Hi! I’m Alessandra, I recently finished up my MA degree at DU and I’ve been working with the Art of Access Alliance steering committee to manage the website and any aspects of their work with a digital component. Here’s how I got involved with the group.
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For the last several years, I’ve become increasingly immersed in accessibility and what that means for artists, particularly disabled artists. I grew up wearing hearing aids, but I never realized what advocating for myself as a disabled artist or patron of the arts meant. After my last job at Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit art and technology organization creating tools and services for artists, I started exploring the ways that arts organizations can increase inclusion of people of all abilities in the cultural sector.
I moved to Denver from New York in 2016 to attend the University of Denver’s Emergent Digital Practices Master’s program, which focuses on the intersection of art and technology. Shortly after, I started interning with Danielle Schulz in Adult and Access Programs at the Denver Art Museum. I was eager to continue learning from her and collaborating with others advocating for accessibility in Denver, and began getting involved with the Art of Access Alliance later in 2017. As I was approaching my final year of graduate school, I was hoping to use my technical skills to highlight the group’s efforts and explore new ways technology/web-based tools can enable people of all abilities to make and experience art.
So, I approached the group with the proposal to build an online platform for the Art of Access Alliance. At the time, conversations about a regularly meeting Art of Access Alliance were still in the incipient stages, and I thought a website might be a great way to solidify the group’s momentum. They were immediately on board, and that is how my role managing all things digital started with the group.
For my graduate thesis, I was researching various online access methods and how technology offers one means to improve arts and cultural experiences for individuals with embodied differences. Working on this concurrently with building the website was ideal and helped me understand what functionalities the website would need to make it as accessible and useful as possible.
To start on the Art of Access platform, I received a research grant from DU to do a pilot study interviewing people working at the intersection of art/tech/disability in Denver. I spoke with disabled artists, people working for organizations with a disability focus (Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, Community Living Alternatives, for example) to find out what they would want out of such a platform. I also interviewed members of the Alliance and other individuals working at arts organizations to get an understanding of how their interest in access/inclusion plays a role in their jobs and how they define access for disabled people. Spending time with and learning about these community members for my project was arguably the most rewarding and vital portion of my thesis project!
With these interviews as qualitative support, I began working on the website with various user profiles in mind crafted based on my conversations. Members of the Alliance organizing committee agreed that a searchable calendar of events, a resource database, and other information about access efforts in the region would be the first features to prioritize. I also wanted to ensure that the website would be as accessible as possible, so I chose to build it on WordPress, a content management system with tons of web accessibility plugins and tools.
I also included a map of access features of cultural organizations in the region. This was created through my participation in Vanderbilt University’s Critical Design Lab, a national group of artists/scholars working on projects at the intersection of design, crip technoscience, and mapping access. This map was meant to be a way to visualize various access features, but is also meant to encourage more organizations to post this information on their websites.
Throughout the process, I tried to get as much feedback from users as possible. It was a great way to learn about web accessibility guidelines and I learned a lot about how individuals with various access needs such as those who use screen readers or keyboard controls, navigate web pages to get to information on the Internet. If anything, the project highlighted one hugely important fact: cultural institutions are uniquely poised to be influencers in society – if they can demonstrate best practices in their respective organizations, then it provides more support for the society-wide argument for inclusivity. Even simple changes like including access information or image descriptions and captions on websites can eliminate access barriers for disabled audiences.
I’ve loved seeing traffic to the site increase as the Art of Access Alliance continues hosting professional development events and spreads the word about the various access and inclusion efforts happening in the region. I’m hoping to expand the types of events and information posted in the calendar so that the resource can be as useful as possible as its user base grows.
Our understanding of abilities, bodies, and the senses with which we experience the world is extremely subjective and can often ostracize dissimilar approaches to navigating society. Access to culture and the arts provides one means of leveling the playing field for people of all abilities and addressing societal misconceptions of disability. In the past year during which I’ve worked with the Art of Access Alliance, I’ve learned so much about what it takes to be an advocate, and about the benefits of access programs not just for audiences and visitors, but for the organizations themselves. Continuing to build out this network to support collaborative efforts and amplify diverse voices is crucial for the momentum that the alliance has created, and I’m grateful to be a part of it and learn from everyone involved!