Accessibility Resources: Home

The Libraries Accessibility Team (LAT) was charged by SRLT in winter 2023.

The charge of the Libraries’ Accessibility Team is to identify how we can best coordinate efforts across the Libraries to reinforce and build upon our strong commitment to accessibility in all aspects of our operations, services and programs. The Team’s work will be guided by principles of accessible, universal, and usable design. The Team will create recommendations for the development of standards to ensure the Libraries’ compliance with anti-discrimination laws associated with library technology, spaces, and content access for users with disabilities (See the full charge).

Our working definition of accessibility has been pulled from several sources that are cited in our Guiding Principles document.

"Accessible” means that individuals with disabilities are able to independently acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services within the substantially same timeframe, and with substantially equivalent ease of use, as individuals without disabilities.

Aim for Inclusive Design rather than Universal Design
 

• “Inclusive design is more variably defined but shifts from explicitly connecting with disability and acknowledges that it isn’t always possible or appropriate to design one product to address all needs—the goal of universal design. It’s “design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference.” Inclusive design takes into account an ever-evolving and expanding audience while accepting that more can always be done.” (Smith, K. A., & Malinowski, C. (2024). What We Aren’t Seeing Exclusionary Practices in Visual Media. In Unframing the Visual: Visual Literacy Pedagogy in Academic Libraries and Information Spaces, pp. 327-345), p. 328.  Internal quote from the Inclusive Design Research Centre.)
   
• The LAT’s focus is on accessibility, as spelled out in the definition above, with an inclusive design lens: it isn’t always possible or appropriate to design one product to address all needs and it takes into account an ever-evolving and expanding audience while accepting that more can always be done.
   

Our strategies will include the use of Equally Effective Alternate Access Plans (EEAAP) and Accommodations
 

• An EEAAP is a plan that describes how the institution will provide “equally effective alternate access” to the same information or services offered by a technology that is less than accessible.  It is proactive, rather than reactive (accommodations are entirely reactive), because it plans ahead for what we will do when a user needs a technology, resource, service, or space offering that is inaccessible to them in the current state.
   
• Our strategies will also necessarily involve making accommodations to remediate barriers caused by inaccessible design in order to address user needs for existing inaccessible technologies, services, resources, and spaces. (Accommodations are approved by MIT offices:  for faculty/staff, DSMLO in HR; for students, Disability and Access Services in Student Life.)
   

Focus Forward

• There is a lot we could focus on.  The LAT will prioritize work that helps us avoid introducing new inaccessible technologies, resources, services, and spaces into our portfolio and address existing issues as we can.  For the latter, the LAT will prioritize addressing situations promptly where somebody points out a barrier.  A single accommodation issue may be brought to a larger review. Requests for accommodations must be brought to the appropriate office on campus.

See the full version of our Guiding Principles with source material.

Find the LAT's project list on Trello.