#93: Most American Spanish-speakers don't care about the flag of Spain

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If you have third-party services (a self-check machine, a computer reservation system, etc.) that offer languages other than English, check and see if there’s an icon representing each language option. If there is, and there’s one for Spanish, check with the vendor to see if you have the option to customize what the icon looks like. It’s very common for vendors to use the flag of Spain for Spanish, which isn’t intuitive for most American Spanish-speakers (imagine having to select a picture of the flag of Great Britain to get an English option). If possible, find out where the plurality of Spanish-speakers in your area have roots, and swap the Spanish flag out for Mexico, Puerto Rico, or whatever is most likely to suggest ‘that’s intended for me’ to more of your particular patrons.

#90: Curbside service raises new barriers

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Your library may be one of many that is temporarily changing its service model to keep staff and patrons safe during the coronavirus public health crisis. If you are currently keeping patrons out of the library building and instead offering a drive-through holds pickup service, find a few minutes to make sure this new service is as accessible as possible. Things to consider:

  • Do you have a plan for serving patrons without cars who will need to bike up or walk up to the pickup point?

  • Have signs/instructions/marketing materials for this new service been created in all the languages used by your patrons?

  • If your plan involves patrons calling the library, do you have a system for people who are Deaf or who otherwise can’t communicate in a standard telephone call?

  • If you’re not providing this service during all of the library’s usual operating hours, do the hours of service include a variety of times so that those who work have more options for accessing it?

#89: Allow proxy borrowing

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Most libraries will let you use any library card in your possession without checking identification, but it would also be helpful for many patrons to have someone authorized to access the library on their behalf even without the card. Consider allowing proxy borrowers like the Forbes Library in Northhampton, MA or using hold release forms like many Michigan libraries. This helps, for example, the patron who can come to the library herself when she has someone to drive her but who needs her son to pick up her items when she doesn’t have transportation, or the patron on chemotherapy who likes to come visit the library on just the right day between treatments, but who needs to send his friend to pick out some cheerful movies on his worse days.

#86: Lurk on a relevant forum

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You might not currently have a regular patron with a particular disadvantage as far as library access, but that could change at any time and you need to be prepared. If you don’t have, for example, someone who is visually impaired who can advise you about your library right now, check out an online forum such as https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/ and listen to what people who are visually impaired have to say to each other about dealing with access challenges in public places like yours. When you can, try to listen respectfully to existing conversations rather than asking people to answer your specific questions—the forums you will find most easily will likely be full of people who don’t belong to the group dropping in to try and use the people there as a sounding board for a question that’s already been asked many times, then disappearing once they’ve gotten the information they need.

#85: Get a free 'consultant'

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If you work in a multi-location library system, get a coworker from another location to come visit your library for an hour and look for areas where you could do better as far as accessibility goes. If you work in a single-location library, get a friend (ideally a library worker, but not necessarily) to do the same. No matter how hard you work, someone seeing your space with fresh eyes will notice barriers that you’ve acclimated to.

#83: Make sure your vendors do their part

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There is such a thing as a ‘voluntary product accessibility template’ (VPAT) that is sometimes part of a contract between a library system and a vendor that sells databases. A VPAT documents a technology’s current conformance (or lack thereof) with accessibility standards. Advocate for your library system to make it policy that all vendor contracts include a VPAT, or some other language that states what a vendor’s commitment to accessibility is. Even better, advocate for policy to be that all vendors must comply with a certain accessibility standard in order for the library to do business with them at all.

#80: Use a cool tool to make your writing easier to understand

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We use a lot of complicated words in brochures, signs, and other writing you might find at a library, for example: “prohibited,” “access,” “circulation,” and “reshelve.” Lots of people will have trouble with terms like those, from people have a first language other than English to people with cognitive disabilities, not to mention children. It can be hard to figure out which words might be problems when you are so used to them, but fortunately there are some neat tools on the internet that can help you. I like the Hemingway App. It points out hard words and sentences that are too long and gives you a readability score.

#79: Holiday closures may not be obvious

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If you have library users who are immigrants or who are otherwise isolated from the dominant culture in your area, make sure that you advertise any holiday closures extensively and far in advance. For example, many American libraries will be closed today in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Although this is a federal holiday, it’s likely to come as a surprise to the patron who arrived from Mexico six months ago and was counting on being able to come in and print out the lease agreement for his new apartment today.

