Commemorating Disability Pride Month with TIE and Choice Content

To commemorate Disability Pride Month, we've compiled TIE and Choice resources that highlight disability history and inclusivity, including book reviews, webinars, and more.

Posted on July 2, 2024 in Blog Posts

Commemorating Disability Pride Month

To commemorate Disability Pride Month, the Toward Inclusive Excellence team gathered TIE and Choice blog posts, book reviews, webinars, and more on disability rights and inclusivity. These resources feature topics like the Deaf-led movement for closed captioning, the accessibility of videoconferencing, and disability and artificial intelligence. Choice, the publisher of TIE and a publishing unit at the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, provides book reviews to help librarians identify academic sources and professional development tools like webinars, podcasts, and white papers.

New content will be added throughout July, so make sure to revisit this page for new content. We hope you find these picks helpful to further your study and understanding of disability rights and accessibility.

TIE Blog

These selections include several TIE blog posts and resource lists on topics like accessible videoconferencing. To keep up with upcoming TIE content, subscribe to the TIE newsletter.

Crip Time in the Academic Library (Added 7/11/24)

A disabled student sitting in a wheelchair and wearing a hijab listens to a lesson at her own pace owing to the needs of crip time.

Crip time, a phrase often attributed to the scholar Alison Kafer, can broadly be understood as a new way of thinking about time. Simply put, it is the idea that disabled folks experience time, milestones, and life events in ways that do not align with normative understandings of time or the socially accepted way that time is understood in everyday life. It is, for the most part, a nonlinear way of understanding and moving through time, and it takes into consideration the flare-ups, setbacks, and fatigue that often accompany disability. Read the TIE blog post.

Hybrid Conferences Are an Accessibility Issue

Illustration of people communicating via video for a hybrid conference.

Spring conference season is upon us once again, and for the first time in a few years now, I am distraught to see how many conferences I won’t be able to attend. I understand that many people look forward to the in-person conference–that ability to feel connected to one another, to share ideas and network, and to return to “normal.” However, for many of us, that is not an option. I know I’m not the first person to express my feelings on being excluded from so many collaborative opportunities to learn and grow as a librarian. In fact, Fobazi Ettarh wrote an incredible essay in 2022 about the grief that many disabled folks feel about being excluded from in-person only conferences. Read the TIE blog post.

Videoconferencing in the “Post-Pandemic” Era: Accessibility across Difference

Three diverse individuals videoconferencing through their computers.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most people were familiar with the videoconferencing platform Skype, and the ubiquitous iPhone meant equal ubiquity of popular video-chat tool FaceTime. Perhaps only fully online educators and their students used videoconferencing tools, either built into learning management systems or from third parties, as daily facilitators of communication and instruction. March 2020 slammed the door shut on a majority of in-person communications, creating feelings of panic and plunging higher education and the world at large into the unknown. Read the TIE blog post.

Cultivating a Sense of Belonging: What Does “Belonging” Mean for Libraries in the Era of Loneliness?

Illustrations representing belonging showing four diverse friends with their arms around each other.

An epidemic looms in our society today: nearly one in four adults experience loneliness and isolation, according to a Meta-Gallup survey. Last year, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy declared that “loneliness and isolation is a public health crisis” with severe physical and mental health implications. Research has also found that these phenomena impact people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) even more so. Many factors might explain why people are feeling lonely today, such as high levels of social media usage, invisible disabilities, or relocation. In Japan and the United Kingdom, there are ministers for loneliness and isolation who are charged with addressing these issues and implementing measures to prevent social isolation in their respective nations. Given these circumstances, we must also ask ourselves, “Is there anything we in libraries can do to mitigate these issues?” Read the TIE blog post.

Resources for Understanding the Ethical Implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Disability and AI

Illustration of an AI robot's head in profile alongside text that reads "Ethics + Artificial Intelligence"

Webinars

Choice-ACRL Webinars feature presentations on library trends by industry experts, covering topics like collection development, library technology, and scholarly communication. This session spotlights APA Style’s best practices for inclusive language.

