Episode 45- The Harm of Generalizing Accessibility and Inclusion
0-0:12 Orthotonics Accessible as Gravity plays and fades out
0:13 Hello and welcome to Accessagogy a podcast about accessibility and pedagogy. I’m your host Ann Gagné and this podcast is recorded on land covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and within land protected by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Agreement, which is the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.
0:32 Welcome to episode forty-five. In today’s episode I’m going to explore this tendency that is happening in higher education when it comes to accessibility and inclusion, as more and more folk who do the specialized work of accessibility are laid off due to budget cuts, which is the belief that everyone can just do all the accessibility things that need doing.
0:55 So here’s this thing that happens in higher ed a lot is folk say well the work of inclusion is everyone’s work. And you know what yes, absolutely, yes it is. I have said it on this podcast many times, it’s important to help out your unicorns and stop making it one single human’s responsibility to do all the accessibility things.
1:17 However, where the problem occurs is when the bean counters and administrators generalize that guidance and start to believe in practice that every random person that works at the institution can do this work. And guess what, fun fact, not true.
1:34 So today I want to give some tangible examples of the harm that can happen when we generalize accessibility work and let folk in the spaces that we are in, use the mantle of expertise when they have not done the work or created the community connections to have the awareness that comes with that mantle.
1:54 One, I see this happen a lot in education spaces, on social media, on listservs, where folk try to promote themselves as the person to talk to, or hire, for inclusion work or accessibility work, but their own work consistently demonstrates gaps in pretty obvious areas. What this means in turn is that any support that they do provide will then also perpetuate those same gaps and biases in a sort of trickle down effect. Those who do digital media see this a lot of the times where they can kind of see the fingerprint of support given by a certain person who embeds their gaps in the project, so for example if it’s someone who is more well versed in front-end work when they try to do back-end work for example in accessibility.
2:44 A lot of this happens in HigherEd because there’s this belief that in certain spaces that folk are not allowed to not know something about a thing. But when you pretend to know something about a thing, when you actually don’t know all the holistic angles connected, and who you could possibly connect other people to help with the gaps that they may have, in fact you end up building in more barriers into the design and then prevent engagement opportunities for others who do have that lived experience and knowledge.
3:16 So connected to this is point two, and this is a very important point. Ready. It’s completely okay to say you don’t know how to do a thing and defer to a person who definitely knows how to do the thing instead. And again I know academe makes it seem like we must know all the things, but remember the structure, that even we have in graduate studies where you specialize on this like very specific thing, and you come to know this very very specific thing really well. And yes you sorta know the things that lead up to this very specific thing that you wrote about in your thesis or dissertation, the same has to be said about accessibility that there may be some things that you can specialize in and you know a lot about. So let me give you an example. And this is, you’ll appreciate this as a very real tangible example coming from my own life.
4:12 I ‘ve had my blog on a Blogspot since like 2009, so that’s 16 years of blogging in one place, where people know where to find me, they know the address, and so on. But it’s also a Blogspot so I know on the back end of it is basically held together with elastics, bandages, and WD-40, right. So when the pandemic started I switched the blog to a white writing black background design because my eyes, my eyes they were very sore from being on screens for 15-17 hours a day as I tried to support folk with more accessible design choices being the only educational developer at the institution that I was at. But again it’s also a Blogspot so the options that I had for more Ann eye friendly design were very limited. And have I been told that that design doesn’t work for some folk? Yes I definitely have. Can I find a way to toggle it so that users have choice in the way they engage? Not that I have come across as of yet, unless I move it some place else, and before the overlay folk come and say hey and I give them a side eye, I’m not interested in embedding even more issues for others like screen reader users into my blog space.
5:34 So you see, me as someone who does accessibility work, I know the limits of what I can make happen within my own skill set. Have I talked to folk about this, yes, will I continue to talk to folk about this, absolutely, because I want my space to be accessible, but I also know what I can do, and I know the skill sets of my friends, like my friend Kim for example, hi Kim. So I talk to them, I learn from them, because I know what is not my area of accessibility land and that is okay.
6:05 And what I see happening so much is folk saying yup I can do this work, and then in turn creating inaccessible work, inaccessible modules, inaccessible graphics, inaccessible PowerPoints, because they know that there are very few people out there that actually will say the thing being created is inaccessible, and call them out on it, so basically they’re banking on never being found out. So this is you know a massive ethical issue, and it’s a massive ethical thing, indeed it is, and it’s also important in accessibility and inclusion work to deeply know where your skill sets are the limits of those skill sets and kinda stay within them so that you can support best in the ways that you know best.
