Sharing Disabled Wisdom: Five Moves Toward Composing Conference Accessibility Guides

Contributors: Katie Bramlett, Margaret Fink, Ruth Osorio, and Ada Hubrig
Affiliation:  California State University East Bay, University of Illinois Chicago, Old Dominion University, Sam Houston State University
Email: makabramlett at gmail.com, mfink3 at uic.edu, rosorio at odu.edu, axh151 at shsu.edu ​​​​​
Published: Issue 30.2 (January 2026)
DOI: 10.7940/M330.2.PRAXISWIKI.BRAMLETT

Introduction: Moving through Access Guides

When preparing for a conference, attendees submit their registrations, book lodging, figure out how to get from point A to point B in an unfamiliar city or how to log onto a new digital interface. On top of all that, disabled people often have additional tasks on their preparation to-do list: Will going to the bathroom before a roundtable mean needing to present through brain fog, set off by the strong fragrance of bathroom cleaner? Are there wheelchair-accessible restaurants in the area, so there’s something to suggest to colleagues who want to catch up? Where can one go on a bad pain day for some quiet alone time? Will the lighting situation trip a migraine that must be nursed for days in a darkened hotel room? Will someone’s text-to-speech software operate smoothly on the virtual conference interface? This additional labor of researching, asking about, and advocating for access is often called access labor, and it represents one of the most tangible ways our professional spaces are inequitable for disabled scholar-teachers (Hamraie, 2017). Day in and day out, this access labor accrues and can lead to what Annika Konrad (2021) has framed as access fatigue, "the everyday pattern of constantly needing to help others participate in access, a demand so taxing and so relentless that, at times, it makes access simply not worth the effort."

Conference access guides are a key tool for redistributing access labor from the disabled individual to the collective of conference organizers and attendees, disabled and nondisabled. Conferences demand excessive energy, research, and preparation from disabled people, and yet, conferences are commonplace for the academic journey (Price, 2009). We are expected to present, network, and engage with other work at conferences to further our research and scholarship. Conferences are both inaccessible and inevitable, a reality that inspired Margaret Price to write the first-ever Access Guide for the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in 2011 (Osorio, 2022). The guide reviewed access barriers and obstacles in the conference city, Atlanta, as well as the conference space itself, featuring more a textual guide and a linked photo gallery. By compiling access information into one document, CCCC attendees were able to quickly access the needed information to plan their trip, conserving the energy typically expended on scrambling a contact to make accessibility arrangements, or researching throughway dimensions and service animal policies.

What began in CCCC as a local grassroots effort has evolved into an organizational responsibility and annual expectation across the field. Since Price’s 2011 guide, an access guide detailing the access barriers and affordables at the host city and conference site has become an annual occurrence at CCCC. We the co-authors are familiar with these shifts in practices because we’ve written access guides in various contexts and locations:

• Katie was the graduate assistant to the Directors of the Rhetoric Society of America 2019 Summer Institute. Katie individually researched and wrote the accessibility guide with help from Ruth and other campus representatives as guidance. This was a paid position.
• Margaret chaired the Accessibility Committee for the 2020 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), a national conference that was planned as an in-person conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but was canceled because it coincided with the advent of COVID-19. This iteration of the Accessibility Guide built on years of precedents and included a separate, more developed "Building a Culture of Access" section about accessible presentation practices. In 2023, Margaret chaired the Accessibility Committee for the CCCC again when it was hosted in Chicago.
• As part of the conference planning committee, Ada worked as a sole volunteer to create the first Access Guide for the Conference on Community Writing in 2021, which was online because of COVID.
• Ruth chaired the Accessibility Committee for the 2019 Mid-Atlantic Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). With a team of four unpaid volunteers, the committee composed the first access guide for a regional CCCC conference. The guide has since been revised and replicated at other ODU conferences. She has served as a co-chair of the Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition (CDICC) since 2021, and in that role, she recruits, mentors, and advocates for CCCC access guide writers.

Because each of our experiences represent different organizational contexts, modes, and locations, we foreground our unique personal experiences of access guide writing throughout this wiki. There is no one way to compose an access guide, and the varying constraints, resources, and embodied needs of the writers will shape how disability advocates approach this task. Through our written testimonies and video conversation, we offer broad movements as a place to start, coupled with individual stories of the diverse and divergent practices of access guide writing.

