Sheila Webber here - I'm attending LILAC today and the first session I'm liveblogging is the day's keynote from Maria King (Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland): Accessibility – what does it mean for libraries and education. Last year she presented on Inclusive Teaching Practices to Improve the Learning Experience for Neurodivergent Learners and the slides are here. This year King had prepared a video going through some key guidelines and questions, which will be generally available after the conference. The session itself focused on answering questions from conference participants, mostly submitted in advance. The notes that follow are my impressions as I liveblog, so I apologise if I misinterpreted, and also I couldn't capture all the responses so apologies if my description is unbalanced.
The first question was asking whether accessibility work was distributed equally through the workforce. King's answer was no, there seemed to be a lot of assumptions that people in the accessibility team would be dealing with this, and also people who have a personal interest might take up the issues. When people take up EDI work this can be seen as something "extra" and not scheduled properly into the workload. This is not satisfactory. This can vary depending on individual managers or organisations - whether they acknowledge this workload and whether they realise that accessibility is everyone's issue. The solution has to be at management level, so it is embedded in the work of a team, this means the work is seen as part of the job and doesn't stop because an interested person leaves. Also people can make sure they aren't leaving everything to their colleague.
A related question was how you deal with the situation where you know a lot about accessibility, and a colleague who needs to learn more about accessibility is given responsibility for accessibility. King said that having material that can help people learn about accessibility, to carry out their job better is one obvious thing. She also said that her approach would also be to draw attention to the fact that this issue is not being prioritised enough, if need be.
The second main question raised was that there was much more attention paid to accessibility for students, without taking account of staff's needs. King said that, yes, accessibility teams generally have a remit to look at the student experience without there being an aquivalent team for staff accessibility. This didn't take account of the fact that there will be staff, researchers and external visitors who need adjustments and accessibility. There can be nothing on a website aimed at these people. Obviously this is something that needs addressing.
How librarians can signpost assisstive technology so it can be more easily known about by disabled people, was another question. King said that including reference to assistive technologies and accessibility features as routine when you are doing training sessions and demonstrations is an answer - so it is just part of explaining the features of the database, search engine etc. to help everyone, including disabled people, to get the best out of services.
The next question was about the use of AI and how it could be useful in generating text descriptions of images. King said that you have to be cautious because automatically generated text for an image can be variable in the quality of the text generated and also it won't know the context in which the image is being used.
A question about appropropriate pedagogy had been posed. King said it should be student centred, flexible, active learning, where people can tailor to their own needs - basically anything coming from a more constructivist approach to pedagogy. King said a little about "punk pedagogy" which she positioned as a critical constructivist pedagogy which questions, critiques, enables people to decide how they want to learn. From an accessibility point of view, enabling engagement in multiple ways was important - she gave the example of the keynote itself where you could use the QR code, submit a question in advance or raise a question on the day in person. Another one was thinking about how some people are anxious about working in a group, so activities should be clear and have options to engage in different ways. A big thing was sending out materials in advance, so that people can take the time they need to engage with it.
Next there was a question about how you can persuade academics to do what they need to about accessibility. One option is training courses on accessible teaching methods, although there can be variable takeup. King also talked about how having a requirment for academics to evidence that they are teaching in accessible way was effective. Also having people who has personal experience involved in training can have a big impact and help people to take it more seriously - as well as enabling staff who may have accessibility needs realise that they can admit this. A later related question was about giving academics the time to be able to cover this work, and there was a specific question about reading lists and how information about particular needs (e.g. needing print rather than electronic) gets to the people who need to act on it.
Then there was a question about the impact of making ebooks, IL education etc. accessible, how it affected the student experience. King said that anything which shows that you are being considered will help to make you feel that you belong and that you want to be engaged. This means thinking about accessibility right from the start - so that that the disabled person doesn't have to do the emotional labour of having to ask for adjustments constantly and waste time getting the services, applications and information usable. This includes physical and virtual spaces, so people don't feel "this space is not designed for me, I don't belong here". This extends to staff as well - so you need to think about recruitment practices too.
There was a question about intersectionality - King talked about the problems with the diagnosis system, including long delays in getting diagnosed, diagnosis being biased towards symptoms presented by a particular group (e.g. white males).
There followed a question about use of applications which are good for some types of accessibility but not others. Also King raised the problem of institutional applications which have accessibility issues, especially where there isn't an alternative.
King advised using "identity first" terminology (e.g. disabled people) although individuals might have personal preferences.
A final question was whether the overall approach to information literacy was that people were not disabled. King said that this was a general problem, thinking about non-disability being the default. She returned to her advice of designing the learning to enable people to tailor their experience, and offer alternative ways of learning.
Photo Sheila Webber: cherry blossom on Cambridge University Sidgewick campus, April 2023
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