In 2024, Christine Moeller and UI SLIS graduate student Theo Prineas met to discuss disability and librarianship. With their 2019 Library Trends article “Disability, Identity, and Professionalism: Precarity in Librarianship” and role as PhD student lead on an IMLS grant to improve neurodiversity inclusion in library workplaces, Moeller is a leading researcher on libraries and disability. The conversation between Moeller and Prineas is a wide-ranging discussion of disability and libraries, giving attention to themes of equity, access, and the ways that organizations can and should enhance services to everyone through a stronger commitment to serving and including individuals with disabilities.
Theo Prineas (TP): DEI and DEIA are often used interchangeably in discussions across multiple fields. How does accessibility fit into the framework of diversity, equity, and inclusion? What can accessibility contribute to the DEIA framework?
Christine Moeller (CM): Accessibility is an integral part of DEI because equity work requires dismantling systemic barriers, especially those that are experienced by historically marginalized people. Intersectionality also draws our attention to the ways that identities interact and aren’t experienced in isolation. As we’re thinking about diversity, disability needs to be part of that conversation. Otherwise, we aren’t making things equitable for whole people, only certain aspects of people’s identity. I have heard people say, well, “That’s part of diversity,” or “That’s part of equity,” but I actually think there’s real value in naming accessibility, specifically to indicate that it is recognized, that it is seen as a priority. Naming it makes it visible as an important consideration that is part of equity and inclusion and diversity, and it removes accessibility from this framework of accommodations, where we see accessibility as a response to a specific request from an individual, and instead recognizes that accessibility needs to be a bigger, holistic, ongoing process. I see that as what accessibility contributes to that framework. And in libraries, where we have access and equity as core values, we need to be practicing those things in a more holistic way.
TP: I like what you’re saying about the library value of access. There’s a certain double meaning with the term “access” in which it refers to “access to information” in the sense of intellectual freedom. Then you can ask yourself, what is the process by which people get access? How do we get everyone access to library services and information?
CM: Yeah, and in disability studies, which is a field that I draw a lot of my work from, we talk about all the different forms of access as well. Even in the way the core value is stated, libraries are focused very specifically on access to information. But information can be conceived of very broadly, as I’m sure you’ve talked about in your SLIS courses, right? If we think about accessibility in that broad understanding of information, then that helps us see why access is a helpful term for thinking about things like accessibility, right? If your information isn’t accessible, then people don’t have access. Then you’ve cut off that access, and that’s working against the values that we state that are core to this profession.
TP: Let’s say we are entering a library to evaluate it for accessibility. What is your guidance on how to approach library spaces can find accommodating infrastructure? What are common steps that librarians take to make space more inclusive spaces for people with disabilities?
CM: People often think about the physical space, so my first encouragement here is to think beyond physical disabilities and beyond the physical space and think about the whole library environment as part of that space.
I also will acknowledge that it can be very hard to step out of our own knowledge and experiences of spaces and environments, and as workers in those spaces, we might have a very different level of comfort than someone who is potentially new to that space. From my perspective, the best thing to do is to ask other people and to know when to say, “I don’t know how other people are experiencing this space. I’m going to reach out to people in the community or to my colleagues to get that input from disabled people and how they experience this space.” And of course, compensating them for that expertise at the end of their labor in that process, because it can be hard to try and see that space as someone walking into that environment for the first time.
If you are trying to look at your library, it’s important to think about all the things in that space. What are you noticing if you stand in the entryway to your library? I worked at a library where the doors were really hard to open because of air pressure. That might be something that you need to do something about in terms of access for people. What do you hear? Is it clear where you should go? Are there clear signs giving you directions about where things are located? How are people responding to your presence, especially if you’re standing there for a moment looking unsure–how are people around you responding to that? Those are the sorts of things that help remove you from familiarity in that space.
There’s often a focus, even in library literature, on people with physical disabilities and there isn’t a lot of recognition of people with invisible disabilities. When I was in SLIS, I wrote a paper about that. I encourage people to think through what that’s like; imagine if moving is painful for you. Do your stacks require someone to crouch down to reach books on the floor, or to climb onto a stool to reach high? All of those will impact your users and potentially the people working there as well.
If you start to recognize those situations in your library and you aren’t sure what to do about it, universal design can be helpful in terms of thinking through things. It’s important to not necessarily see access as a checklist; sometimes people’s needs will conflict, and universal design can be really helpful. It’s also important to remember that accessibility is an ongoing process, because people’s needs can and will change. It’s always an ongoing process of adjusting to the needs of the community.
TP: Can you define a universal design just for people who don’t know the term?
