Accessibility for Justice: Accessibility as a tool for promoting justice in librarianship

Abstract

Recent critiques of diversity in higher education and librarianship by Stewart (2017), Hudson (2017), and Hathcock (2015) have encouraged a critical shift away from diversity talk and initiatives, towards attention to equity, anti-racism, and whiteness. They point out that diversity initiatives often fail to address deeper power imbalances, and they offer new language for the effort to make our institutions more just. This essay offers another term for that effort: accessibility. Linked to legal discourses of compliance on the one hand and to library values of access on the other, accessibility is rhetorically very useful. It is also historically complex and politically powerful. The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) was achieved through coalitional activism that reflects the intersectional nature of disability and, because the law prohibits discrimination by design, it demands active design agendas that stand to benefit people with and without disabilities—and marginalized people in particular. Librarians committed to justice can use accessibility as a starting point to change our institutions.