Episode 55- Accessibility is Not Cake
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.
0:33 Welcome to episode fifty-five. In today’s episode I want to talk about how accessibility work is not cake. And I know just by that sentence you’re probably having many ideas about what I am trying to get at. Is she trying to say that accessibility work is difficult and not a piece of cake? I mean it’s challenging at times, but no that’s not what I mean. Is she going to talk about and have an episode about gluten-free food options on campus? Also no, but please you do need to have many gluten-free food options on campus and at your events.
1:13 What I’m trying to get at with the title and topic of today’s episode is that often times in accessibility and inclusion work, those who are in the space and do the work, and are either not part of the community they support, or not intentional in the work they do, tend to think of the work as cake. That there’s only one accessibility cake worth of work to go around, and once all the slices have been allocated that there’s going to be no cake left. And thus, there’s this tendency to want to horde the cake so that they have all the slices. We can use pie, or lasagna, or any other foodstuffs that is commonly sliced to share with multiple folk. My point is is that if you treat accessibility as cake, in the belief that you need to horde the cake, or be responsible for all of the slices of the cake, and that there’s like a finite amount of cake, that demonstrates a foundational lack of understanding of accessibility work, as well as guarantees biased inclusion work because there’s going to be no other perspectives present.
2:26 In austerity times I’m seeing so many people try to keep the cake to themselves and that is actually the opposite of what should be happening. So today I want to unpack all the different elements that lead to accessibility as cake as a mindset, to identify what we are seeing so often, in the hopes of disrupting that tendency in our spaces, towards a more collective view of inclusion that recognizes, acknowledges and takes into account the different specific experiences and knowledges that folk bring when it comes to accessibility.
3:02 So as I noted austerity is the number one reason why cake hording happens. People see other people losing their jobs, or job descriptions changing, and the first reaction is to try to harvest as many pieces of cake so they will not be the next to go. It’s a belief that to demonstrate worth, value, skills, they need to have all the cake responsibilities. And this logic is how they attempt to express expertise in the work, because if they are the only one’s doing the work then they must be the experts in the work right?
3:35 But this is a problem because if you do accessibility work you know that there’s no such thing as an expert. Like I would never call myself an accessibility expert. In fact, I get super uncomfortable when folk refer to me that way, like if I’m giving a talk and that’s how somebody introduces me. Not because I don’t know things, I know things, but because I have an awareness to know that I’ll always have things to learn. And because of like Title II and that ADA stuff that’s happening so many of us who do accessibility work or are in accessibility or disability community have been inundated with emails from folk, from companies claiming to be “accessibility experts.” And these emails are always devoid of context and fail to recognize that folk like me who live in Canada where Title II and ADA are not our legislation not part of our hurry up please it’s time that’s happening in the US right now, these emails are meaningless.
4:35 And yes sure you can definitely know about how to support inclusive work, or how do accessibility audits of digital spaces, manually, not with an AI robot. Or how to support accessible pedagogical design, which is what I do, but I would be the very last person to call myself expert. Because the cult of expertise in academic space suggests that if you are an expert that somehow you have nothing left to learn. And the dynamic nature of disability and accessibility means that you will perpetually always have something to learn. And that reality is a real issue in academic spaces committed to one and done, checklistification of inclusion.
5:18 So the person wanting all the slices of cake will market themselves internally and externally as the only person who can do that work. And we know that this is statistically impossible, and also in terms of acknowledging the importance of lived experience and knowledge that lived experience brings, that sort of framework is also incredibly gatekeepy. It’s the kind of stuff we see with that fake consultation process that’s all the rage right now in academic spaces, and in fact so much so that episode 56, the next episode, is actually going to be about how to make consultation processes more accessible. Because the main motivation around fake attempts at consultation is more gate keeping, secrecy, and exclusion of those who would be most impacted. And this is a great place for a reminder that “leadership of the most impacted” is a disability justice principle.
6:09 Therefore, gatekept accessibility is not authentic commitments to accessibility and it leads to what I like to call “9 to 5 accessibility”. 9 to 5 accessibility is the kind of accessibility work that happens on the clock, where the work is done in the confines of the institution or the space, it’s only done or thought about between the hours of 9 and 5, and when folk log out of the computer at 5 o’clock, accessibility ceases to be a consideration. There’s no connection to the work of accessibility to disability community by the practitioner of the work, there’s no attempt to make those lived connections in allyship because the work is a job and not foundational to who they are as humans. So when there’s no opportunities to see the bigger picture or the interconnectivity, interdependence, cross-movement solidarity, all the things mentioned in the disability justice principles, the work tends to be done in vacuum-sealed Tupperware containers, filled with cake, and only within the institution.
