> Skip to content
FEATURED:
  • The Evolution of Race in Admissions
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
Sign In
ADVERTISEMENT
Profhacker Logo

ProfHacker: Accessibility and the Digital Humanities

Teaching, tech, and productivity.

  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Show more sharing options
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Copy Link URLCopied!
  • Print

Accessibility and the Digital Humanities

By  Prof. Hacker
September 20, 2012
accessibility
[

This is a joint post by Jen Guiliano, who is the assistant director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and ProfHacker’s own George H. Williams.

If you are interested in this topic, please fill out this survey: “Disability, Accessibility, and the Digital Humanities.”

We’re sorry. Something went wrong.

We are unable to fully display the content of this page.

The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net.

Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, or subscribe.

If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com

accessibility
[

This is a joint post by Jen Guiliano, who is the assistant director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and ProfHacker’s own George H. Williams.

If you are interested in this topic, please fill out this survey: “Disability, Accessibility, and the Digital Humanities.”

]

Consider this a call to digital humanists generally and more specifically to the project directors (from 34 different projects) who attended today’s Project Directors meeting at the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities:

What is your project doing to address accessibility for people with disabilities?

Today’s meeting is a gathering of project directors from the Digital Humanities Start-up Grants, Digital Humanities Implementation Grants, and the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities competitions. Each project gets just three minutes and three powerpoint slides to introduce their project and their concerns, so we’re taking the liberty of publishing a blog post as a follow-up.

ADVERTISEMENT

Over the last several decades, scholars have developed standards for how best to create, organize, present, and preserve digital information so that future generations of teachers, students, scholars, and librarians may still use it. What has remained neglected for the most part, however, are the needs of people with disabilities. As a result, many of the otherwise most valuable digital resources are useless for people who are--for example--deaf or hard of hearing, as well as for people who are blind, have low vision, or have difficulty distinguishing particular colors.

One of the central values of digital humanities is the importance of open access. For example, most scholars in the field would never use a proprietary format for preserving and sharing our work, in part because to do so would be to exclude those people who cannot afford or do not have access to the necessary software to use that format. However, few of us think twice about whether or not the format we have chosen and the design choices we have made are excluding people with disabilities. As a result, inaccessible design choices remain a significant barrier to the digital humanities for people with disabilities. If our goals include--as they should--the ability to share our work with as wide and diverse an audience as possible, then we should embrace universal design principles.

For the 2012-2013 academic year, the BrailleSC project and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities have partnered to extend WordPress--a system recommended frequently here at ProfHacker--to the blind and low-vision communities by creating a plug-in that will allow anyone to translate WordPress content to braille text. We’ve titled our efforts “Making the Digital Humanities More Open.”

Why WordPress? WordPress is the chosen platform for “over 60 million people” and has been used by digital humanities projects and centers to power their research and content delivery. We’ll be able to deliver a plug-in that allows an integrated experience for blind and low-vision users who want to engage digital humanities content.

And while this is an important first step, we’re also using this project as an opportunity to evaluate our own development and design practices by keeping the following questions in mind:

  • Are we building accessible sites and projects?
  • Are we delivering our content (code, publications, digital objects, digital tools...) in forms that allow for use by blind and low-vision people?
  • What do we need to know to integrate the work going on in braille and low-vision research communities into the work we are doing as digital humanists?
ADVERTISEMENT

There’s much more work than this to be done, of course. People work in a digital environment with a wide variety of abilities and disabilities (not to mention a wide variety of hardware and software tools). Vision and its associated technologies are only one aspect of that work.

So, we’re inviting you to join us in learning more about accessibility this year:

What is accessible design? What can we in the digital humanities do to improve the work we are already doing? And how can project directors evaluate projects and tools to recognize accessible-compliant design and development?

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
  • Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
    Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
  • The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
    The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
    Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
    Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2023 The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin