Abstract

Music archives face many accessibility challenges, including image-based music scores, website construction, outdated and potentially harmful descriptive language, and the (often unintentional) omission of Disabled identities in archival description. These challenges overlap with general accessibility concerns, but how they appear in music archives can be unique. For instance, many archives need to remediate PDFs, but music archives will need to remediate PDFs that are music scores, so common solutions will not work for them. To identify accessibility barriers and locate practical ways to repair them, I conducted a Qualtrics survey; this lightning talk presents an overview of the survey’s preliminary findings. 

The survey examines: what disabled music archive users are searching for, what music archivists think users are searching for, what language preferences and expectations both groups hold, what accessibility needs users have, and how aware of/prepared to handle them archivists are. Due to IRB limitations, participants were U.S.-based. To locate participants, I posted participation calls in targeted groups and listservs, sent calls directly to potential participants, and employed snowball sampling. 

Ultimately, this project’s goal is to provide archivists with tools that can help them make real-world change for Disabled archive users (Cleaver et al., 2010; Kitchin, 2000) and to repair the damages created by inaccessibility. Particularly as new legal requirements around web accessibility have come into effect in the U.S., music archivists are looking to conduct reparative work on their collections and online archival spaces. Findings from this survey will help them do just that.

References

• Cleaver, S., Ouellette‐Kuntz, H., & Sakar, A. (2010). Participation in intellectual disability research: A review of 20 years of studies. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 54(3), 187–193. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2788.2010.01256.x 

• Kitchin, R. (2000). The researched opinions on research: Disabled people and disability research. Disability & Society, 15(1), 25–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687590025757 

Presentation materials

Materials forthcoming!