Introduction

While most libraries in the United States are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), they are not necessarily accessible enough, or accessible at all, to those with disabilities, even when the buildings conform to the law. The ADA is a national law in the US that seeks to create more equal opportunities and treatment of people with disabilities. Codified within the law are requirements such as that all public buildings should have accessible entrances and bathrooms. While it is easy to say that libraries should make more efforts to provide services for people with disabilities and different access needs, in this time of economic uncertainty, all departments in the library have multiple competing priorities and a dearth of funding. Even if funding were not a major issue, competing priorities certainly are. The prevailing unspoken attitude tends to be that as long as the library is accessible for most people and is at least ADA compliant, than accessibility for all is not a tier-one priority. This chapter explores how new literacies can play a role in challenging such complacency and improving library access for people with disabilities. Librarians tend to be a forward-thinking group of people when it comes to technology; they are often early adopters and are used to considering ways in which technology can improve access to information. From here, this chapter argues, it is a relatively small step to using new literacies to change the very way that we think about accessibility.

The chapter starts with an overview of disability issues in relation to library provision. It then examines how the new literacies required to interact with digital media and, in particular, Lankshear and Knobel's (2006) notion of ‘mindsets’, might be a means to challenge prevailing attitudes. Building on this theory, a number of practical approaches are described. These include both general suggestions that might apply to a range of disabilities and examples of methods suited to particular conditions.