Access Statement

Our Approach to Access

We believe that honest communication is one of the most important forms of access there is. 

In that spirit, here's the access you can expect from the Remote Access Archive.

Oral History Interviews

Every oral history in the Remote Access Archive is transcribed and available in both Word and PDF documents. Each transcript has a cover page with the name or pseudonym of the interviewee, the date the interview took place, keywords within the transcript, and the interviewee's location.

All oral history interviews are available in text-based transcript form. A selection of oral histories will be released via audio on the Contra* podcast. If you require audio or video form you can email RemoteAccessArchive@gmail.com.

Not all oral history interviews are available in video or audio form because:

• We needed to maintain the anonymity of the interviewee or protect information they shared.
• We offered interviewees the option of making edits to their interview transcript to ensure that the interview accurately reflected their intentions. If the edits were significant enough that the audio and video content does not match the transcript text we have chosen to hold back the audio and video.

Documents Held By the Remote Access Archive

Documents held by the Remote Access Archive are always available in Word form. Many people who sent the archive documents provided both PDFs and Word versions. If we received PDFs then we have created a screen reader accessible Word version. Any Word versions of documents that we created contain an access statement documenting any differences between the PDF and Word versions.

We also have developed descriptive transcripts of video art held by the Remote Access Archive.

Links to Material Hosted By Other Archives and Other Platforms

The Remote Access Archive links to a number of other platforms, including other archives and websites. Where possible we have provided screen reader accessible versions, particularly descriptive transcripts of videos hosted elsewhere. We have not provided screen reader accessible versions of pdfs hosted on other websites.

Contact

If you have questions about the Remote Access Archive's approach to access, please contact project manager, Kelsie Acton at KelsieActon@gmail.com.

If you need an alternative form of anything in the Remote Access Archive, please contact Aimi Hamraie at RemoteAccessArchive@gmail.com.

Please allow at least two weeks for a response. If you can expect a longer reply, an out of office email will let you know the timeline.

The Limits of Remote Access

It's a cliche in disability culture to say that nothing is ever fully accessible. But disabled people know that this isn't an excuse. It's not a reason to throw up your hands at the inaccessibility of the world and do nothing. Rather, the limits of access is a call to do something, but in doing it, name what you are doing and what you are not doing. In naming our limits we can understand the work that needs to be done in the future. In that spirit, these are the limits of the Remote Access Archive.

Limits of Crowdsourcing

The Remote Access Archive documents the ways disabled people and their communities past and present have used technology to connect, create culture, work, learn and socialize. This mirrors the way the Critical Design Lab and the Remote Access Archive team works. We use remote access to study remote access. This creates limits and absences in the archive.  

The Remote Access Archive is in English, and most of the people we spoke to were part of our disability community networks in North America. We took a "crowdsourcing" approach, which means that our documentation is limited to those who freely volunteered it. Remote access does not work for everyone, and we have tried to document that whenever possible.

Limits of Digital Divides

Digital divides are real and constantly evolving, meaning that there is unequal access to hardware, software, internet, information, and communication. Digital divides have a particular impact on Deafblind people, Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing people, blind people, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, people whose first language is not English, low-income disabled people, and institutionalized and incarcerated people. 

The vastness of digital space, and limitations of documentation surrounding analogue technologies, mean that there are many absences in the archive. Put simply, if we archived the entire internet, we would still not have a complete archive of disabled remote access. There are limits to the time, energy and resources we could dedicate to creating this archive. 

We want to mark these absences in the archive in its current form, and identify them as areas for future research to focus.