Every digital historian who lives and works in the US has a legal obligation—under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973—to create accessible digital research products. But our obligations go much further than that. To build truly inclusive communities of inquiry and practice, accessibility must not only be a concern for websites but also something that is actively addressed at every stage of a DH project’s lifecycle, from the initial meeting of collaborators to conference presentations to final research products. People with disabilities are not just in our audiences—they are also among our students and collaborators. They are not just passive recipients of our research products, but also active practitioners of digital history.

No one in the DH community lives untouched by disability, whether they have a disability themselves, or their relatives, collaborators, or students do. As a baseline, one in four American adults meets the ADA’s criteria for legal disability. For some groups within American society, these numbers are even higher: over 40% of post 9/11 military veterans and over 35% of people aged 65 or higher have reported disabilities. Approximately 75% of Americans need vision correction–a number so high that most forms of vision correction (e.g. glasses) are excluded from the American definition of disability. Color blindness affects 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women world-wide. Difficulty walking or climbing stairs affects 14% of American adults, while 13% have some level of hearing loss and 11% have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions. Over 31% of Americans will experience an anxiety disorder at some point during their lives. These and other disabilities can be “invisible,” making it easy to overlook their prevalence within the DH community and among our audiences.

This roundtable takes a holistic approach to accessibility and will give attendees a global overview of accessibility in DH. Panelists variously identify as disabled, are activists for accessibility, have conditions that meet the legal definition for disability or otherwise impact their ability to participate fully in DH scholarship, and/or participate in cultures traditionally associated with disability. One of our goals is to raise awareness of both the complexity of accessibility and embody the widespread presence of differing abilities within the DH community and academia more broadly.