The expansion of this practice serves an important role in creating a culture of access in writing studies. Ada Hubrig and Ruth Osorio (2020) define a culture of access as one that "embeds access into the fabric of academic practices, allowing scholar-teachers of rhetoric and composition to create spaces that value disabled bodyminds." Access benefits everyone because it allows us to connect and share knowledge. A culture of access affirms the value of disabled participants’ contributions, starting from the understanding that we all lose when access issues exclude some of us (Fink et al., 2020). Access guides are just one step in moving away from the expectation that access barriers are problems for individual disabled people to solve, and moving toward a shared responsibility for co-creating accessibility. Lauren Cagle, co-writer for the 2015 CCCC Access Guide in Tampa, argues that accessibility guides can "produce something that frees up time and space for disabled people to engage in the other kinds of self-advocacy they might need to do" (qtd. in Osorio, 2022). This freeing can facilitate wisdom-sharing amongst disabled and nondisabled scholar-teachers. Access is an institutional responsibility, and the moves we share here can help move our field’s professional gatherings toward a more accessible community that embraces the presence of disabled scholar-teachers.           

We want to offer a few cautions about the role of access guides in our efforts to interrupt academic ableism (Dolmage, 2017). As disability studies scholars and disability justice activists have insisted, access cannot be achieved by a single move: It is a complex, ongoing process (Brown, 2016; Hubrig, 2021; Hubrig and Osorio, 2020; Mingus, 2010; Wood et al., 2014; Yergeau, 2016). As we work together to develop a culture of access in our professions, access guides are a critical move, but they do not fulfill institutional obligations for access. Another caution: the work of writing an access guide is often substantial and uncompensated, and it’s often incompletely integrated into conference planning processes. We urge conference organizers to include access guide writers in local arrangements discussions, provide material support (stipends, conference organizers, staff or other support), recognize the labor in multiple venues, and provide documentation of the writers’ labor for tenure, promotion, and job market files. 
                                                
As authors of this Praxis Wiki and authors of conference access guides, we are delighted that access guide writing is becoming a more common practice. Disabled and nondisabled scholars are recognizing the value and necessity of taking on information-gathering work and access labor to interrupt academic ableism in our professional spaces. But we also know all too well the lack of theory and practical wisdom on creating guides. To address this gap, we draw on our own, first-person experiences creating access guides to outline the moves necessary to notice and communicate access failures and opportunities in a conference space, physical or virtual.

These moves include five sections:

• Move #1: Preparing for the Audit
• Move #2: Building a Team
• Move #3: Conducting the Audit
• Move #4: Composing the Guide
• Move #5: Wrapping up and Letting Go

Though we list these moves linearly, we envision them as recursive, dynamic, ongoing steps to composing access guides. For each move, we pair disability rhetoric scholarship with our personal stories of applying that scholarship on the ground, highlighting the diverse, and in some cases, disabled, methods we employed in doing this work. In doing so, we hope to highlight that there is no one singular way to write an access guide.

We imagine these moves as starting points, not end goals: We invite you into conversation about creating access. This is why, along with the text of this document, we’ve recorded a series of captioned videos, each centered on a conversation about the moves we identify. Along with the introduction video, we’ve also included a captioned video for each of the above access moves, with each video intended to complement the text and invite you into deeper conversations about access. Each video is captioned, and transcripts are included below each video.

We’ve also included a set of "movements in action" at the end of each section in our web text; while not a summary, exactly, this can serve as something like a "tl;dr" (too long; didn’t read) feature—or a segment that might help you hone in on what section(s) of this web text might be most helpful to you and your current contexts and purposes.

What matters most is approaching access as an institutional responsibility, and the moves we share here can transform our field’s professional gatherings into an accessible community that embraces and encourages participation from those who have been shut out, from disabled scholars and others whose access needs have been too-long ignored. We know (as we speak more about in our conclusion) that access guides in themselves do not solve the issue of inaccess, but we imagine the ways access guides might create community dedicated to access.

Move #1: Preparing for the Audit

Writing an access guide first requires an expansive understanding of access and a thorough audit of the access affordances and barriers in the spaces conference attendees engage with. The Radical Access Mapping Project (n.d.) defines an accessibility audit as the process of "collectively creating useful, accurate, broad-based and up-to-date accessibility information about the physical environment so we can make informed choices about what events and spaces we participate in and support." As more and more conferences integrate virtual platforms, we believe that audits must also include evaluations of the virtual spaces where we engage. No matter the space or modality, guide writers need to know what to look for and how to look for it before assessing the accessibility. That is why we believe the first move in composing an access guide should be learning about radical, expansive frameworks of access—and the best source of that information is disabled people, particularly multiply-marginalized disabled people, with a wide range of disabilities.

