What is accessibility?

Lately, many of us have been having conversations about ‘what is accessibility?’ from a variety of experiences related to activism, organizing, engagement, abilities, strengths, struggles, pleasures, and pains. This issue has proven to be more difficult, and more important than I think most of us could have expected.

In an effort to allow these conversations to continue across time and space, in ways that could not happen at our meetings, and in an effort to use this space to engage a broad range of experiences, we would like to invite visitors to contribute.

Feel free to shoot me any questions: dagrange@syr.edu

So, what have we been talking about?

Access, inclusion, and exclusion are emotional issues, and connected to our hopes and dreams. Our access to physical/emotional/intellectual/social spaces which develop our focus and perspectives on our strengths or weaknesses, pleasures or pains, influences so much of our lives, and can open and limit a large variety of possibilities in our lives. Disability can be an identity that marks more normative ways of doing, even though it has been more normative ways that have been doing the labeling. In this way, our experiences can teach us what this means for the ways we are disciplined and ruled, regulated and rehabilitated out of our usual ways, and how we are all being made into molds, and cookie-cutter bodies. None of us will ever fit those cookie-cutters. Rather than try and cut out our diversity, we must learn how to acknowledge it and cherish it, even though we've learned so well how to divide ourselves.

Multiculturalism and diversity are words that have been utilized in unproductive ways, and so i want to be clear about what i mean when i say that we need to learn how to cherish diversity. Diversity, access/inclusion and segregation is emotional. Sometimes are differences are going to create more things which challenge us and challenge who we are than what we can know about at international food day. As happy as our bellies may be, hard differences must be recognized and acknowledged if we can even think that we might have something to cherish.

Claims of universal design, like any claims to universality, does work to silence or erase perspectives that do not fall into what we count as 'universal design' or 'accessible.' In the name of diversity, and in recognizing differences, it is important to recognize that these differences cannot all be accounted for and that these differences need to be accounted for in very contextual ways.

Sometimes, what will be good for one person is not always good for another. Sometimes our needs conflict with one another. I am sensitive to bright lights, while my partner needs additional lighting to read. It seems like a simple example, but I bet some of you have more examples that might complicate this principle. Sometimes, what’s good for one person in one moment can be bad for that person in the next. For example, I get easily distracted when people interrupt me when I’m talking, but at the same time, I tend to impulsively interrupt people. It would be easy for some teachers to take up the task to never interrupt students, but if that standard was used to gauge accessibility in my classroom, it could potentially systematically exclude particular embodiments.

Accessibility, like diversity, is not zero-sum. It is not something we can gauge in a binary way - it is not accessible or inaccessible, it is not diverse or segregated - even a room of white men is diverse. For example, as a student with a learning disability, ‘institutions of higher learning’ have done a lot to open up access to some things (like creating this) but it has also done a lot to limit me in a lot of other ways. There’s a lot of creative ways people have been able to negotiate various exclusionary features of various spaces. And I hope that this word exclusionary isn’t too strong. For example, when school gets tough, usually my activist work is neglected because I have been taught that my school work is my top priority, and activist work isn’t thought of as a kind of school work. in a way, when school gets tough, I don’t have a choice about doing activism. As a result, schools have set up a system which works to exclude people like me from activism. And it’s not just my activist work that suffers, but my community of support is neglected as well, making school that much more difficult.

I hope this example also shows how important it is that we share stories about our experiences. Some times it’s hard to say why something is important, but it doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly important.

I know there's probably more that I could say, but i thought this would get us going.