Choosing Your Words in APA Style: Best Practices for Clear, Precise, and Inclusive Writing

Screenshot of webinar

This webinar explores how to choose your words when writing in APA Style. The APA Style team addresses how to choose words that are appropriately specific and free of bias, including how to deal with overly vague prose, eliminate academic jargon, and describe people with inclusive language. Speakers share new guidance from APA’s Inclusive Language Guide, Second Edition, regarding word choice best practices for topics including pronouns, disability, body size diversity, pregnancy, and neurodiversity. Watch the webinar recording.

Find more recordings in the Choice Webinar Archive on topics in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Accessibility (DEIA), including:

Review of the Week

Each week Choice highlights a review that addresses a topical issue, event, or holiday—or simply, a review we believe deserves more attention. These picks discuss disability inclusiveness in Africa, the social understanding of blindness in early modern Japan, and a critique of “perfectionist” medical technologies.

Uncharted: How Scientists Navigate Their Own Health, Research, and Experiences of Bias book cover.
Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity book cover.
Engineering Perfection: Solidarity, Disability, and Well-being book cover. Maroon, orange, and tan squares with white text.
A World Away from IEPs: How Disabled Students Learn in Out-of-School Spaces book cover. Bright green background with blue text. Two flower stems at the top and bottom.
Disability Rights and Inclusiveness in Africa book cover. A photograph of two people looking at the camera, both standing, one using forearm crutches.
Fitter, Happier: The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric book cover.
"Turn on the Words: Deaf Audiences, Captions and the Long Struggle for Access" book cover. The book cover has two photos: the one at the top is of a protest march with people holding signs, and the one at the bottom is of students facing a projector screen in a classroom watching a video with captions. In the middle of the book cover is the book title and author name in purple text against a pale yellow background.

LibTech Insights

LibTech Insights (LTI) is a content vertical that examines the day-to-day impact of library and education technology on the higher education community. The channels provide practical guidance on technology trends and products as they relate to opportunities and challenges involving issues such as productivity, accessibility, discovery, operations, and content management. These picks highlight accessible user experience research, how the library can gather statistics on accessibility needs, and more.

LTI graphic. Two people carrying a big piece of paper with a pie chart on it.

How to Get Statistics about Your Institution’s Accessibility Needs

My favorite quote about accessibility is that it’s a process, not a one-time project. Your library should be continually considering the accessibility of its spaces, services, and website. As you do this work, it may be helpful to know some statistics about disability. These can help you make the case for accessibility work to your administration and prioritize what to work on. Read the LTI post.

Getting Started with Accessible User Experience (UX) Research

LTI graphic. Two people standing in front of a large browser window.

As educators and researchers, we are committed to centering students with disabilities and marginalized identities in our work. However, we recognize that we cannot truly understand the individual or collective experiences of our disabled students, nor of their intersectional identities. However, it is our privilege and responsibility to work toward this understanding, to listen to and to elevate student voices, and to advocate for accessible practices within higher education. Read the LTI post.

Find more posts on LibTech Insights, including:

Ask an Archivist

Ask an Archivist is a monthly feature that explores the research and production behind compelling special collections through interviews with their curators, archivists, and directors. This archive delves into the National Disability Arts Collection & Archive and the UK Disability Arts Movement. 

Tony Heaton, NDACA founder as painted by Tanya Raabe as part of “Who’S WhO: defining faces of an arts movement,” a series of portraits of disabled artists and activists. 2008

The National Disability Arts Collection & Archive

In this interview, project archivist Alex Cowan talks with Choice about the National Disability Arts Collection & Archive (NDACA) and provides an overview of the UK Disability Arts Movement. Throughout the conversation, Alex details how the social model of disability shapes NDACA’s work, and the ways disability art can act as a form of protest. Alex further describes the accessibility of NDACA’s physical and digital spaces, highlights the collection’s efforts to support emerging disabled artists, and shares how the Disability Arts Movement continues today. Read the interview with Alex Cowan.

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Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.

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