In their archived guide for accessible event planning, the folks at Sins Invalid (2017), a performance and activist collective of queer and trans disabled people of color, call for event organizers to think through "the cascade of access barriers in the world and how we can best disrupt them to create 'liberated zones' from disability oppression." By approaching access work as disability liberation work, we can write accessibility guides that go beyond a required document with the bare minimum of information and instead actively invite disabled people to participate in the event as fully and comfortably as possible. To create liberated zones, we urge access writers to think about access not just expansively but also intersectionally. Disabled people can also be people of color, queer people, trans people, etcetera; therefore, access that only considers disability in isolation from other identities only guarantees access for white, cisgender, straight men. Understanding the importance of intersectional approaches to access, disability justice activist Mia Mingus asks, "how are we re-imagining access in ways that include, but are not limited to disability; that encompass class, language, gender, mamas, parents and children?" An expansive, intersectional understanding of access prepares guide writers to observe physical, cultural, and technical features of a space and convey that information to diverse disabled scholar-teachers. 

In our video conversation about Move 1: Preparing for an Audit, Ruth emphasizes the importance of revisiting past access guides, both to see what is included as well as to see what gaps or information might be missing. Ruth also suggests the importance of understanding the lived experiences of disabled people, and especially multiply marginalized disabled people, to consider how disabled people might move through or interact with the conference space.

Movement in Action:

• Katie: As a graduate student in rhetoric, I took a few seminars that included a unit on disability studies, but for the most part I had little knowledge about what an accessibility guide entailed. I tried to view my writing process with an open mind and sought out examples, disability scholars (like Ruth), and campus resources. I had so many enlightening conversations with Ruth that it really helped me to find a starting point and get going. I think going through the resources gathered here would also be a good option to help someone who doesn’t really know what they are doing get a head start.
• Ruth: The first step I did when planning the access guide for the Mid-Atlantic CCCC at Old Dominion University was to study previous access guides closely. I looked at the 2015 CCCC Guide for Tampa frequently. Lauren Cagle and Ellie Browning included information I would have never thought of, like wheelchair lifts in the hotel pool (wheelchair users are entitled to pool time too!) and the locations and dates of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I began to compile the information I really wanted to include in our guide as I was observing the formatting and style. 
• Katie: One thing that I found useful when creating an accessibility guide was going through registration responses about accessibility needs. When our participants registered, they included information about a variety of questions that helped me create a guide that reflected our actual participants' answers. These answers helped give me, a relative newbie to the accessibility guide, a starting point for information that would be helpful and encouraged me to reach out to campus representatives that could help me give accurate information. I felt like this meant I had a more thorough and factual guide and had the knowledge and connections to help participants during the actual event.
• Margaret: I learned so much about what to notice by reading earlier accessibility guides. It was a beautiful experience of learning more about my community's access needs. For example, Margaret Price's guide was the first time I had encountered having information about carpet patterns. When I learned that bold patterns with a lot of contrast can be disorienting, even dizzying, to some folks, it made so much sense, and it's something I've noticed ever since. We know our own access needs best; access guide writing asks us to lean on the cross-disability solidarity we learn by being in community with other disabled people. These lessons in noticing as a form of care accrue and have shifted my encounters with environments—noticing that round door knobs won't work for some of my friends, remembering when someone expressed their deep sense of relief that a fragrance-free conference meant they could think clearly and join in, knowing that this sidewalk would be (literally) the pits for another colleague.

Move #2: Building a Team

As it is probably clear at this point, writing an access guide can be a lot of work. But the good news is that no one has to write one alone. The lived experience of disability necessitates collaboration through interdependence; it’s no surprise, then, that the field of disability rhetoric embraces those same values. Disability rhetoric scholar Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson (2003) sees collaboration as inherent to the production of rhetoric, explaining that rhetoric should be seen as "a collaborative action for specific, interested ends... which in its exercising, mutually constitutes intersubjectivity, agency and interdependency as well as human dignity and caring" (p. 164). Lewiecki-Wilson's definition offers a model for access labor in our field, one that facilitates both collaboration and caring in its quest to dismantle ableist barriers. Through an interdependency model, we see access guides operate as a part of a larger ecology of access labor at a conference, and as such, requires the input and support of multiple actors—not just an individual writer.

In practice, then, to compose an access guide is to compose a team of people invested in access. Sometimes, there will be an official team of volunteers identified to write the guide (a model we recommend). Other times, though, the team will be less formal, consisting of campus staff, community activists, disabled mentors, conference organizers, and friends. Campus disability offices often have detailed measurements and information about physical barriers on campus; cities often have disability, ADA, and 504 experts who compile information on navigating through the city; airports and train stations often feature accessibility information on their websites; hotels and campus housing often have point people with information about measurements and access, as well as people who can give tours for the guide's writer(s). There is no one expert who knows everything about disability and access for every disability experience.

