Everything is a Touchscreen

There were so many things I could have written about this week, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that they were all connected in some way. I could have written about what happens when someone follows you on all your social media platforms and barges into conversations you are having with other people that they don't know on a regular basis to use your connections with those people to build their own profile and think you won't notice. I could have written about what happens when there is such extreme lack of communication in the work place that your work and your schedule are literally invisible to others and devalued in the scope of the rest of the work happening in your space. And the sad part is I know that so many of you could probably resonate with those two scenarios so deeply. And I will return to the first one in a bit because I have a lot to say this week. 

But instead what I am going to first talk about how everything in our workspaces is a touchscreen and how accessible sensory considerations are no where when people buy things for the office. What all those three things have in common is belonging (a word rapidly being used to extinction by DEI folk) and worth.

A few days ago I asked folk on Twitter to do an audit of their profile to note how many tweets they were retweeting on a regular basis without alt text and without captions on videos. A lot of people responded and some had questions about different aspects of the things they were sharing like links. I would like us to do the same for our workspaces in higher education. Look around the office and take note about how everything is a touchscreen. The pad to unlock and use the technology in the classroom, the photocopier, the lockbox for keys, the displays in the library, the menus in the cafeteria, so many things. Now think and check if there are other sensory ways to engage with those screens. Are there audio cues? Are there haptic cues? Chances are the answer is no and that is a problem because the existence of these screens reinforce who the institution feels should belong in this space, how they should normatively engage in this space, and who is worthy of being in this space. 

Everyday HigherEd is telling blind and low vision folk you don't belong here. I mean in general they are telling all disabled folk everyday you don't belong here, but this week I am focusing on this and how the touchscreen-only options are also not great for folk who need other sensory options like those with ADHD or autism, or blind and low vision folk, or folk who can't use a touchscreen at all for whatever reason (like how it is positioned if they are a wheelchair user).  And part of this issue is because when people buy tools and services for departments they never take accessibility into account. People who are in charge of making those decisions don't take the accessible procurement training (if it even exists at your school, it does at mine) and no one forces them to or makes sure that they make inclusive purchasing choices. So this week I would like you to observe just how much everything is a touchscreen in your spaces, see if there is another way to engage with that touchscreen, and if there isn't I need you to bring that up with whomever you need to bring that up with. Remind them how they are excluding people, remind them how they have built in a barrier, remind them how they are reinforcing a faulty normative framework of how people engage with things. Remind them how they are showing every day that they feel certain people are more worthy of being in this space than others. 

And with that idea of worth, I want to go back to the first thing I said I could have written about today which is the folk who seem to clout chase by being in proximity to you and your community online. Sometimes these people don't realize they are doing this if it happens a couple of times. But when there is a pattern it becomes difficult to ignore. This happens a lot with people who do product design for companies where they want to "learn" from disability community and extract that information to take back to their work. 

I was thinking about how this is similar to the ID badge check at on-site conferences when two people are talking and someone recognizes one person as a person worthy or important to talk to, but the other person is not someone they recognize. I have seen this happen so often, where people will slowly approach two people in conversation then do this glance at the badge to see if the person talking to the "important person" is worthy of being in that conversation, are they from the right school, do they have a recognizable name, and if not they will totally slide into that conversation and take it over. Usually the people who get pushed out of that conversation are graduate students, or people at 2-year colleges (ask me how I know this, lol). And I see a similar thing happening on social media especially around the DEI space as more people want to be known for doing that kind of work because their institutions seem to "value" it. The quotation marks around that word are intentional because the performance is real. 

I've talked about variations of this particular thing so often in the last few months you must surely be getting the idea by now. Ultimately, acknowledge people who have influenced your work, the people you read, the people you engage with, don't try to take over conversations, listening is okay too. Community is reciprocal and built; if folk are sharing information, resources, connections with you, bringing you into spaces, introduce you to people, you need to reflect on your responsibility to that information and to that relationship. Are you going to also share and include? Are you going to gatekeep that knowledge behind a paywall, behind an institution-only event? Just like I would love for folk to reflect on what they are buying for their offices and the barriers they are building in for folk, I would love for folk to reflect on extractive practices that become habits in HigherEd, as folk try to add lines to CVs and get grants and awards, and how those perpetual extractive practices impact others even if that is not the intent.