Monthly tips, suggestions, and questions to help you make your library welcoming and useful for the widest range of patrons possible.
There are surely accessibility considerations that are relevant to your work and your library that it would be hard to touch on with generic accessibility ideas and suggestions like the ones on this site. Take some training or read some articles on Syracuse University’s Project ENABLE platform to pick up some tools and perspectives that will help you spot some possible accessibility improvements that are unique to your library.
You may have prospective volunteers who aren’t suited for traditional volunteer tasks like reshelving materials and doing physical processing of new books. Spend ten or fifteen minutes making a list of things that people with limited English literacy, limited dexterity, or other potential issues could do to help your library.
If your library has a ‘no sleeping’ provision in your code of conduct, consider softening it or at least talking with your colleagues about when you will and won’t enforce it. There are legitimate reasons for these rules, like allowing/encouraging staff to attempt to rouse people who may need medical attention and discouraging people from bringing in a lot of stuff and treating the space like a hotel room. However, sometimes sleeping prohibitions are just there to make people who are homeless feel unwelcome in the library and discourage them from spending time there. See if you can find a way to allow an elderly homeless gentleman reading the library’s copy of the newspaper to doze off in a comfortable chair for 15 minutes, or for a sleep-deprived teen to quietly rest his head on a table and nap until his ride arrives.
Hello readers,
When I first had the idea for this site, I told myself I’d launch it once I had a year’s worth of weekly tips. Tip 52 will be posted in mid-July. Also, I’ve always hoped and planned that the tips I wrote myself would only be the nucleus of a larger site, and that in the long term tips would come from a wide range of contributors. This is primarily because it’s well-documented that diverse groups produce better ideas, but also because I’m not particularly qualified to run a site about library accessibility—I’m privileged enough that I almost never experience accessibility barriers as a patron, and I have no real formal training in design or accessibility issues. I do think that contributions from someone matching that profile have value (so please don’t let that stop you), but there are clearly people who could bring a lot more to the table.
If you have found this site useful over the last year and would like to see it continue and grow, please consider contributing a tip or sharing the site with someone who you think might have a tip to add. You can submit a tip here or reach me at erumstead at gmail dot com.
Thanks,
Emma
What will you do if someone who is visually impaired needs information about a topic for which you don’t have a large print book? You can go to an online source, but many people with low vision are older and not all that comfortable with computers. Can you buy a magnifier and keep it at the front desk to lend out to people who want to read something with print that is too small for them?
In particular, check out these resources on books featuring Native American and First Nations characters: https://firstnations.org/books and https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/. Not only are there good purchase ideas for expanding your collection or putting together a display, there are also reviews of problematic titles that you might want to consider weeding. If you want a refresher or primer for yourself, I liked Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but were Afraid to Ask by Anton Treuer.
Do your bathrooms or other interior rooms in the library have non-automatic doors? If so, consider if it’s feasible to leave them open without affecting anyone’s privacy, so that people with mobility impairments can get in and out more conveniently.
It’s common for kids with autism to struggle with being in an unfamiliar place. Kids on the spectrum may also have trouble understanding and conforming to the norms of library behavior. This can mean they disturb other patrons and their caregivers feel reluctant to bring them to the library for fear they aren’t welcome. Many libraries have found that this problem can be mitigated by doing special introductions to the library at a time kids can be themselves without disturbing other library users. Can you open your library an hour early, or close it an hour late, to host a one-time library intro visit just for autistic kids and their families?
People are not born knowing that in the United States, public library memberships are generally free and there is no rental cost to borrow materials. You will encounter adults who are learning this for the first time, especially in communities where there are lots of people whose parents weren’t library users, and/or lots of people who grew up in countries where free public library memberships are not the norm. Make sure that your marketing materials explain the absolute basics of how the library works—don’t assume people will come in already having that knowledge.
If you speak a language other than the dominant one in your area, that’s excellent. However, if you don’t ‘look’ like it, patrons may not be able to benefit from your skills. While some people will approach the desk and ask if anyone speaks their language, other patrons will see that no one behind it appears to come from their same ethnic/linguistic/cultural group, and assume that they are out of luck. Consider adding something to your badge or work outfit indicating your talents, and try greeting hesitating patrons not only in the dominant language of the area, but also in whatever other languages you know.
Is your library ordering new furniture? Congratulations! When you’re choosing what to order, be conscious of the importance of choosing things that will work for all patrons who might come in. Advocate for at least some of them to be wide enough for people who are obese. A single style of small chairs with slim profiles may look more visually appealing on the mock-ups, but not all of your patrons are going to be able to use them, especially if they have arms that people will have to navigate.
Show your website, signage, and/or flyers to someone who doesn’t work at or use a library, ideally a kid. If those materials use any words they don’t know, try to reword them to make them simpler.
Your colleagues deserve to be treated well in the library just as much as your patrons do. To make yourself aware of some ways in which that might not be happening, check out the LIS Microaggressions Tumblr blog about what it can be like as a library staff member who doesn’t match the demographics of a typical library worker. Even if you’d never say any of the things people report there, it’s good to be aware that they are being said, so that you can be listening and ready to intervene if you hear them from someone else.
Consider whether you can add pictograms to any of your large directional signs. A pictogram is an image or symbol indicating the same thing that the text of a sign would indicate—think the box with up and down arrows for ‘elevator.’ Pictograms help all sorts of people navigate the library: young children, people who don’t come from the dominant language group, people whose vision isn’t good enough for smaller-print signs, and adults who are illiterate or semi-literate.
Before your library opens or after it closes, bring a wheeled office chair out to the public floor and roll around in it. See which tools and services are inconvenient or impossible to access. Patrons using wheelchairs probably can’t access those conveniently, either.
Log into a public computer and imagine you have limited vision. Can you find the support tools (screen reader, magnifier, icon size settings, high contrast display) easily from the desktop? If not, see if you can get the setup changed.
Check your posted signs, documents, and website language for mentions of people with disabilities. Re-word any references that use outmoded or offensive language. Figuring out the best terminology can be a challenge, but getting rid of the worst terminology should be easy. While there there is not a clear consensus on preferred language (unsurprising since the number of people with disabilities is so large), there is consensus about a large number of terms that should not be used.
Do you have a plan for if someone who doesn’t share any languages with the library staff needs service? Your city/town/area may have a government office or nonprofit that provides over-the-phone interpretation for patrons in this situation. Give it a Google.
If you are purchasing or putting together a display of children’s or teen materials, take a look at the Schneider Family Book Award winners for some titles which portray the protagonists’ disabilities “as part of a full life, not as something to be pitied” and include accurate information on those disabilities.
Since library fines are charged at the same rate for all patrons regardless of income, they basically operate like a regressive tax—the same $1/day late fee is a significantly larger fraction of the weekly budget for a patron who lives on $15,000 a year than for a patron who lives on $80,000. Thus, fines are an equity issue—they are more likely to be a barrier to access for people who already face more of those barriers than the average patron. Moreover, fines and fees typically make up a small proportion of a public library’s operating budget and in some cases libraries may spend more collecting the fines than they make as a result of collection. Whether or not you currently have any influence over your institution’s fine policies, educate yourself on the case for going fine-free so that you can be ready to be an advocate if it is ever on the table.