Building a team not only redistributes the labor among a larger crew but it also ensures a more thorough, in-depth access guide, making it more innovative and collaborative, as Katie, Ruth, and Margaret make clear in their video conversation about Move 2: Building a Team. In our video conversation, Katie and Margaret highlight how most of us starting with access labor are novices, learning as we go. To help find grounding, Margaret highlights the usefulness of disability-related listservs and the usefulness of reaching out to professional networks to connect with others who might be more knowledgeable about certain aspects of access labor. Margaret thoughtfully suggests how we might break down tasks and delegate access labor among a larger team, and—as Ruth highlights—every member of the team brings a more expansive view of access rooted in their own experiences.

Finally, we also point to the importance of being mindful of labor inequalities: Disabled, and especially multiply-marginalized disabled people, are already asked to do so much labor for their institutions around disability (often uncompensated and invisibilized: see Cedillo, 2018; Hubrig, 2021; Jackson, 2019). This is especially true of disabled graduate students who are overworked and harmed by structural inequalities in our institutions (Rice-Evans and Stella, 2021). We also highlight the importance of unequal labor dynamics working with adjunct and contingent faculty, echoing Julie Avril Minich (2016), who argues "it is often the most precarious faculty (untenured, disabled, adjunct, and/or temporary) who end up performing access labor." This doesn't mean that people in these positionalities cannot do this work or that access guide writers shouldn't include them on the team (often these are the very people whose insights on access are most needed!), but we highlight the importance of being attentive to the demands placed on disabled peoples' time and energy.

Movement in Action:

• Ruth: When I volunteered to write the access guide for the Mid-Atlantic regional CCCC conference, I also asked for a committee of volunteers to help with that task. I'm so glad I did! I had a great team of graduate students who were eager to learn more about disability, and one who was an expert herself. It was my first semester at ODU, so I was grateful to work alongside people who knew the campus better. Violet, a physically disabled graduate student, offered experiential knowledge about navigating the space with a cane, while the other two graduate students, Meghan and Meg, shared knowledge about areas of campus they knew well. We strove to utilize peer mentorship throughout, contributing when we could and listening when we needed to understand better. 
• Katie: I was a hired graduate student assistant for the Rhetoric Society of America 2019 Summer Institute and one of my assigned tasks was to compose the accessibility guide. While I had teammates that worked with me on other tasks, I worked mostly by myself on the guide. I ended up learning a lot about disability services on campus and was introduced to a variety of issues important for disabled people, but I think the overall process would have been a lot more effective with a team. While my team couldn't have hired anyone, if I had reached out to my department or other campus members for insight and wisdom, I think it would have transformed my guide. At the same time, this could have been yet another task someone might have had to perform that they would not have been compensated for. Looking back, I would reach out to someone on campus and offer to buy them a coffee in exchange for a chat about what is important to them on campus concerning access and what might be useful in a guide.
• Margaret: While I did end up writing up a lot of the accessibility audit for the conference site myself, having a crew of volunteers to collaborate with was so important for a number of elements: I had a site tour partner for at least one pass on both of the Access Guides I did, Annika Konrad for Milwaukee, and Charitianne Williams for Chicago. Annika helped me notice the situation with signage (a lesson I carried forward to the Chicago guide!) and Charitianne was a genius at chatting up the door staff at the hotel to get good info about our patchy experience with the automatic doors. The expansion of the collective access section, "Building a Culture of Access," was a brilliant Google Doc-mediated collaboration around detailing access practices from disability culture and know-how about accessible documents. I am so grateful to the colleagues and accessibility experts that brought that section into being, collaborating remotely before Zoom was even a thing. The teams for the guides effectively extended into the past as well as the future, as subsequent guides re-used that section (also improving it by making an at-a-glance version that offered a lot more readability and cognitive access).

Move #3: Conducting the Audit

To audit a space means to evaluate its accessibility features (or barriers) in order to communicate that information to potential conference attendees. Therefore, the audit is at the heart of composing an access guide. In writing about the accessibility audits conducted by the queer disability student group PISSAR, Isaac West (2010) writes that the auditors "embodied a critical corrective that challenges the devaluation or ignorance of material space in radical democratic theory" (p. 169). By conducting an access audit, access guide writers can similarly embody a "critical corrective" of the inaccessible, often hostile, spaces disabled scholar-teachers are forced to engage with. At its most impactful, conducting an audit is an act of solidarity, doing as much information gathering as possible so that others don’t have to expend their energy in this way. When spaces' accessibility varies, the auditing process itself can be inaccessible, so it’s worth taking time to think about auditors' access needs and building collaborations that involve cross-disability coalition and nondisabled allies.

