#4: Keep paths open — Library Accessibility

From Emma:

I pushed a large shelving cart around my library branch at closing last week. I was happy to see that I could pass through almost all the paths, although some of the turns were a little tight. The only place I really encountered a problem was near a window where we have a little round table set up with a couple of chairs around it. You can pass comfortably between the window and the table if and only if there is no chair on that side. I think when we first put chairs out around that table, we had them parallel to the window, like this:

Diagram of a table with two chairs positioned on opposite sides of it. The chairs are parallel to a line on the left side of the image representing a wall.

However, patrons (reasonably) moved the chairs around as they saw fit, and someone had rearranged a chair so that they could sit facing away from the window, with the chair in between it and the table.

I could add "change the position of the chairs at this table" to my closing sweep routine, but rather than try to remember that every day and hope my colleagues do the same, I'm just going to shift this table further away from the window so that there is enough space for someone to position their chair in between the the without making it hard for some patrons to go by.

Additional note: When I added the image of the arrangement of the wall, chairs, and table to this post, I thought it was the first image on this site and I had to research how to add alt text (see Tip #5: Screen readers can't read pictures). That made me realize that the site also had a CC-BY-NC creative commons license icon on it, and that that icon didn't have alt text! I'm going to go back and add that now also, so this exercise ended up serving a double purpose.