Uncharted, unstudied
Oct. 12th, 2017 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistlilysea shared a great article on accessibility, or more accurately the lack thereof, at the University of Sydney.It's fairly long, and all very good, but one paragraph from it particularly stood out for me. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
For staff members, the situation isn’t much better. Dr Sheelagh Daniels-Mayes, a lecturer in Aboriginal education, is one of only eight blind and low vision academics in Australia. She estimates that she spends about 25 extra hours a week making up for inaccessibility. Turnitin and Grade Centre are both inaccessible for screen reading software, and PDF documents are “sheer hell”. And, unfailingly, the cobblestones. In order to avoid them, Sheelagh’s guide dog Nina insists on taking her on a roundabout route through the Law buildings.Partly this is of course because I'm starting to navigate university life while partially sighted. PDFs are sheer hell and people think they're accessible because they're electronic like that's magic or something.
But what has stuck with me is the estimate of losing 25 hours a week to dealing with inaccessibility. I've said many times now I've spent more time and energy on dealing wiht the admin associated with being a student than I have on reading or writing or thinking or learning. It's not all directly related to inaccessibility for me, like in the article, but it all adds up to the feeling that like the feminist idea of women doing a "second shift" of work when they get home from the dayjob to cook and clean and look after children, I have a second shift of sighted-guide-wrangling, getting lost today on my way to a new building (not something I could wrangle a sighted guide for in time because I didn't have enough notice), being distracted in a meeting by an ankle that was sore because I'd just fallen up some stairs on the way to it, waiting for the next bus after one zoomed past me at a stop today which they're not supposed to do, deciding whether any individual thing is worth complaining about...
I don't know how many hours I spend dealing with inaccessibility a week, but this academic's phrase reminded me of a poem I adore, "Girl Hours", which is actually about a kind of Hidden-Figures set of women in the late 19th century. The director reckoned the difficulty of astronomical projects in "girl hours," the number of hours these human computers would need in order to do the work. There must be some equivalent in disabled hours.
Oh bright rain, brave clouds, oh stars,
oh stars.
Two thousand four hundred fires
and uncharted, unstudied,
the hours, the hours, the hours.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-12 05:32 pm (UTC)When I was much younger, Imlived and worked with a blind PhD student (and later Dr). Way before ADA or DDA -- and she estimated that she spent 25/hrs week dealing with inaccessibility as well. Once I was her screen reader, literally narrating what appeared in he terminal in a comp sic class.
How terrible that it hasn't changed.
A little while ago, amandaaw wrote a fabulous essay on "second shift for the sick"
http://disabledfeminists.com/2009/10/15/second-shift-for-the-sick/
(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-12 08:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-12 09:26 pm (UTC)Also also, it SUCKS how much extra work you have to put in!
(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-12 07:51 pm (UTC)And even DWP, which probably has inaccessibility as a mission statement, feels the need to annotate every link to a PDF with the statement that it may not be accessible.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-12 08:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-13 12:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-13 01:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-14 01:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-14 01:10 pm (UTC)