many ways in-person conferences are inaccessible to me. The advent of COVID-19 and shift to virtual seemed like it would make professional involvement more accessible for disabled folks. Virtual attendance and remote work has long been advocated for as a tool for accessibility. But after attending ACRL 2021, I realized there are still many ways to leave behind people with disabilities in the virtual environment.

It became apparent that accessibility was not integral in conference planning when the directions for presenters were released. All presentations were pre-recorded, and some had live Q&A sessions. ACRL directed presenters to use automatic captioning features to caption their sessions, first with Zoom (which they must have figured out doesn’t provide auto-captions for all accounts) and then using Google Slides. Unfortunately, as many people involved in accessibility know, automatic captions do not provide equitable access. They often lack correct grammar, punctuation, differentiation between homonyms, or clarification on technical terms, jargon, or proper nouns. It is not difficult to learn of the inaccessibility of auto-captions, as even a quick Google search – well within the expertise of academic librarians – shows years of criticism for auto-captions on sites like YouTube.

As a disabled presenter, it felt like captions were nothing but an afterthought in planning. Like late in the game someone asked, “Oh yeah shouldn’t we have captions?” and the planning committee threw together the easiest and cheapest option for them to do so. And despite the fact that sessions were required to be submitted almost a month in advance, there was no apparent review of captions. Captioning varied widely throughout the sessions. Some presentations (like mine) had edited, large-text, and easily readable captions that matched the recording. Others followed the directive to use Google Slides auto-captions, which were very small on screen and words appeared and changed as the presenters spoke, making it difficult to follow along. Then there were some sessions with no captions at all. And almost universally, the emoji buttons the platform so helpfully provided to engage with the sessions covered up captions.

Captions are an essential aspect of recordings because they benefit everyone. They make it possible for Deaf and Hard of Hearing folks to engage with the material, improve concentration for neurodivergent people and those like me who struggle with brain fog, and can help comprehension for non-disabled individuals. They should be the bare minimum for accessible practices, but ACRL’s half-hearted attempt at captions proved more difficult than helpful.

And it wasn’t just the captioning that made this virtual conference hard to navigate as a disabled librarian. The session recordings with a live Q&A played at a scheduled time without the ability to pause the recording. Trying to take notes and follow a condensed session was often overwhelming for my tired brain. I know other librarians with disabilities who stopped watching the live Q&A sessions all together, waiting until the recordings became available with a pause afterwards as it was the only way to stay cognitively engaged with the session. This, of course, meant they missed out on material since the live Q&As were not recorded. The conference platform also proved problematic when trying to use assistive technology. One of the panelists in my session had to turn off a screen reader to be able to appear in the live video Q&A. ACRL did provide live caption for Q&A sessions but only for people who requested accommodations, seeming to do just what was required to meet ADA requirements and no more.

By the end of the week, I was extremely frustrated with a conference I had assumed would be a pleasantly accessible experience. Despite the fact that ACRL included several sessions on disability, they did not appear to include library workers with disability in their planning. So I emailed the Conference Manager, Tory Ondria, expressing disappointment that the remarkably expensive virtual conference (attendance started around $300 for salaried librarians) somehow could not afford captioning services. Interim Executive Director of ACRL Kara Malenfant responded as staff was on furlough. I followed up with a list of specific questions as to the ways accessibility was part of the 2021 Conference planning process:

What specific accessibility concerns did you evaluate when choosing a platform? Was an accessibility audit performed?
Was ensuring accessibility largely left up to the chosen platform?
Who from ACRL oversaw accessibility concerns and testing for the conference? What experience with accessibility and/or disability do they have?
Why was a platform that (presumably) did not include captioning chosen?
The auto-caption directive for presenters seemed like an afterthought. How early into planning for the virtual conference were captions considered?
What research, if any, was done into captioning options? Why was auto-captioning, despite being far less effective than correct, added captions, chosen?
In a broader sense, how are library workers with disabilities included in the planning of ACRL conferences?

I expected to get a response along the lines of accessibility was left up to the platform or maybe which portion of the planning committee addressed accessibility concerns, both of which I considered bare minimums. But unfortunately, I was shocked to find that ACRL could shatter my already low expectations. Here’s the response to the above questions I received, in full, shared with permission from Kara Malenfant: “Thanks, Katie, for your helpful and detailed questions. They can certainly help shape reporting to the ACRL Board and our Conference Committee as well as inform work going forward on improving accessibility for future events.”

That was it. No attempt to answer any of my questions. When I asked if there was anyone else who may be able to answer my questions, I was again told that “[W]e learned a lot from our experiences. Things were not perfect, but we did try.” And yet, I received no details about how they tried beyond live captioning accommodation requests. Nothing about how the conference platform was chosen or the session accessibility standards. Only statements about how they will incorporate my concerns for future conferences.