An audit asks us to perform a spatial analysis through a lens of disability. This is an important aspect to consider when writing an accessibility guide, as

How a space is designed signals who is expected to engage in that space—and who is not. To process this information, the access guide writer learns how to notice disability. The act of noticing the material and affective dimensions of a space is something that many of us learned by being in community with other disabled folks as we move through (or move against) a space. Such awareness is critical for physical and virtual spaces. As we built knowledge amongst diversely disabled people, we began to understand why certain kinds of information about a space provides access. For example, many potential auditors understand that steps would present a barrier to access; yet others may understand that knowing the number of steps can be useful (the difference between a flight of stairs and three steps may produce a different accessibility map for some of us). These kinds of disability wisdom are collected in a number of helpful guides that are grounded in crip practices of building community spaces that care for a wide range of people.

In our video conversation about Move #3, Conducting an Audit, Margaret describes, in detail, her process of conducting an audit, offering insight from her experiences. Margaret suggests how to break down an audit into smaller tasks, reminding that the audit itself can take several hours. Margaret recommends bringing an audit buddy along, thinking about each members’ access needs while conducting the audit. Margaret highlights the importance of learning what to notice, making several helpful suggestions to help conduct an audit. In thinking about digital spaces, Ada makes suggestions about how to conduct an audit of virtual spaces, imagining how we can push back against digital inaccess and create virtual backchannels when necessary.

Movement in Action

• Ruth: For me, going to the space prepared was key. I had a toolbox, including a tape measure and a camera. When I was auditing, I looked at familiar campus spaces with a completely new perspective. For example, I noticed how spaced out the entrance ramps were compared to the steps to the building. It's overwhelming trying to capture all the info I wanted to write the guide, so I took photos of everything I thought could be important, such as doorways, carpet patterns, entrances, ramps, elevators, steps, room set-up, etcetera. When I returned to write the guide, I didn't have to use my memory. I was able to pull so much information from the photos, which also became part of the guide itself.
• Katie: One of the biggest challenges I faced in my auditing process was a lack of access to physical spaces or accurate online information. For example, our conference offered our participants an option to stay in on-campus student housing. However, as I was working during the semester, I wasn't allowed to make an on-site visit. The dorms' website lacked detailed accessibility information and we were not given details about which dorms participants would stay in. Thus, my audit of the dorms began with large scale access concerns. This meant that I had to talk with university housing directors and work with an on-site team. Through these contacts, we were assigned rooms in a specific dorm and the on-site team was able to take photos and measurements. My audit of the dorms required that I not just think about the space where people would be staying, but also meant that I had to work with and navigate the barriers that working with a large institution can entail.
• Ruth: Here’s something I didn't do for the access guide, but I did do with my Feminist Disability Studies class the next year. We conducted an access guide, customizing RAMP’s template for our needs. On the day of the audit, students had brought tape measures, and wow, what a difference those made. We observed several access issues we wouldn't have noticed without those measuring tapes, especially the heights of the directional signs in the hallways, which is important for wheelchair users.
• Margaret: For Milwaukee, my first guide, I was advised to take thorough notes and try my hardest to write up the information as soon after the audit as possible, while the details of the space were still fresh. I printed out five sets of audit worksheets and loaded them into clipboards with measuring tapes attached—and found myself scrambling to cram the audit into a general tour of the site with the NCTE conference team, scribbling wildly on whatever sheaf of paper was on top of my stack and taking a million pictures. Despite the advice I had gotten, I started a new and intense job soon after the audit and my notes sat, available only to me, for a couple of months before I composed the access info section of the Guide. I learned that clearly labeling my notes about access issues and measurements with the location ("conf center, 2nd fl bathroom") and my copious photos were essential, and made the guide possible when I returned to it. I learned that not having the notes in a shareable format was a major barrier to collaboration and getting help—if I did it again, I'd stick to handwriting my notes, but I'd add an intermediate step of making the information I'd gathered electronically shareable, to better bridge the gap between doing the audit and composing the guide.
• Ada: We made abrupt shifts in moving from planning for a conference originally imagined as an in-person conference that was then reconfigured online because of the pandemic. This shift meant access needs changed drastically. Sometimes, when talking with people on the programming and platform side of things, it felt like we were talking different languages. They had previously not considered, for example, the experiences of users interfacing with the conference through screen readers. But just having those conversations together created a huge shift, with us working together to create access.
• Margaret: Sharing accessibility information about audits is an important step for collaborating with other disabled folks to gather accessibility information and craft a guide. Performing an audit can itself be a rather inaccessible endeavor, often involving lots of walking, carrying items, absorbing details, writing things down, navigating spaces that may not be all that accessible, and so on. I also learned, along the way, that people new to doing audits could feel quite overwhelmed and unsure of what to notice. For my audits, I used detailed worksheets adapted from worksheets created by the access guide writers in Pittsburgh. When we toured area restaurants for the Milwaukee 4Cs, I found myself teaching our group to boil the need-to-know info down into a few useability-focused items: Who can get in? What’s it like once you’re inside (seating, lighting, noise)? What’s the bathroom situation?