CM: Universal design emerged in architecture. It’s the idea that you make your environment usable by the greatest number of people. There are a couple of examples that people cite as universal design. One of them is curb cuts–the idea was that curb cuts are an element of universal design. They make crosswalks and sidewalks accessible for people who use mobility aids. As a result, they also make that space more accessible for someone pulling their wheeled suitcase behind them or someone pushing a child in a stroller. Ramps are another example often used in demonstrating the benefits of universal design, because everyone can use a ramp whereas only a certain number of people can use the stairs comfortably. It’s those elements that universal design strives for–to create architectural environments that benefit the greatest number of people.
TP: Thank you very much. I also wanted to follow up on what you were saying earlier about conflicting needs. Something that we’ve spoken about in SLIS classes is different points of access for people. Could you expand on that and explain it to me? The example that I jump to is that there’s a standing area and a sitting area at the desk of the ICPL to resolve potential issues of conflicting needs.
CM: Yeah, that’s a good example again of universal design–providing those different areas for people for whatever their needs might be, and trying to provide and anticipate that there might be different needs, but not everyone will benefit from the exact same height desk. Some people may want to sit. Some people may want to stand. What I am thinking about is conflicts of access–this is the idea that some of your patrons would prefer a quiet space, whereas for other people that silence could potentially be really distracting or discomforting. This is what I mean in terms of these conflicts. People come to our spaces with different needs, and sometimes those needs interfere with one another
The benefit of universal design, as your example demonstrated, is that it helps you think through how to meet those various needs in different ways. Some libraries will have a designated quiet area, or another area that is for group discussions. We have those a lot in academic libraries, for example. That can minimize some conflicts of access because providing those areas will meet the needs of different people in your community.
TP: Something I have noticed is that librarians often discuss disability in the context of serving patrons, which is great–that’s what we’re here to do–but there’s a lack of discussion to go along with that about librarians with disabilities. Can you describe the ways that accessible infrastructure can benefit both librarians and librarianship as a field, as well as patrons?
CM: I’m going to try not to get on my soapbox too much, because this is my area of research in an area that I am very passionate about.
TP: I invite you to get on your soapbox.
CM: If you’re asking for it. We need to practice the values of our profession, not just for our patrons, but for each other as well. To me, if we are only doing these things for some people while ignoring other people, I’m uncertain that those really are the things that we value. If we are not practicing them in all our work, then I question whether that’s really a core value.
Libraries now are doing increasingly difficult work under increasingly difficult circumstances. And therefore, it is a necessity to consider the health of the organization and the wellbeing of the people who are doing that work because otherwise this work will not be sustainable.
In many areas we’re seeing that a lot of people who are facing understaffing, underfunding, the work isn’t sustainable. As a profession, we really need to step back and think hard about how we make this work and being a librarian sustainable long-term, because otherwise we can’t serve our patrons! We’re not doing them a service either if we’re doing ourselves a disservice by making this a difficult field to be in. We can’t serve our patrons well if we aren’t at our best either.
There’s my soapbox about that. This benefits everyone, both ourselves as people who work in this profession, and our patrons.
From my work, it seems difficult to consider the needs of librarians because we have such high expectations of each other. In libraries, there’s an expectation that people commit to lifelong learning and stay attuned to the latest trends and be innovative. It’s hard to step back and say, “Oh, wait, but we need to do all of that in a way that’s healthy,” but doing so recognizes that we all come to this work with different lived experiences in different bodies with different ways of being.
That’s the piece that we are still grappling with in this profession, and that is related to the lack of discussion of librarians with disabilities. That’s certainly what I found when I started doing research, and part of why it became important to me as a disabled and neurodivergent librarian, recognizing that many people didn’t understand my experiences as a library worker with those identities. The libraries in which we’re doing work for patrons like me weren’t welcoming to employees like me. The reason that I talk about this is because there is this lack of recognition that we are part of the profession. The better we can do to meet the needs of and welcome librarians with disabilities, the better we will be able to serve the members of our community who are also coming to our spaces with those lived experiences and ways of being.
TP: I really like what you were saying about looking out for the wellbeing of library workers, because that is not only beneficial to people with disabilities, it could just be universally beneficial.
CM: It sure is. It’s like universal design in terms of the library spaces. The same is true of many of the practices that benefit disabled librarians in the profession. That’s what I’m doing as part of my dissertation work. Those kinds of accessibility practices benefit everyone in the workplace. They make it a healthier place for everyone. There’s improved work-life balance and improved communication across the organization. Many are just good managerial practices anyhow. It’s very much like that universal design; the things that you would be doing to help support the needs of your disabled library workers would also benefit the whole rest of the organization.
TP: As we’ve been talking about, libraries and librarians are under a lot of pressure right now. How can we advocate for accessibility to be a priority? How do we make that argument now given all the other tensions in other areas of need in the library at this moment we’re in?
CM: I recognize that there are many tensions in libraries now. There is a lot of understaffing, a lot of underfunding. So many librarians I speak with are facing those situations at their libraries. And that’s complicated. It makes things harder for everyone.
