Creating Accessible Digital Images for Vision Impaired Audiences and Researchers

In 1992, the UN has designated December 3rd each year as the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, an effort that aims to promote the rights and well-being of people with disabilities in all aspects of life. Under the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the rights and wellbeing of people with disabilities should be universally accepted and protected. While a laudable goal, thirty years later, we find that these protections are not being met in the museum sector or in the scholarly journals that focus on that work. Curator: The Museum Journal has acknowledged our failure to live up to the spirit of accessibility and continues to work to rectify these deficits in the coming year.Discussion of image accessibility is common in the discourses around social media, and the fields of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction, the same cannot be said for the cultural sector. The UK ‘Heritage Access' report (VocalEyes, 2022) demonstrated that digital access to cultural institutions for vision impaired, D/deaf, and neurodivergent users remains very low. They find that information continues to be communicated in ways that are inaccessible, despite the rapidly increasing digital presence of cultural institutions that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. Similarly, the ‘State of accessible publishing in the UK' report (PAAG, 2022) revealed that only a small minority of publishing institutions implemented and integrated accessibility into their workflow and their organizations.