Narratives of Academic Librarians: Chapter 2: Finding a niche in Accessibility

Chapter 2: Finding a Niche in Accessibility

This started when I was still [temporary].

I basically became known as the accessibility person.

That was a big passion of mine.

Whenever there was anything having to do with questions about disabilities or accessibility, they would point everybody to me, and still do.

Coming out of my [graduate degree] program, they talked a little bit about accessibility and things like universal design for learning, but they didn't really go that deep into it.

It was just my own interest that led me to study more, learn more.

When I was here at [our academic institution], I noticed how things could be more accessible, not only in our instruction, but in our websites and at the [information area] where the desk is.

We have a bunch of computers and we just have materials that we [let] students borrow.

Simple things like scissors.

We only had right-handed scissors.

We didn't have left-handed scissors.

Just noticing all these things, I started to slowly do presentations for my department on how to make instruction more accessible.

I mentioned earlier that part of my job is just to teach learning best practices.

To me accessibility is part of that because it doesn't only help people with disabilities, but it helps everybody.

I would do these little like one-hour workshops trying to teach the other librarians, the instructional librarians specifically, about how to increase the accessibility of their instructional materials.

I did teach a little bit about universal design for learning just to get them in that mindset and then they saw the potential to use the accessibility tips or the instructional materials in their website.

They were looking at [web-based library information] and saying, “okay how can we make this more accessible?”

I ended up teaching [some] librarians specifically how to make [web-based library information] more accessible so it's more web accessibility even though I had already done some document accessibility.

Then they thought, “well those librarians are not the only ones that handle [web-based library information] it's all the other librarians too.”

They all have their own area and their own [web-based library information] so then I had to expand it to teach everybody and we had several sessions.

I did a lot of work on basically developing these accessibility [reports] telling them exactly what was wrong with the guides.

In the in-person sessions (the workshops) I would teach them how to fix it and they would go to their individual computers to fix it.

I would be there in case they needed help.

We had several workshops like that and then it developed into making a [accessibility group].

They realized how much the [web-based library information] alone needed updating.

They appointed me ahead to lead this group.

We had [people] from each department in it, and we looked at accessibility in the physical library, in instruction and also staff knowledge.

It was just kind of well-rounded digital accessibility because we didn't go into like the rest of the library website or archives.

We looked at everything in a general sense and tried to pick out where improvements could be made.

It was just writing up the report, but then not a lot happened because of [major difficulties at the institution] and the library [had difficulty operating].

We didn't make any strides on the physical accessibility in part because of [major difficulties at the institution], but people were still working on their documents.

That was especially important during this time.

They would just come to me whenever they needed help, whenever somebody asked them questions.

I feel like I'm still known as the accessibility person, but I feel like that was a big part of making me a more important person or a useful person in the library.

A more useful staff member, I'd say.

That was one of the big things that I thought, okay, this is something that I have more expertise in and that I can help and make a big contribution.