“Ableism” is defined as “discrimination against the disabled”. Often, when I hear the word, “ableism”, it’s usually in the context of using language at the expense of the mentally disabled. But there are other ways, such as schools putting tremendous focus on trying to “cure” disabled students, instead of helping them. As a person living with a relative diagnosed with schizophrenia, and momentarily lost the ability to walk properly, “ableism” is something I have been thinking about it a lot.
Which is why it was such a big deal when CUNY was sued for not properly providing for their disabled students. This was something I first heard when I walked into a meeting held by Peter, City Tech’s computer technician. As a public institution, City Tech was bound to follow the federal law of making accessible documents and websites. And AIR, of course, has to abide by those rules.
Because my background is in web design, I associate “accessibility” with more than just people with visual and hearing impairments. I think of people who live in states with poor internet connection, people who might look on a website on their phone, and people who have poor bandwidth speeds. Knowing how to code a website, or a document, for people who are blind, deaf, or colorblind, was something I never thought about.
Since neither the interns and I knew how to do this, AIR held a workshop with Peter from the Computer Science department. He was incredibly knowledgable, and was obviously frustrated by common design mistakes he gets from the school documents and websites. For example, he told one of my fellow interns that putting a graphic right side-up in a document was a terrible design choice. Because although it was going to be printed, people would have to tilt their heads to properly read it on a computer screen.
I was surprised to learn that he was the person behind making the school website “talk”. For web, he informed us that color choices were key in making an accessible website. There were tools for checking for readability in colorblind vision, but some colors were best avoided altogether, like a bright yellow. You also had to assign special tags, if you want to avoid having a screen reader detect them.
Another part of accessibility is PDFs. PDFs also need to be assigned HTML tags, so a screen reader would be able to read it like a regular web page. Bookmarks and articles also make it easy for disabled people to navigate a long document, and separate chapters from each other.
The workshop was really educational and we were able to apply that knowledge in making the handbook accessible. AIR informed that they pitched to the school about making “accessibility” a required class, so that everyone, especially in COMD, would get the basic knowledge.
