Recommended for archivists, collections management, and librarians.
Table of Contents
Time Savers
Read:
- Where are the disabled curators?, 9 minutes. An article by curator Aidan Moesby, who openly identifies as disabled.
- Smithsonian Head Lonnie Bunch on Institutional Racism and the Duty of Curators, 7 minutes from Artsy.
- What Are Best Practices for Creating Alt Text?, 3 minutes from Accessibility.com. Our collections are going online. This article gives us good and bad examples to help understand how alt text can give meaning to an image.
Watch/Listen:
- Disability Visibility Project, Episode 89: Museums – an interview with Curator Amanda Cachia, 32 minutes. Cachia talks about “her scholarship and work as a disabled curator, museum accessibility during this pandemic, how curators can make accessibility part of their practices, and how technology can bring people closer to art in new ways.”
Toolkits and Training
Online Toolkits:
- Accessibility in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums: Archives LibGuide from the Pratt Institute. This a high-quality list! Do look at all the tabs to find related resources in this LibGuide.
- Accessible digital documentary heritage: guidelines for the preparation of documentary heritage in accessible formats for persons with disabilities, UNESCO
- The Association of Art Museum Curators: Curators in Nonprofits AAMC notes that the downloadable PDF includes, “Sustaining meaningful momentum supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in the field”, See also page 84 on “Inclusion and Access”
- Cooper Hewitt Guidelines for Image Description “For visitors who use assistive technology, image descriptions allow for more equitable experiences in accessing digital content.” Useful guidelines for helping people who are blind or low vision to access the information contained in images. Includes examples of alt-text (for social media posts or websites) as well as more detailed image descriptions.
- Museum of disAbility History, You can take a cue from the museum whose mission is to share the history of people with disabilities.
- National Gallery of Art: Collection Image Descriptions for Web Accessibility
- Society of American Archivists: Accessibility and Disability, This page links to inclusive hiring, guidelines for accessible archives.
Webinars:
- Archivists with Disabilities, about 45 minutes. Panel presented at Archives and Records 2020 by Ann Abney, Veronica Denison, Michelle Ganz, and Chris Tanguay.
Additional Resources
- Accessibility of the Hellen Keller Archive
- Disability History through Primary Sources, Emerging America, Links to primary resources along with curriculum supports for educators. This is useful because of the extensive list of primary resources to help with research and potential connections with other relevant collections.
- ‘Disabling’ the museum: Curator as infrastructural activist, 30 minutes from Amanda Cachia, a curator who identifies as a person with a disability. This paper is a deep professional discussion curators and their work through the lens of Cachia’s own experience as a curator. doi: 10.1386/jvap.12.3.257_1.
Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution unless otherwise noted.
