Accessibility and Archives: Adapting Our Present to Preserve Our Past
In this, the twelfth in a sequence of blogposts around disability and inclusion from the Accessibility working group of ARA’s Diversity and Inclusion Allies, Ella Clarke from the Disabled People’s Archive describes its work curating for a diverse audience of disabled people (and others) the records of disabled people and their civil rights struggle, created by disabled people themselves. The DPA’s practice presents a challenge to the profession’s orthodoxy around what Accessibility really looks like.
The Disabled People’s Archive (DPA) is a joint venture between the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People (GMCDP) and Archives+, formerly the Greater Manchester County Records Office. The collection is physically based at Manchester Central Library but makes items from its collection available digitally on its website, and on request for users who face physical barriers when travelling to our host libraries.
The archive began in the early 2000’s, as it became apparent to disabled activists that there needed to be a space to house and preserve the history of the Disabled People’s Movement in the UK. In 2016, after various attempts to secure funding, GMCDP and Archives+ began discussions about cataloguing the collection and working to make it accessible to the public. After a successful funding bid, The Disabled People’s Archive was officially launched on 9 June 2019 and currently employs 3 part time members of staff: a Lead Development Worker, a Project Worker, and an Access and Inclusion Worker.
GMCDP is a Disabled People’s Organisation, which means it is controlled and run by disabled people. Additionally, GMCDP only hires disabled workers – including for the DPA project. Accessibility for disabled users to the archives, then, takes on an extra level of importance and meaning. GMCDP follows The Social Model of Disability “which identifies the way society is organised and the barriers it puts in place for disabled people as the problem, rather than the individual’s impairment or difference.”
As disabled people face inaccessible systems in information services, as well as many other parts of society, the Disabled People’s Archive works to ensure that the archives’ resources are as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. This commitment embraces the push for archives to be ‘open to all’ – becoming more welcoming, relevant, and responsive to community needs – in recent cross-sector strategies, but also goes beyond it. The DPA’s approach not only wants to convince people that archives are valuable, but also to change the basic way that materials and services are organised to remove the barriers that prevent many disabled people using archives.
As the archival sector presents many barriers for disabled people, one of the main aims of the Disabled People’s Archive is to create transcribed accessible versions of material so that all disabled people can access their history. So, for a standard print paper document, we aim to produce a Large Print, Accessible PDF, Braille, and Easier to Read (an adapted form of English which supports those for whom English is not their first language or those with Learning Disabilities) version to be made available alongside the original record. For other media, such as videos, we will use Captioning, BSL, Audio Description and Transcripts to present the record in an accessible way to the user.
We do not only see these adaptations as a way of making the heritage sector more fair, open or representative; although those are important goals. Rather, we approach them as a political act. While people with different kinds of bodies or minds have always existed, they have only been systematically excluded from the societies they live in since the birth of industrial society – when new technologies in the workplace threw them into unemployment, segregation, and dependence on charity. Our collection records the struggle of people with impairments against this inequality, and their demands for full access to the fruits of modern society. This history of struggle belongs to disabled people as a whole and presenting it in whatever form they need gives them full ownership of it.
Contributions to this series are welcomed, particularly if you have experience of working with records of disabled people, or making records accessible to disabled people. If you are interested in contributing to a similar post, in the first instance contact diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk .