Access: A Tale of Two Jobs
I have had lots of jobs in my adult life, but for our purposes, I’m going to talk about two of them. One in generalities, the other very specifically. The latter story gets me pushback in professional spaces. It’s a time when my personal identity comes in conflict with the professional one I’m expected to project.
I can’t just leave my personal identity at the door. That comes with me. This is something people with any marginalization deal with. We all have lots of stories about personal microaggressions (and macro, if I’m being honest), and stories about discrimination against others we’ve witnessed. This one haunts me. But first, the (oftentimes) good.
Immediately after college, I worked at Disneyland. Love it or hate it, one thing is very true: it’s one of the most accessible places in the world. At Disneyland, it’s not an afterthought: it’s baked in. Recently they’ve even modernized all of their queues to be wheelchair accessible. There have been some recent difficulties with the update to their Disability Access Service; more in a bit.
But all told, if you are disabled and you’re looking for a vacation, it is widely known that Disney properties are serious about access, about food safety, about things that nondisabled people take for granted but we have to think about: a place to store medications that require refrigeration. Service dog relief areas. ASL interpretation for shows and experiences that rely heavily on dialogue.
For the most part, it’s not treated like a burden. They will bring some rides to a stop to transfer riders who need more time. It is built into the experience.
This is not an endorsement or an ad. I myself went to Disneyland in my wheelchair and had a…not joyous time due to things like the absolutely exploitative Genie plus system. There are of course lots and lots of stories of ableism from individual workers and guests, and the new Disability Access Service is…not great. You have to have an interview with a cast member to explain your need, and if you’re approved, you get basically one appointment where you can skip a line. This is geared heavily toward people with sensory difficulties and doesn’t take into account things like ulcerative colitis, where you might have trouble waiting in a line because you don’t know when you might need to find a bathroom.
But the fact remains, they do consider disabled people when they go to build something. They consider how to make things not just accessible, but fun. Because the whole point of the thing is to provide a good experience for everyone. Individual facets of discomfort aside, that hasn’t much changed.
Well, until COVID.
For those of us who are high risk (and there are a lot more of us than you know), going into crowded places where people don’t mask is a nightmare. For me, at the time a library worker who swore never again to work a corporate job in large part because of my experiences at Disneyland, it was and remains horror upon horror. Disneyland does not require masking, and as such, should no longer be considered accessible. But publicly funded places? That should be a different story.
Our system forced us to reopen our doors after months of providing curbside service. At the beginning, it was very measured, based on the science of the time. Despite most of the staff being unhappy about reopening, we were able to accept masked people, a few at a time, coming in to check out their books or use the computers and leave. I, already having contracted long COVID from the crush of people who arrived on our last open day prior to lockdown, was apprehensive, but I felt that the guidelines were at least trying to keep people safe.
One by one, the guidelines loosened in direct defiance of the science. The library leaned on the policies of the state, largely to avoid critique. Political pressure led to the state abandoning disabled and high risk people a bit at a time, until at last, the mask mandate fell.
Personally, it was like a horror movie. We’d been told that the mandate would be lifted on the first of the month. I made plans to keep calm and talked to my coworkers about their plans. Many of them said they intended to keep masking. Imagine my surprise when I came in on the thirty first to a bunch of smiling, naked faces. “They lifted it a day early!”
I had been used to policies diverging from science, but I wasn’t prepared for how thoroughly my colleagues would embrace that. I found myself looking for somewhere to go in private to calm down and went to the meeting room that had been out of use during the whole pandemic. In the dark, two unmasked colleagues sat having a meeting. “What’s wrong?” One asked, grinning.
It was, I think, the first time I realized that high risk individuals had been completely abandoned in society. It was hard to come to terms with that in an industry that prides itself on its equity.
Libraries are for everyone is a rallying cry and an ideal, but disabled employees know it’s often not the case on our end. I alone dealt with policies and pushback from HR on necessary accommodations, and just about every disabled employee I knew dealt with similar.
