The Barriers Built In: Information Literacy, Ableism, and Anxiety

This post is about the barriers that are built in to so many digital spaces. It is about information literacy, and what one of my former students called this week "bougie semantics". Of course with everything there is a story.

I have been wanting to start a podcast for about a year now. A podcast dedicated to accessible pedagogy where I would talk about a strategy in a short period of time (under 15 mins) and folk could also ask questions or ask me to focus on a particular thing. For a whole year this idea has be percolating in my head and in December I started to do something about it. I created a pilot trailer that was shared with a group of supportive folk thanks to the podcast course that Brenna Clarke Gray runs out of TRU, and I said to myself that 2023 is the year this is going to happen. And it will, and it has (more on this soon), but let me tell you about all the other things connected to this.

I realized that I needed a new website. I also deeply realized, thanks to the guy who bought Twitter, that free means other people have power over you and your content. So I said I will start doing this work in December or January. Well that didn't happen. As I started delving into what this would entail, the amount of barriers I encountered and the ableism and the anxiety it produced was incredible. I was telling a friend and colleague about this a few weeks ago and she said, "Look, if you are encountering this, you who knows something about some things, imagine how many others are! You need to blog about this!" So here I am blogging about this. 

This is not going to be comprehensive, but here are some things I encountered:

• I wanted to make sure the website was accessible since it would be horrible for me to have a website that hosts a podcast on accessible pedagogy that was not accessible, because, unlike what Higher Ed wants to tell us, modelling is actually a thing. So the thing is the accessible out of the box templates I discovered are pretty expensive. And I am all for making sure folks' hard work is rewarded because that is so so important. But I also realized deeply what a barrier this is, and why so many websites are not accessible. The fact that I could do this though is also part of my privilege in being employed at the moment so that is another part of this that needs to be taken into account.
• So when you get your own domain you have to read this 10+ page document written in the most inaccessible cross between legalese and techese and I feel like I may have actually signed away my parent's house or something in signing it. It was horrible. I few days later I am still reeling from this. Information literacy can only help so much with this, this is a real barrier and though I can understand why it exists (so there's not more crap on the Internet), I can see why people just don't bother because nope nope. It was a document filled with bougie semantics and I hated every second of it. 
• Then the actual creation of the website itself. I messed up at least a half dozen times and I apologize for those who are actually looking for websites that I may have actually claimed in the process of messing up. It was so so difficult. And I know the accessibility tech and ed tech people who follow me are probably rolling their eyes right now in my general GenX direction, but honestly, why? Why is this still so difficult to do in 2023? And who are the folk designing these really crappy inaccessible UX/UI backends where I can't add a plugin unless I pay a lot of money?

There are many more elements to this, but you get the picture. So I spent a lot of time putting this all together and now I have a new website that will be launching soon along with the new podcast (which will be launching by the end of the month). And part of the reason for more delay with the podcast is that I actually have to give myself a break from the barriers that were built in to the website creation, because there will be even more barriers with the podcast. 

I want to end this, of course, with a connection to how this relates to pedagogy. Asking students to create a website or a podcast can certainly meet some learning outcomes of your courses. However, if you are asking them to do this, please give them options to use technology and tools they are comfortable with or have used before. Mandating the use of a tool or technology creates a need for platform literacy that they may not have (unless you are teaching them how to use that tool because that is part of the learning outcomes of your course). Also having conversations about the accessibility of the design they create or the tools you ask them to use is really important if we want to help address the many barriers built in to these systems and the ableist assumptions around literacy and tech that they uphold.