Move #4: Composing the Guide

The ideal access guide not only includes information about access, but also, the document itself should be accessible and usable to diverse readers across dis/abilities. Scholar-teachers do not engage with texts in the same way: Some read a screen from top to bottom, while others might jump around or listen to a screenreader or read image descriptions closely for the full picture. Here, we echo technical communication scholars such as Jason Palmeri, Lauren Cagle, Ellie Browning, Jared C. Colton, and Rebecca Walton: When we write technical documents, such as access guides, we need to prioritize disability when designing user-friendly texts. As Susan A. Youngblood (2012) explains, "Ideally, a document will not only be accessible to users with disabilities, allowing them to do what they need to do or to get basic information, but it will be usable, providing them with an experience that is effective, efficient, and satisfying." Since differently disabled scholar-teachers will be reading the guide, a critical step in composing a conference access guide is assessing its accessibility and usability (and, we’d argue this is true for all conference texts, even those not pertaining to disability).

In practice, accessible document design means simply that the access guide can be navigated in a multitude of ways by a multitude of people. For scholars who read via screenreader, this means features like alt-text, in which there is a textual description encoded into the image, and heading tags, so that they can skip right to the relevant sections instead of having to read through 80 pages of content. If learning about web accessibility and/or Adobe accessibility features feels overwhelming, we get it! Fortunately, so many resources exist to help incorporate accessibility into the design of the access guide, such as WebAIM, which audits websites and marks access issues, allowing the writer(s) to identify access barriers they didn’t know existed.

In our video conversation about Movement #4: Composing the Guide, Katie discusses her experiences composing an access guide, speaking to the importance of balancing access needs. She uses examples of how to most thoughtfully integrate images into access guides, discussing how imagining access guided her choices. Margaret discusses "meta" concerns, thinking about how we make the guide itself accessible. Margaret discusses the importance of access advisory messages, which help strategically flag certain access concerns. Katie highlights the difficulty with the guide itself being overwhelming in terms of the amount of information, and suggests the importance of making the guide easily navigable so access guide users can more readily find the most relevant information for them.

Movement in Action

• Katie:  As I was composing my RSA guide, I realized that I needed to rethink certain aspects of accessibility. For example, I had never thought about sensitivities to harsh lighting or patterned carpet and realized that the actual space of the conference might be unwelcoming (or worse) for people. Thus, when composing, I tried to make the alt-text below photos engaging as well as descriptive. My goal was to be informative about the environment but do it in a way that seemed inviting or welcoming. I wanted these details to let participants know what to expect and feel like they were welcome on the campus even if they had to navigate physical space that could be unwelcoming.
• Ada: As I contemplated the needs of a digital conference, I found it better to have two guides: one for presenters that outlined access work to do well before the conference date (which was especially important for people uploading their presentations in advance), and a second access guide for conference attendees, with detailed information on how to navigate the online conference platform and its accessibility features.
• Margaret: The conference I was working on in Milwaukee was made up of three interconnected sites with very different accessibility situations, making the "access info" portion of the Guide incredibly long. Considering what it would be like to wade through all of that information, it was crucial to use heading styles in the Google Doc of the accessibility guide to enable readers to jump from a hyperlinked Table of Contents to a specific segment of information. In Chicago, we repeated this approach, but upon publishing the guide, we learned that the Table of Contents–if it included H1, H2, H3, and H4 (H5 even!)—could become overwhelming in its own right. We revised the ToC to include just the first few heading types. Access is relational, iterative, and ongoing!
• Margaret: Another piece of advice: be descriptive as much as possible, rather than jumping too immediately to saying something is or is not accessible. Three steps may be doable for some and a total accessibility barrier for others. For another example, instead of saying a door is accessible or inaccessible, for a guide it’s more useful to know that a door has an automatic door button, or that it is quite heavy. For the guides I worked on I tried to counteract the large amount of granular information with overall summaries at the outset of the guide, which included "access advisories" highlighting particular elements that could pose a significant access issue, so that these details would not get lost in the mix. Examples might be noting that a hotel’s lobby is perfumed, or that certain areas are only accessible via retrofit lifts of dubious size.