#78: Find somewhere for laundry or a shower

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A common issue with patrons who are homeless is that they don’t have much access to showers or to washers to clean their clothes. You may end up having to ask someone to leave the library for the day because the way they or their belongings smell is interfering with other people’s use of the library, and it’s easier on everyone if at the same time you can point them to somewhere free they can remedy the problem.

#74: Make plans for a kid left behind at closing

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Hopefully, your library already has a procedure in place for what staff are supposed to do if the library closes and there is a child who has not been picked up. Obviously, safety has to come first in this procedure, but an important secondary consideration is what the experience will be like for the kid. Being left at closing is scary for little kids, but also often pretty embarrassing for older kids, who understand that their family is inconveniencing the library staff and that staff members are likely making judgments about them and their family because this has happened. Try to create a procedure that minimizes awkwardness for the kid, and reassures them and their family that they will not only be welcome back at the library in the future, but that they will not be treated differently.

#72: Shelve materials at an appropriate height

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A typical shelving unit in a public library is likely to be somewhere in the range of 8 feet high, if not higher, and to have shelves that go down almost to the floor. Try to avoid using the lowest and highest shelves as much as possible, since both are hard to access. If you must use one or the other, choose which one with your audience in mind: Children’s books should be closer to the ground since a three-foot-tall person can’t get things off a five-foot-high shelf, and adult fiction might be better off higher since it’s hard for many adults to bend or squat down to reach items that are low to the ground.

#70: Ask for a designated adult

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Not every kid who visits the library has a mom or a dad, let alone both. If you need to talk to an adult in order to help a child, instead of asking if their mom or dad is there with them, ask something more general, such as “Do you have an adult with you?,” “Is the person who takes care of you here?” or “Can I talk to your designated grown-up?”

#69: Identify a seated reference space

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Even with older desk setups where it’s more likely for the staff person to be seated at a sitting-height desk, in general, library service points are set up so that the patron has to stand the whole time they are being helped, which may be a problem. If you have a seated-height service point, know what chair you will bring over for a patron to join you. If you have a standing-height service point, identify somewhere else in the library you could go to assist a patron who needed to sit, ideally somewhere with a comparable level of privacy.

#68: Watch out for Christmas parties

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If you work at a library in the United States, your library is likely to be planning some kind of “holiday” party for children this time of year. Think about what this will include and how you are marketing it. If you can do a “winter party” instead, that’s ideal. Consider crafts, decorations, and advertising featuring white and blue, snowmen, bears, penguins, snowflakes, ice skates, sledding, and cocoa. However, if what your library will actually be doing is a program featuring red and green, reindeer, Santa, ‘ornaments,’ and strings of multi-colored lights, call it a Christmas party. A “holiday” party that just uses the word as a euphemism for “Christmas” sets non-Christian families up for frustration and disappointment and essentially erases the fact that other holidays are indeed celebrated in December.

#66: Get a helpful critique

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Ask a favorite colleague to listen to you work at the reference desk for a little while and give you feedback on anything you might be doing that accidentally intimidates patrons or makes them feel like they are not the library’s target audience. Do you respond to a question about a nonfiction book by giving someone a Dewey Decimal number, which assumes they know how to use the Dewey system? Do you tell someone not to worry because their fine is “only” ten dollars, when ten dollars might be a really significant sum to some of your patrons? Even when you’re really well-intentioned, it can be easy to fall into patterns of speech that can be off-putting or discouraging to patrons.

#64: Replace "ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls"

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While gender binaries probably aren’t very common in your everyday speech at the reference or circulation desk, you may still find yourself asking “ladies and gentlemen” to give a round of applause for a performer, or welcoming “boys and girls” to storytime. This is uncomfortable and unwelcoming for anyone who doesn’t identify as one of those two categories, or who does but who is often misread by other people as far as which one they belong to. If you have a script for welcoming people to a program, even if it’s only a mental habit rather than a written document, practice replacing those phrases with more inclusive ones like “Hello, everyone!” or “Okay, friends, now it’s time to sit down for storytime.” It may feel silly, but practicing aloud can help you stick with the new phrasing rather than reverting to something more familiar when you’re actually up in front of patrons.