This is a guest post by 2024 Junior Fellow, Avianna Miller, who interned in the Office of the Chief Information Office’s Design Division.
National Disability Employment Awareness Month
National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM) finds its roots in 1945, when Congress enacted Public Law 176, which designated the first week of October as “National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week”. This morphed into NDEAM around 25 years later, when Congress changed the week into a month. Check out the 2020 blog post National Disability Employment Awareness Month and the Library of Congress to read more about how the Library has historically supported and documented disability employment.
As part of celebrating this month, I am proud to have curated 13 images from the Library’s holdings that demonstrate the history of disability justice in America. These images have been added to the Library’s Free to Use and Reuse: Disability Awareness set to commemorate the occasion. I chose images that capture moments of protest, memorialization, progress, grief, forgotten history, opportunity, and advocacy—big and small.
Highsmith, Carol M. AIDS quilt, Washington, D.C.. Color transparency, between 1980 and 2006. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Year of Document Accessibility
This summer, I worked with the Office of the Chief Information Officer’s (OCIO) digital accessibility team as a 2024 Junior Fellow on the Year of Document Accessibility project. While in this position, I had the opportunity to think creatively about the possibilities of advancing accessibility in an institutional setting. The work focused on fostering staff engagement with document accessibility.
Under the mentorship of the digital accessibility team, I worked with Junior Fellow Emily Paterson to produce reports on document templates, such as preset styles of presentations and memos, to address accessibility issues. This work resulted in the creation of a guide for staff members about the process of both authoring and making use of templates. This guide emphasizes best practices for maintaining accessibility from author to user to audience. These practices also aid staff members in remaining in compliance with Section 508 standards, which require agencies to provide equal access to information for disabled people.
As a result, staff will have direct access to the resources needed to move forward with accessibility as a primary measure in their workflow while making materials for other staff members.
Describing Disability Justice in America
Besides developing these accessibility guides, we had time and space to work on personal projects. Both myself and Emily Paterson independently engaged with image description, which is a brief text description of the visual information an image communicates.
With the disability justice-oriented images I curated for the Free to Use and Reuse: Disability Awareness set, I created a digital exhibition on the ArcGIS StoryMaps platform. This exhibition uses open image description as a public-facing, creative tool. These descriptions are placed on the page with each image to guide viewers through the StoryMaps content. Often, image descriptions are included as alt text and concealed as metadata within the code of a document or website. With open descriptions, the descriptions are instead present in the text, available as a primary resource to both screen reader users and non-screen reader users, alike.
This work is inspired by artists Bojana Coklyat and Finnegan Shannon’s Alt Text as Poetry project. They reimagine alt text as something that should be approached “thoughtfully and creatively” instead of done simply to meet web compliance standards.
Through this guiding thread of the StoryMap, my work demonstrates the creative potential of image description as a central component of visuals. In this application, image description functions not merely as a piece of metadata but of equal weight to the digital representation of an image. Independently, I hope that my digital exhibition’s application of image description can help demonstrate to the public about the creative potential of accessibility. It’s not all standards and requirements; it’s ultimately something human that seeks to connect everybody.
Challenges
While working on this project, I encountered some challenges with copyright restrictions, which limited the breadth of history captured in this set of images. It is essential to recognize that disability justice exists within an intersectional framework that centers on historically marginalized individuals. This includes, but is not at all limited to, women, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, incarcerated people, and unhoused people.
When we talk about disability justice, we must acknowledge the past and present struggles and the hope for collective futurity—a shared future through the lens of disability that envisions endless space for disabled and chronically ill people. This must be held close as we seek justice for all who are excluded in a society that centers able-bodiedness. A resource on the ten guiding principles of disability justice is available through the disability justice project Sins Invalid. Also check out feminist disability studies scholar Alison Kafer’s book Feminist, Queer, Crip for more on the notion of disability futurity!