Move #5: Wrapping up and Letting Go

Access is a project that is never finished. . . but access guides need to be created ahead of a specific moment. This means that no Access Guide can fully address all access needs, but will eventually need to be circulated. In practice, this means being conscientious of the labor devoted to creating the access guide for the event and setting a date for when the resource will be circulated. As wonderful as any access guide may be, it will be imperfect. As Margaret discusses in our video conversation about Move 5: Wrapping up and Letting Go, the access guide will always be incomplete. Managing expectations about the finished product is a necessary emotional dimension of this work. It is complicated by the often-fraught positionalities access guide creators can find ourselves in, as all of us have access needs—and many of us are disabled—ourselves. We may find we work within institutions that are simply not as committed to intersectional access work, and fail to support this work with the financial or other resources. We may find ourselves advocating for access against a backdrop of institutional ableism. Access guides—while an important and worthwhile endeavor that can open spaces and create access—will always be inadequate in providing access, because they cannot fully address the systematic inequalities institutions are built upon.

While we are hopeful these steps help understand the process of creating guides, we also know that while writing, one may come to realize that there is always one more detail to find—the process can be never ending. Details of a space can be collected ad infinitum. There is always more to note, more to analyze, more to critique. Because our institutions are not yet as accessible as they should be and no guide will be perfect, the process of writing access guides can require emotional and physical labor. With this in mind, we also hope that creators find a stopping place in their creation process that reflects accessibility needs and realizes that it will still be just a step in the process of helping our conferences and spaces be more accessible. Capacity is a parameter too. To help mitigate some of this labor in advance, it’s important to reflect on how writer(s) might handle shortcomings of the guide when and if they arise, as exemplified by the following movements in action.

Movement in Action

• Margaret: For the first guide I worked on, the two major shortcomings stemmed from finite capacity and developing cross-disability solidarity. We never got to the airport to gather information! I felt intensely guilty to not have recruited at least someone else to check it out, but a wonderful colleague, Linda Smith-Brecheisen, volunteered to compile any and all information available online. We approached this section as cutting down on the access labor of navigating multiple internet rabbit holes to figure out transportation, collating broad strokes information and direct links to various transportation accessibility websites to create a one-stop spot.  In terms of cross-disability solidarity, it’s a process, and we are often still learning about access needs different from our own. For Milwaukee, I didn’t yet understand the difference between alt text (which should be quite brief) and image descriptions, and the alt text was terribly long: people listening on screen readers may have gotten cut-off accounts of particular images. For the second guide I worked on, another wrench was that the streets around the conference site were under construction and the access information was changing. I added and maintained a "living document" section at the beginning that noted updates.
• Ada: What I hadn’t anticipated in creating an access guide was how anxiety inducing it would be to finish the guide. I drafted an email to conference organizers with the guide attached that I was unable to send for a week. I agonized over what the guide might be missing, concerned for the ways it would fail disabled people. In conversation with other disabled people, I was reminded that the guide is imperfect, it could still function to create access.

Conclusion: Looking ahead—We Want (Beyond) Better Access (Guides)

At their best, access guides are a love note, providing access to those who have been traditionally pushed out of these shared spaces by ableist institutional logics. The access guides being created for future events can offer more equitable, more just spaces, allowing more people to engage. We four authors are grateful to you—dear reader—for engaging in this collective work of providing access. At their best, Access Guides create and invite others in to disabled community (Hubrig, 2023). We hope you find your labor in creating a culture of access through your access guide to be a positive experience that grounds you in disabled community. And we eagerly anticipate the ongoing evolution of access guides that find new ways to center access needs we’ve yet to imagine.

