#7: Do a non-visual sign check — Library Accessibility

From Emma:

I recently moved to a new branch of the Dallas Public Library system, so I checked out all our room signs as part of getting to know my new building and preparing for a meeting with our Facilities department. I am fortunate to have an excellent, hardworking team who have the respect of the community, take good care of the collection, and maintain a heavy program schedule, so it looks like one of my major areas of focus as branch manager is going to be on our building, which is older and could use some attention and investment if it’s going to meet the community’s needs as well as the staff and collection are meeting them. The building was built in the 1980s, so a lot of the accessibility features that are more common in newer libraries aren’t likely to have been on the radar of the designers at the time.

My building has basically 10 doors of significance that a patron might want to know the labels of: two public restrooms (men’s and women’s), a conference room, a program room, the main exit/entrance doors, and three emergency exits from public areas. There is also a door from the staff area to the public area, but it’s behind the desk where patrons won’t be walking, and a janitorial closet that opens onto the public floor as well as into the staff area.

I checked all these doors (except one of the emergency exits, which I am realizing as I write this—better go back) and only the program room has braille on the sign. I know that a donation from a community organization enabled us to get that room, so I bet that the sign was purchased at a different time, possibly from a different budget, than the rest of the room signs.

Rather than ask for the remaining signs by sending a single list asking our administration to purchase all nine, I thought I would see if I could do some more thinking and research to help me prioritize what we need. In a perfect world of course we’d buy everything we need right away, but I’m a new manager, I know my system’s budget isn’t infinite, and I want to make sure that both literal capital and political capital are left for other accessibility-related needs if it does turn out to be the case that administration can’t or won’t get everything we ask for.

The big trade-off that I came up against in trying to do this was frequency of use versus safety. I suspect that most patrons would be much more likely to need the conference room and restrooms than the emergency exits, but the consequences of not being able to easily identify the emergency exits on the rare occasions that they are needed are obviously more severe than having to ask someone which door is the one for the women’s bathroom. I went on an online forum for people who are blind or otherwise visually-impaired and asked for advice about what made libraries easy or difficult to use, and room signage wasn’t high on the list as far as what people said was important, so I think I’m going to minimize our investment in this by asking for braille signs for every door I can think of where we could order something pre-made, cheap, and widely available, and where a person would probably be going by themselves. Accordingly, I am asking for “women’s restroom,” “men’s restroom,” “staff only” (for the janitorial closet), and three “emergency exit” signs. I think “conference room” might not be as widely available, and I think the main entry/exit doors are probably relatively obvious to someone with limited or no vision, since they feel and sound different from the other doors and are the only double exterior doors.

If anyone knows more about this than I do, I’d be grateful for input!