[This is a joint post by Jen Guiliano, assistant director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and George H. Williams, associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate.

This post was originally published on September 20, 2012 at ProfHacker.]

Consider this a call to digital humanists generally and more specifically to the project directors (from 34 different projects) who attended today’s Project Directors meeting at the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities:

What is your project doing to address accessibility for people with disabilities?

Today’s meeting is a gathering of project directors from the Digital Humanities Start-up Grants, Digital Humanities Implementation Grants, and the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities competitions. Each project gets just three minutes and three powerpoint slides to introduce their project and their concerns, so we’re taking the liberty of publishing a blog post as a follow-up.

Over the last several decades, scholars have developed standards for how best to create, organize, present, and preserve digital information so that future generations of teachers, students, scholars, and librarians may still use it. What has remained neglected for the most part, however, are the needs of people with disabilities. As a result, many of the otherwise most valuable digital resources are useless for people who are–for example–deaf or hard of hearing, as well as for people who are blind, have low vision, or have difficulty distinguishing particular colors.

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