But access guides do not solve the ableism of institutions, and access guides should also be used to rethink and challenge oppressive institutional and organizational structures (Hitt, 2021). Together, the authors of this piece worry about how these access guides might be co-opted by institutions in ways that stall deeper self-examination and transformation (Hubrig, 2023). Too often, we worry that institutions simply claim they’re "done" with access work, because they have arranged for the creation of such a guide—guides themselves typically created by disabled, multiply marginalized femmes, commonly with no compensation. Patting themselves on the back for being accessible (spoiler: they are not), these same institutions then refuse to examine their own culpability in creating inequalities and systematic oppression—not just limited to the pervasive ableism of these institutions, but their deeply rooted heteropatriarchal, white, and otherwise privileged positionalities as well—including harm done to graduate students, adjunct instructors, and other contingent laborers. We demand more just, equitable spaces, and we demand greater institutional accountability for access—in terms of time, in terms of reciprocity, in terms of money. Our warning to institutions is this: Meet these demands for access—for disabled, BIPOC, queer, poor, femme access—or wither and die. The future is accessible.

In our video conclusion, we discuss our frustrations about access labor and the creation of guides. Ada suggests how the onus of doing access labor should be on the organization, and acknowledges that access guides themselves do not make places accessible. We speak to how access guides don’t fix the inaccess of fields of study, of academia, and of our models of conferences themselves. Ada highlights the importance of being aware of who is asked to do access labor, noting how institutional asks to complete uncompensated access labor are frequently made of multiply marginalized disabled people.

Thank you for thinking about access labor alongside us. As you have read these ideas for accessibility guides, we invite you to join us as we ask institutions to go beyond the bare minimum of accessibility and create a more accessible future. By composing thoughtful, in-depth access guides, we can amplify these demands. We can create a community of care that can transcend the culture of ableist logics. To that end, we collectively imagine how access guides might go beyond providing information and toward changing institutions and building disabled community:

• Local politics, like trans bathroom bans and presence of ICE, can create access barriers for Othered bodies. Access guides can include information about local politics and provide resources for activism, community protection, and safety.
• Advise conference attendees about collective access practices: how can members of a professional community take up the work of making our conferences more accessible in terms of how they present and inhabit the space?
• Here’s an idea from former CCCC Committee on Disability Issues chair, Jay Dolmage: access guides can have stickers that say “THIS IS NOT ACCESSIBLE” that conference attendees can use to draw attention to barriers at the conference. User engagement with the space→ invitation to access activism, critique institutional spaces, and collaboratively rethink access.
• The access guide should be fully integrated with other important conference information; access guides should be considered as essential as hotel and dining information.
• Processes for creating an access guide can build in an awareness of who is asked to take on this labor and how that labor is recognized.

Resources

Theoretical Frameworks of Access

• Ada Hubrig and Ruth Osorio’s CCC symposium, featuring several disabled scholar-teacher perspectives, imagines what an "access as love" approach to conferences might look like, drawing on disability activist Mia Mingus’s work.

Practical Advice for Accessible Events

• Sins Invalid’s Access Suggestions for a Public Event includes both general and specific suggestions for planning accessible events
• Access is Love Project’s Reading List

Digital Accessibility Tools

• PDF Accessibility on Adobe
• How to write good alt-text
• WEB Accessibility in Mind

Example Access Guides:

• 2015 CCCC Access Guide
• 2021 Community Writing Conference Access Guide
• 2019 CCCC Access Guide
• 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Institute Access Guide
• 2023 CCCC Access Guide

References

Brown, Lydia. (2016). Disability justice & conference space: Notes on radical access & radical inclusion. Autistic Hoya. http://autistichoya.com/2016/10/disability-justiceconference-space-notes-on-radicalaccess-radical-inclusion.html.

Browning, Ellie R., & Cagle, Lauren E. (2017). Teaching a “Critical Accessibility Case Study” developing disability studies curricula for the technical communication classroom. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 47(4), 440–463.

Cedillo, Christina. (2018). What does it mean to move? race, disability, and critical embodiment pedagogy.” Composition forum (39). https://www.compositionforum.com/issue/39/to-move.php.

Colton, Jared S., & Rebecca Walton. (2015). Disability as insight into social justice pedagogy in technical communication. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 8.

Dolmage, Jay. (2017). Academic ableism: disability in higher education. University of Michigan Press.

Fink, Margaret, Janine Butler, Tonya  Stremlau, Stephanie Kerschbaum, and Brenda J. Brueggemann. (2020). Honoring access needs at academic conferences through computer assisted real-time captioning (CART ) and sign language interpreting. “Symposium: Enacting a Culture of Access in Our Conference Spaces” edited by Ada Hubrig and Ruth Osorio. College Composition and Communication , 72(1).

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Sins Invalid. (2017). Access suggestions for a public event Web page. Sins Invalid. https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/access-suggestions-for-a-public-event. 

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