I went into this conference knowing that library organizations provide virtually no support to library workers with disabilities. After all, my panel was titled “Who’s Missing from EDI Advocacy?” and it highlighted the ways ACRL does not support disabled librarians beyond including them in blanket EDI statements. But ACRL 2021 was not only disappointing, it was demoralizing. I received confirmation that the organization that spouts the importance of an equitable profession addresses accessibility as an afterthought. I feel dubious about the effectiveness of any ACRL EDI efforts because the roots of ableism, like racism, are embedded deep in white supremacy culture. Disability intersects in innumerable ways with other marginalized identities. How can we be growing more inclusive as a profession if part of those identities are completely ignored?

I’m left thinking about a friend’s tweet: “Why do library orgs act like disabled library workers don’t exist?” To go a step farther, why should disabled library workers engage with and give money to professional organizations who do nothing to support, protect, or understand us? How can we ensured our lived experience and knowledge will still be shared outside of an inaccessible professional community?

Accessibility and Universal Design: A report on the BTAA Library Conference

This month, along with several others from my library, I was able to attend the Big Ten Academic Alliance Library Conference. Every year, the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) chooses a topic of interest to libraries, finds experts and organizes speakers, and holds a conference on that topic. This year, the conference was about accessibility, and since one of my secondary job responsibilities is accessibility, I had the opportunity to attend. This was my first BTAA conference and my first conference that didn’t offer breakout sessions, so I was excited to see how it would play out.

There was a keynote each day, from Jay Dolmage and Amelia Gibson. Both were fantastic. Dolmage began by discussing the design of buildings, including libraries, with several examples of buildings designed around stairs. Though there may be a ramp or elevator available, it is not the focal point of the building. Of course, then, we must ask, “Why?” Why is universal design not prioritized? Why is universal design not the norm? Taking the buildings as an example, Dolmage then moved on to discussing universal design in other contexts, especially with regard to teaching and learning. Dolmage stressed the importance of “positive redundancy,” ensuring that there are multiple modes of engagement, such as having information for a lecture in slides, in a handout, and in an electronic form.

Amelia Gibson touched on similar themes as Dolmage, such as the existence of internalized ableism that must be identified and worked against. Gibson advocated for moving beyond ADA requirements and instead focusing on meeting individual needs, beginning with the premise that anyone who is at a school is there because they can succeed and that it is our job to help them succeed. Gibson also discussed the fact that identities, including disability identities, are intersectional. This means that challenges can be even greater for people of color who also have disabilities. Gibson asked us to consider the various reasons that people might not seek information or help from a library, citing cases where potential library patrons have faced ridicule for their child’s behavior because their child was on the autism spectrum, or cases where black patrons have been thrown out of libraries. For some people, concern about being in library spaces is real and justified.

Finally, a point brought up by both Gibson and Dolmage and throughout the conference was how often people with disabilities are asked to disclose their disabilities and how detrimental this is. People with disabilities should not be asked to disclose their status; instead, we should be creating inclusive spaces that do not retroactively try to account for disabilities but instead are designed to accommodate various needs right from the beginning. For example, there is no need for publishers to require an individual student disclose their disability before an accessible version of a document is supplied. Electronic publications could be accessible from the start or, if remediation is necessary, the extra step of disclosing a disability does not need to be mandated. There are also numerous reasons that people might not disclose their disabilities, be they financial (getting diagnosed is expensive) or out of fear of repercussions. Again, designing with accessibility in mind is key.

This brings us back to the idea of universal design. These principles can be applied in any library space, from making library instruction more welcoming to people with a variety of learning styles to working with vendors and publishers to ensure that content is readable not only for screen readers but for users who want to change the font size or color to suit their own needs. We cannot make everything completely accessible immediately; in many cases, accessibility will be an iterative process, with changes made over time. However, we can strive to bring principles of accessibility and universal design into our own individual practices as librarians to begin making changes today.

Overall, I found this conference extremely worthwhile. I often find myself a bit untethered at conferences, unsure how to choose which sessions to attend from a long list and drawn in several different directions because of all my different interests. This conference provided a more concentrated experience and, because of the more focused theme, there was enough time and space to delve into library accessibility in more detail than I’ve experienced in other conferences. Now it’s time to refocus, take what I’ve learned, and find more ways to incorporate accessibility into my work on a daily basis.

For more on universal design, get started by looking at the UDL guidelines website.

Read more about the BTAA’s e-resource testing initiative.

And check out the conference hashtag, #BTAALib19, for more on the conference.