Too often accessibility is treated as almost a numbers game. I hate to use that phrase, but there’s this conversation that happens sometimes in libraries that goes like this: We don’t have that many disabled people coming to our library, so it’s not worth the time and the resources to make things accessible. When I hear that, I want to ask: How do you know? If you aren’t making things accessible, you’re sending a signal to all of those people who have that particular need, “You are not welcome here.” You’re requiring them to still show up anyhow and declare themselves and their need before they have the access that they need. And no one else in your library has to do that in your community, so why are you responding this way to discussions about accessibility? If you’re not practicing that particular value in your library, you are still sending a signal to disabled members of your community, and that’s not a good signal to be sending. If access really is a value that we care about in libraries, then why aren’t we practicing that? To me, that’s the argument about why access is central to our work as librarians and as library workers. Otherwise, we’re not providing access to information that is central to this work, to who we are as librarians and library workers.
TP: To build on what you’re saying about raising accessibility as a priority, a common reason that I see for DEIA initiatives to fail to manifest is for finances to be insufficient. This is especially pronounced in libraries that are run on a shoestring budget; everyone could have good intentions, but things still might not work out. Why does accessibility infrastructure spending need to be a priority on the budget specifically? What are the long-term benefits of a budgetary allocation?
CM: Budgets are value-driven documents. Budgets demonstrate priorities and values. That connects to what I have said in terms of speaking to our values; the budget is part of that. If you aren’t continually committing funds to accessibility, then you’re sending a signal about what you value and what is prioritized at your library.
The other thing that I’ll say is that long term investment also allows you the opportunity to save up for the projects that otherwise would be too cost prohibitive. It allows you to set this little piece aside to save up, depending on how your budget works. I worked at libraries where we would have had the opportunity to set aside funds, if we had treated accessibility as a bigger project, to do projects like renovating restrooms. We chose not to, that was always the thing we could never do. My advice is that it’s important to think of budgets in the short term as well as in the long term to meet those priorities.
TP: I’m curious about ways that we can institutionalize change in the long term. It’s one thing to, say, invest in a high contrast color collection of books for a few years, it’s another to keep that sustained ad infinitum. What are ways to nest ideas around accessibility in library policies and practices to retain them in the institution, so that efforts today won’t be abandoned by a project tomorrow that’s “the next tiny thing.”
CM: This speaks to how we approach accessibility as library workers. Are we coming to accessibility from this accommodations-oriented framework, where our only understanding of accessibility is that someone has to ask for something and we’ll give it to them? As I argued previously, this is the wrong way to go about it because we’re excluding people from the beginning. To me, access has to be an integral part of the way that we do the work of libraries as library workers, as integral to the profession as things like collection development and readers advisory and reference. In fact, we have to think about accessibility in relationship to all those core functions of the profession as well, because the problem with that one-time approach is that it’s an active choice to exclude people in the community. To really incorporate accessibility into library policy and practice means thinking through what accessibility means in terms of coming into this space. What does accessibility mean in terms of online resources? What does accessibility mean in terms of a reference interaction? What does accessibility mean in terms of our own library worker meeting practices? Are food policies exclusive to people who have needs that require them to have some kind of snack every certain amount of time? Or caregivers whose children might need food while they’re at the library?
Really think through the interaction of our policies and our practices and the needs of our community, which also includes us as part of that community. That’s how we get to accessibility being more integrated into the work that we do every day; we have to attend to it in every aspect of what we’re doing, because to not do that is to prevent access.
TP: What I’m hearing you say is that accessibility is a process, not a static state that you just reach one day and then stay there. Is that right?
CM: Absolutely. Even for me, my needs vary day by day. As a disabled librarian, some days I have good days and other days I have a flare. My needs are very different on those two days. The same is going to be true of our patrons. They’ll have good days. They’ll have bad days. They’ll have days when their needs are one way. They’ll have days when their needs are different. Communities change over time, so yes, it absolutely has to be a process. That also means checking in with people as well to see if something is still working. Asking questions and being willing to make those adjustments when possible and needed. Expect that it is an ongoing process. It’s easy to think in terms of, one person makes this ask and I meet their need and now we are done. The thing that I asked for two months ago might not work for me anymore today. And so that’s why it’s so important to engage with this as an ongoing process. Have that as your expectation, because that’s how you will better meet the needs of everyone that’s part of your library community, including us as library workers.
Christine Moeller is a PhD candidate at the Information School at the University of Washington. Christine worked as an academic librarian for seven years prior to joining the iSchool, primarily working as an instructional design librarian. Their own experiences and the experiences of their colleagues led them to researching barriers to workplace inclusion experienced by disabled academic librarians, including resilience narratives, stereotypes, and professionalism discourse. Building on this research, they are now investigating the experiences of neurodivergent librarians with the goal of making libraries and eventually other workplaces (like academia itself) more inclusive of neurodivergent people like themself.
