Yesterday, 3 December, was International Day of People with Disabilities. On 14 October 1992, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution inviting all member states to ‘intensify their efforts aimed at sustained effective action with a view to improving the situation of persons with disabilities’, and to that end proclaimed ‘3 December as the International Day of Disabled Persons’, also called the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. If the branding of the day has been inconsistent, that is hardly the reason that the day – indeed a week-long program of events – passed unnoticed by the vast majority of people with disabilities, and their families. For them, every day is ‘Day of People with Disabilities’ and they don’t really have the time to parse verbose themes like ‘Building back better: towards an inclusive, accessible and sustainable post COVID-19 world by, for and with persons with disabilities’.
Among the events staged by UNESCO was the launch of a new publication, Accessible Digital Documentary Heritage. According to its promotional materials, this publication ‘draws upon key features of the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the 2015 UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Preservation of, and Access to, Documentary Heritage Including in Digital Form. This is in promoting and facilitating maximum inclusive access to, and use of, documentary heritage. The means to this is by empowering memory institutions to provide equitable person-to-person access services to original documents’.
I confess, as someone who lives with disability and has also produced digital cultural heritage objects, I have next to no idea what this means. That is not a great start, as I am apparently among the target group for the publication, which ‘include librarians, archivists, museums workers, curators, conservators, IT specialists involved in the digitization of documents, relevant professional bodies such as associations working with persons with disabilities, and other stakeholders interested in disability and accessibility aspects.’
It seems counter-productive as well as counter-intuitive to explain that ‘websites are often complex and cumbersome to navigate, making them inaccessible for users with cognitive or learning disabilities’, but to write your guidelines for remedying that situation in jargon so dense that it renders them unreadable. Fewer lengthy quotations from WHO, UNESCO and other official sources would help.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter that the booklet is completely inaccessible to people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities. After all, they are conceived as passive recipients of digital cultural heritage rather than active producers of it. Furthermore, the examples explored in the booklet reveal that its main concern is producing suitably ‘accessible’ metadata – descriptions for images, subtitle and signing for videos, etc. – for web content that assist those with hearing and visual impairments. The goal is important and worthwhile, but it is inaccurate to suggest that the guidelines are useful to those with other forms of disability. Which, in turn, is the problem with lumping all forms of disability into a single category, or a day, even if it lasts a week.