National Disability Employment Awareness Event at Fondren Library, Rice University, Oct. 2016
Each year the Fondren Library Accessibility Committee invites Rice’s Disability Support Services Office to participate with us in bringing accessibility information to the library staff and the whole campus. For the 2016/17 year we sponsored two events. On October 12, 2016 to commemorate National Disability Employment Awareness Month, Dr. Josh Eyler, Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Adjunct Associate Professor of Humanities at Rice, presented “Disability and Difference in the Oz Narratives.” He examined L. Frank Baum’s fiction about the land of Oz and the literary and cinematic legacies of the Oz mythology using the lens of Disability Studies.
On November 10, 2016, the Fondren Library User Experience Office joined the Accessibility Committee and Disability Support Services to host “Accessibility and Usability – A celebration at Rice University of World Usability Day” which addressed three topics. Dr. Lewis Maher, who held space science post-doctoral appointments at Rice University and at RadioPhysics Inc. before joining Exxon Production Research, discussed the various technologies that were available to the blind in the period of 1949 through 2016, and the accessibility of the current science environment. Dr. Claudia Ziegler Acemyan, a human factors and human-computer interaction (HCI) postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychology at Rice University, discussed voting system usability, or the study of human behavior and performance while using a particular voting system or product. Andrew Bertics, a junior architecture student, Ethan Chan, a junior art and architecture student, and Kajal Patel , a senior architecture student spoke for the interdisciplinary team of students who designed and implemented the Hangout outdoor learning space, a creative configuration of hammocks between Fondren Library and the Humanities Building.
The World Usability Day event was recorded and is available on Fondren’s YouTube site at https://youtu.be/Vi28nrV7CYg. Our previous World Usability Day recordings are also available: Designing Technology Around the World (2012) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMrinM1-1hM (2012); and Designing for Social Change (2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPHcSn-uDys.
If you have suggestions or issues concerning accessibility in Fondren Library, please contact one of the Accessibility Committee members: Mary Brower, Melinda Reagor Flannery, Debra Kolah, Peggy Shaw, Linda Spiro (Chair), or Jane Zhao. If you are new to Fondren Library or just haven’t visited it in a while, check out our Accessibility Tips LibGuide (http://libguides.rice.edu/accessibility) created when the committee formed to share ideas about disability etiquette, promote awareness of accessibility issues and provide tools for achieving greater accessibility.