One of my Teaching and Scholarly Learning (TSL) teammates was kind enough to invite me to be March’s First Friday speaker. Friday Fridays are monthly synchronous TSL events that feature instructor successes and is also a place for anyone who is teaching to ask questions, give feedback, share success stories, get advice etc. Of course I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to talk about disability and accessibility with colleagues!
Disability first
In my conversations with Rice community members and beyond, I find that one of the best ways to help people understand why accessibility is important is to talk about disability first. For some reason, a few of which I discuss in the recording below, our society by and large regards disability as a bad word or thing. Many people in the disability community accept disabled/disability but there are plenty of other words or phrases that we do need to stop using. Want to learn more about how to be inclusive in speech and writing? The ADA National Network has a great page on guidelines for writing about people with disabilities and Erk Gunce’s article on communicating with disabled people is a solid read too. I’m still learning how to be a supportive a11y too, one of the areas I’m working on currently is trying to use both person first and disability first language to include all ways someone might identify.
The word disability as it describes fellow humans, friends, family members can invoke thinking or feeling of deficiency, something wrong or something to be fixed. This is in fact a societal norm, where disability is viewed medically as a result of an individual’s difference. The social model of disability frames the conversation that society must adapt to be accessible for people with disabilities so they are not excluded, othered and unable to fully participate in society. There have been many models discussed by disability researchers, but I love talking about and centering the social model because it gets to the heart of DEI initiatives where our attitudes, beliefs and structures as a society need to change.
Once we understand disability as a social construct, that disability belongs within our DEI work and that accessibility is the bridge for people with disabilities to fully participate in our offerings, the pieces all start to fall into place. Working to fix an inaccessible PDF or endeavoring to ensure that a new technology that we bring onboard at the University will function for all community members is bolstered by this understanding.
Want to hear more? Check out the video recording of the First Friday conversation.
Until next time my friends!
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