7:17 What this also creates is the kind of bias that I noted previously, because if it’s only one person, or a small group of people doing that work, and it’s done by folk with no connection to disability community in any way, there’s going to be trickledown gaps. And again, you can be very well versed in digital accessibility, or know how to write inclusive learning outcomes, or set accessible learning goals, but maybe you are absolutely not a person who would take the learning space into account, either physically on campus, or virtually using different platforms. Maybe you know that generative AI tools can sometimes support as assistive technology in some contexts, but maybe you’re not a screen reader user or tester and don’t realize that the tool that you’re telling everyone to use is actually inaccessible to so many other people. Those biases can have trickledown, and now you’ve committed to purchasing a bunch of VR equipment for example, but the equipment won’t work for folk who have ME/CFS due to Long COVID, which is fairly common.
8:23 So to recap, you can be really good at something and have lots of experience with it, but I argue that calling yourself an expert is absolutely not a generative approach. As well, as positioning yourself as one or only one of the only ones in the space, you are guaranteeing that your biases and lack of scope will be ignored in the work you do. And so you have all the cake, you have carefully sealed all that cake in Tupperware containers, but the cake that you are saving for the future isn’t gluten free because you are not the kind of human who thinks of dietary needs in your accessibility work. So inaccessibility is perpetuated by this kind of resistance to awareness of knowledge that peers bring and the actual on the ground work that peers do at the institution and also in community.
9:12 Another piece I want to mention here is seeing accessibility as cake also brings out an evaporation of citational justice and equitable citation practices. It means that a handful of folk doing this work will only cite the other folk doing this work that they know, and this become exacerbated geographically. American scholars only cite other American scholars, American keynotes go to non-American conferences and can’t speak to the accessibility context there because they don’t know the context, but the conference organizers were told that they were are the only cake keepers anywhere, not realizing that the people who do know a lot about accessible cake making in that context are actually right there. Research and ideas become distilled down to the same voices, people start thinking that only one person can talk about this one thing because that one person is the only person that they have seen talk or only reference that they’ve seen when they’re sharing things on social media because their cake holdy people have also shared that work and no one elses.
10:16 The echo chamber is real in accessibility space both micro and macro. What I ‘m trying to get across here with this elaborate dessert metaphor, is that we live in a time where folk need to be deeply weary about things that sound like “this is the only voice in accessibility” because no, absolutely not. Even if you have a handful of folk or one human who does accessibility work in your space, that does not mean that they are the only handful of humans who can do accessibility work. In fact, that work would be better received if the group could demonstrate a commitment to a more holistic disability community fostering, instead of geographical or institutional microcosms and secrecy.
10:57 A perfect example of this is today I was in a session where someone started to talk about UDL and the person said they only just started learning about UDL but then proceeded to talk about UDL in a way like they knew all about it and give guidance about it. Of course they should have reached out to the folk who do UDL in the very space that they are in to collaborate on that session. But no, singular cake baker and delivery. No acknowledgement of well-versed UDL bakers in their very spaces because they haven’t engaged with them.
11:28 There’s enough cake folks, I promise. Like the systems being the way that they are, there will always be more cake, more accessibility angles to explore and support. We are not in finite cake times. I mean I wish we were because that would mean we were very proactive in the supports that we have across the world, but we’re so very far from that.
11:52 And a last thing. Often the impulse to cake horde is because there may be someone else in your orbit that has different skill sets than you and that’s scary, and that’s scary to you cause we don’t like different and instead of learning from the other person, you would rather act as though the other person doesn’t exist or doesn’t have knowledge that would be important to share because you don’t have that knowledge.
12:15 Or maybe they are someone who is differently connected than the connections that you have. So for example, maybe you know a lot of folk in Autism community, and the person knows a lot of folk who do digital accessibility. This would actually be a great time to collaborate instead of hoarding the cake, give them a piece, so that maybe the conversation can go beyond ProLoquo to digital design that is inclusive to different users with different sensory needs. Keeping the work you are doing distanced from other people, where all the projects and plans are secretive, does a disservice to the actual spirit of accessibility work and inclusion. Modelling the spirit of inclusion of the work you are doing is great! And if you don’t the other way the perfect way to make sure that you’re practicing 9 to 5 accessibility, and everyone deserves better than that. 9 to 5 accessibility ensures that real accessibility gains never really happen. It’s performative equity work and it happens all the time. It’s just perpetuating the scarcity model that the system use to get free labour out of folk, and to build in barriers to meaningful participation for disabled folk. Stop hording the cake.
13:37 So that’s it, that’s episode 55 of Accessagogy, with a discussion of how accessibility work is not cake, and that we should share, and that we’re not going to run out of cake I promise, and that there will always be cake because of the very dynamic nature of disability, and the social models of disability.
13:54 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, about why hording cake is a bad idea, and how to have specific experience and skill sets in the space that you’re in relation to accessibility so that things can be more inclusive, please ask.
14:15 As always if you have any ideas about the aspects of your pedagogy that you’d like me to address in this podcast, please feel free to send me an email at Accessagogy that’s acc e ss a gogy at gmail dot com. I’ll 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 55 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have a good week, and share your cake.