On the patron end, attempts were usually made to accommodate, and improvements disabled employees and members of the public suggested for accessibility were often implemented.
Except for when it came to COVID-19. I had begrudgingly come to accept that as an employee, I wasn’t considered high enough priority to care about my risk. That’s just the nature of being an employee in our capitalist society, and especially disabled ones.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the crying patron.
Usually when I saw someone in distress at the library, I would observe, see if they wanted to be left alone, and then gently inquire if there was something I can do. In this case, the mother, standing in the children section, saw my mask and my wheelchair and came to me.
She explained that her daughter had just had surgery. Cancer, she said, and my heart always breaks when kids with cancer come up, but it shattered completely knowing what I know about the risks of COVID are to people undergoing chemotherapy. She looked at me and told me that up until the week before, she had been comfortable bringing her daughter to check out books because everyone here was masked, and they could choose a low traffic time to come. Now, she told me, I was the first person she’d seen masked this whole time, and it broke her that her daughter couldn’t come to the library, something that gave her joy. She said she’d come to pick something out for her, but couldn’t get past the fact that a week ago, she could have chosen her own books.
We did that. We shut her out. It was accessible the week before, and then it wasn’t, in an ongoing global pandemic.
I told her frankly that I would do everything I could to escalate this, but her voice would go further than mine. I saw that she put in a passionate plea in the library’s email ticket system, and saw that it had gone to the director, and hoped.
I didn’t just do that. I told her story to anyone I could get to listen, at the branch level, in admin. I told my mentor and cried with her. I reached out to the team in charge of handling overhauling our system’s lagging diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. I hoped my story, her story, together, would get a tiny concession of one hour a week of vulnerable patron time.
Her ticket closed without an official response, and I thought perhaps they’d given her a phone call. A little while later, the public services director came to “answer questions we had about moving forward.” I brought up the patron and a request for vulnerable patron hours, and she turned sharply to me and cut me off. “We can’t make everyone happy.”
And that was it. That was the policy. I spoke furiously to a supervisor afterwards, who was used to getting my fire about access issues. She said, “Well, they can use curbside. Pick out books at home and mom can come pick them up. It’s a reasonable accommodation.”
But what the library doesn’t get that Disney intrinsically did is it’s not about satisfying legal expectations. It’s about treating disabled people like humans who deserve the same basic experience their nondisabled family members can expect to enjoy. Part of the librarygoing experience is lingering in the stacks, perusing our own books. Something that gave a little girl undergoing cancer treatments in the middle of a pandemic a lot of joy, that we could easily supply.
But we chose not to. It’s actually not even about the basic enjoyment, it’s about getting the same opportunity that a nondisabled person has to look through books.
I gave kind of a jokey presentation for the DEI group about basic access issues in the library, because a lot of nondisabled people don’t wrap their heads around why certain guidelines are the way they are.
Here I am, showing off why we have lower desks in our libraries and should use them if possible instead of the standing ones. I am also the sickest I have ever been in this photo. I had a second case of COVID (contracted at work), and I gained heart problems, crushing fatigue, fainting, and cognitive difficulties that prevent, among other things, reading.
And I told my coworkers plainly: that was the desk where a mother cried to me that we kept her daughter out. If we are serious that libraries are for everyone, we need to consider access not a legal requirement to fulfill, but an essential part of our mandate. Bake it into our foundation. I’d seen the effects of what that was like, when people with medical problems were given the same opportunity for joy (the foundation of what Disney is meant to sell) as everyone else. If equal access is what the library is about, it needs to mean it.
I left my job at the library some months later to go first on medical leave, then try to get disability. It has not gone well. In considering returning to libraries in a lower capacity, I have had to grapple with this friction between who I am and what I need and the reality of library work today. The fact that I’ve written this probably won’t help in our new anti-DEI environment. I can’t bring myself to care.
Are libraries actually for everyone?