Emm's Digital Library

Reading Margaret Price’s, “Un/shared Spaces,” was enlightening to say the least. In my mind, I obviously know that accessibility is more than just wider doors or ramps and elevators, but Price expanded that meaning tenfold. Being a student at MSU, her argument that academic spaces reflect who they are built and meant for, is one that really struck me. Her of examples of inaccessable things, like impromptu meeting places and other physical layouts of campuses are always sending rhetorical messages and implying whose bodies and minds get to belong there. When thinking about this concept in terms of digital spaces, I realize how much online environments carry these same unconscious messages. Any sites that don’t have alt text, readable or convenient formats, or any type of transcripts for audio, pretty evidently assumes that everyone navigates these spaces in the way that the creator does. From Price’s reading, it becomes clear that online spaces should be more aware of a communal spatial responsibility. Digital forums should always anticipate a wide range of readers and not be so narrow-minded by using elements like small text, confusing or overwhelming pages, no captions, etc. This reading made me realize that online spaces are so often made without the idea of people who need different things in mind.

After taking a look back at my own blog, I tried to view it as an outside reader that may have different needs than I do. This was eye-opening to say the least. Some aspects of my blog are pretty accessible with simple formatting, easy to read fonts, and the navigation is pretty straightforward. But, there was also a lot of instances where my blog was unintentionally excluding many readers. All of my images had no alt-text, which would make it impossible for readers using screen readers to access the images and have that extra layer of meaning in my blog. There was also some videos that featured no captions or written descriptions, which is not good. My blog unintentionally excludes any readers with vision or hearing impairments or neurodivergent tendencies. Price’s argument about exclusion being more structural and not necessarily intentional hit close to home on my blog.

After looking back at my blog, I made several changes in attempt to make it more accessible for everyone. I went back and updated all of my images to have alt-text that’s relevant to their purpose on my blog. The ones needed for context, I wrote with descriptive captions and the images on my page that are solely decorative, I captioned them as such. I also made sure that none of my links added to my blog were vague in nature, like simply saying ‘click here’. These were altered to more intentional, descriptive phrases. By actually updating my blog and its posts, I’ve become much more aware of how my writing can be impacted by my design choices. Making these changes made me feel better in creating a space that anticipates different types of bodies and minds, instead of just one type of reader. Accessibility is more obvious to me now in the ways that it’s an ongoing attention to how we create sites for others, like Price continuously emphasizes.