Here’s my slides and speaking notes.
Hello, my name is Tara Robertson. I am from Vancouver, Canada which is the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Unceded means that the land was never sold, given, or released to any colonial government. In Canada we’re thinking a lot about relationships between settlers and First Nations in many areas of society, including education.
I am mixed race and queer, which means I’ve had a lot of life experiences where I don’t fit. Often being a misfit means that I’ve had a first hand personal view of power and group dynamics.
This month I changed careers and am part of the Diversity and Inclusion team at Mozilla, the organization that fights to keep the internet healthy, open, and accessible to all. Firefox Quantum launches on Tuesday, and if you’re not already using it as your web browser, you really should.
In most social situations, I think it’s always interesting to observe:
- Who is in the room?
- Who is at the table?
- Who speaks a lot?
- Who has social capital?
- Who feels welcome?
- Whose ideas are respected and centered by default?
I think even more interesting is to note:
- Who is missing?
- Who isn’t even in the room?
- Who doesn’t have a seat at the table?
- Who is sitting on the margins?
- Who doesn’t feel welcome?
- Who has to fight to have their viewpoints respected?
I think this simple question is useful to keep in mind as we move into the do-a-thon tomorrow.
I’m going to share 2 short examples with you to illustrate this point.
The first example I want to talk about is how I got involved in open textbooks.
For the last 5 years I was the Accessibility Librarian for an organization that serves students with print disabilities at 20 colleges and universities. We digitized their print textbooks and learning materials into digital and accessible versions. In Canada, students with disabilities can register with their Disability Service Office at their university. Students need to provide medical documentation or a psycho-educational assessment. Then they meet with a disability counselor who looks at the documentation, the academic program objectives and the course syllabus and then figures out what barriers exist and what the necessary accommodations are. All of this takes time, and often students with print disabilities don’t have access to the course materials until a couple of weeks after their classmates.
When I heard about the British Columbia open textbook project I saw an opportunity for us to move from remediating things that were broken to inserting ourselves at the beginning of the publishing workflow to make things that were accessible to everyone from the start.
As part of this process we worked with BCcampus and a group of students with print disabilities to test some of the first open textbooks that had been produced in British Columbia. Working with a group of students who were visually impaired or blind highlighted some access issues that we w