Inclusive Data Research Skills for Arts and Humanities/Guidance on accessibility and good practice

Access is complex and there are multiple approaches to understanding it. Ellcessor (2016) writes:

First, access must be understood not in terms of availability, affordability, or choice but in terms of an individual’s ability to engage meaningfully with a medium/technology and its content; second, a hegemonic user position is created by digital media technologies and their usages, and this user position is not neutral but perpetuates an able-bodied norm and contributes to inequalities of access.

By this Ellcessor places emphasis on meaningful engagement. Metaphorically, people cannot just be allowed in, they must be able to participate. Second, Ellcessor (2016) draws attention to the fact that digital technologies assume a particular user - usually a white, non-disabled, man. Good inclusive practice means not making this assumption.

In addition to accounting for a wide range of users and experiences of the world, good access practice understands accessibility, as practiced within disability communities, as a world-making practice that reshapes the material, digital and social world. Access is not a friction-less, self-evident good, that integrate disabled people into the non-disabled world without questioning the utility and ultimate good of that world.

More practically, the first and often most effective tool of access is always communication. Providing whoever you engage with, whether students, other researchers, the public or partners with clear information about where you'll be, what you'll be doing and what will be expected of them is a great starting point. This requires you to think carefully about the assumptions that you make what is involved in an activity. Those assumptions are likely embedded in your culture and quite possibly your assumptions about how bodyminds work.

Make sure you've given yourself a lot of time before the thing you are doing. There has to be time for conversation. Then, ask people what they need. Access can be expansive. This can go beyond how people's bodyminds do and don't conform to societal functions. Asking what people's access needs are can be as simple as asking, 'what do you need to do your best work'? Then respond, as best you can, with grace and curiousity. Access often challenges our deeply held and felt understandings of what 'good work' and 'politeness' is. This is challenging, but also part of the joy of access world-making.

In digital spaces, Wikimedia is pretty accessible. But all that work to build an accessible website doesn't count for anything if you don't write the alt text. Write the alt text.