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As you may know, this column is our opportunity share exciting accessibility-related Association news with you, dear reader of Anthropology News. And I am proud to share the work we have accomplished this summer to help improve and expand our accessibility initiatives!
Because COVID-19 has led many of us to rely far more heavily on virtual community spaces, our efforts at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) have focused on building accessible virtual spaces. Thus, we are providing resources to support these cultural changes so that we may collectively incorporate accessibility into our digital environments, and we warmly invite you to join us on this journey in collective access (a term used by the disability justice educator Mia Mingus and disability justice based performance project Sins Invalid). The new resources include the following:
- Tips for developing accessible PowerPoints, Word documents, and PDFs.
- Guidelines for hosting accessible virtual meetings.
- Guidelines for developing accessible virtual presentations and videos.
- Information for how all of us can make the Raising Our Voices experience as accessible as possible for as many of us as possible, including a short video on how to improve auditory access of presentations and events with our CART captioning and ASL interpreting provider, The Kyle Duarte Company.
A breakdown of these informative resources can be found on our accessibility tips, tricks, and tools page, and we invite you to visit www.americananthro.org/accessibility for the many resources we have available in supporting these cultural changes.
I am also pleased to share that the work we are doing at AAA to center accessibility in our efforts as an association and within our field has been recognized by other organizations such as CEO Update, Associations Now, and the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired. We will keep pushing so that we get better at nourishing an environment where Disabled, Deaf, Blind, Autistic, Neurodivergent, Mentally Ill, Chronically Ill, Aging, and other disability-adjacent community members are not just welcome, but embraced within our community spaces.
Contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions, suggestions, or want to get involved with our accessibility initiatives. For now, though, we invite you to join us for Raising Our Voices, where we are doing all we can to make the virtual event series as accessible as we can for as many people as possible!
Nell Koneczny is the AAA’s accessibility and meetings coordinator.
Cite as: Koneczny, Nell. 2020. “Raising Our Voices, the Accessible Way.” Anthropology News website, October 20, 2020. DOI: 10.14506/AN.1517