6:53 So for example, I would never say that I’m an expert to talk you about Indigenous pedagogies, because, guess what I’m not Indigenous. Do I know important aspects of things to consider in course design in relation to the difference between Indigenizing and decolonizing? Sure, because I’m friends with Danielle and Danielle reminds me of these things all the time. Sure, because I’m friends with Rachelle, and Rachelle reminds me of these things all the time. Am I invested in having important conversations with faculty about how to add representation to courses and to flag microagressions and harm in courses, absolutely. But would I ever claim that I am the person to talk to about traditional knowledges for example? Never. Because part of this work is about having humility to know the limits and who to refer to who would know better. And humility is actually one of the Anishinaabe 7 grandfather teachings which I will link to in the show notes if you are interested. Give you something to read. So again I come back to, it’s okay to not know a thing. You are human and not a robot. And maybe be confident in the knowledges and skills you do foundationally have, and let them take root so folk know that you are the person to talk to about such and such a thing, and not try to be the person that kind of everywhere all at once.
8:18 Point three, look at the work that you’re putting out there, and look at it holistically and think about the ways that more harm can be done if you’re not referring to others who have lived experience and demonstrated knowledge in that work. The perfect example I have for this are pdfs. There are ton of pdfs floating around academe that are incredibly inaccessible. Many places are trying to remediate these pdfs and if they can be made into a web page resource instead they are doing that because htmls tend to be more accessible. And yet there are folk who will say that they can do the work of remediating pdfs without actually having done that work before. And I have, and remediating pdfs are honestly no joke. It’s hard work it takes a lot of experience and each pdf is different so sometimes something will work one way and other times it won’t because it all depends on how it was designed and made originally. There are many human resources spaces aka people and culture spaces that are still having folk do inaccessible things with pdfs like fill them out take a picture with their phone (inaccessible), or find a fax machine, honest to god, find a fax machine in the year 2025 (inaccessible) and send via email, for example, to get a thing done.
9:39 We deeply need to reflect on the kinds of words and values we say that we believe in while our procedures say something completely different, and are putting forward folk to do this kind of inclusion and accessibility work when they do not have the experience or skills to do that work. Again it is okay to be really good at one thing and that be your thing. I am good at creating accessible teaching resources, but I also know that my gap in that is with colour contrast for images, and I know that that’s a gap I have because I also know this about myself that I see colour in the ways that others don’t see colour. So guess what, that’s also okay.
10:22 Basically if you take anything from this episode is that I want us to like sort of collectively reflect on what this push to try to generalize the work that we do around accessibility and inclusion and when we say that everyone should be responsible for inclusion (which yes in someways definitely) how that fact, the fact of pushing towards a more generalized view of inclusion erases the folk who actually have years of experience and expertise doing the exact specific thing that you are asking them to do. So generalizing can be harmful and create barriers because the resources created by folk who don’t have that skill set are in turn inaccessible. It is okay to have some humility and say that you don’t know a thing, or that something is not your thing. In fact humility is a key to building inclusive communities, because if you barge in saying that you know all the things and taking up all the space, that is not an inclusive spaces that you’re creating, that is just echo chamber work, and that leaves more marginalized and multi-marginalized folk with that lived experience excluded.
11:39 So that’s it, that’s episode 45 of Accessagogy, with a discussion of how a little humility can go a long way in inclusion work, and that if we generalize the work of accessibility in our colleges and universities we will in turn create even more inaccessible spaces and resources, because the wrong people are doing the work that other people that have gone to school, and have done many times, and have the lived experience to do are doing. It’s okay for folk to specialize in an aspect of accessibility, and it’s absolutely awesome to refer to those folk. Ultimately, acknowledging and highlighting the skill sets that folk have, as opposed to the skill sets that you wish they had, if the bean counters are listening, will save you more money, cause less lawsuits, and actually create a more efficient space.
12:30 Remember as well that I want this to be a space where you can ask questions and share concepts that you’d like me to discuss. So if there’s anything that I mentioned here, or anything else that you feel I should discuss around the generalizing of inclusion work and how that’s creating more harm and barriers for students, faculty, and staff, please let me know.
12:48 As always if you have any aspects of your pedagogy that you’d like me to address in this podcast, please feel free to send me an email at Accessagogy so that’s acc e ss a gogy at gmail dot com. I will try to include as many of these suggestions as possible in the podcast because ultimately, this podcast is for you. So that’s it, that’s episode 45 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have an authentic and more humility forward week!