Interviews are a great way to move information from one brain to another. Sometimes that information transfer is intended to be the basis of an article or TV segment, for evaluating an applicant for a job position, or just to get to know someone better. Sometimes one-directional, sometimes two. But no matter the format or purpose, an interview is an interactive knowledge transfer mechanism facilitated by language.
Within an MLIS program, I can think of a number of good reasons to conduct an interview. For example, if you’re not sure what kind of library you want to work in, you could interview librarians in different kinds of libraries to get their perspectives on what it’s like there. If you need information about metadata entry, interviewing a metadata librarian would be a good way to get that information. If you had a class assignment to present about the career of a famous librarian, interviewing one would be a great way to get a first-person account to base the assignment on.
But where things can get tricky with classwork is what the requirements are for the assignment. For instance, requiring a face-to-face interview might make the assignment more difficult for remote rural learners and for the immunocompromised. Requiring that the interview not exceed 30 minutes can disadvantage those with language processing delays. Requiring students to make contact with and negotiate the terms of such an interview puts additional pressure on students with social anxiety and social awareness and communication difficulties. Requiring that the interview include certain behaviors, such as a smile and maintenance of eye contact, can make it hard for people with neuro-motor differences and those who experience physical pain as a result of eye contact. And of course, requiring that the interview be conducted verbally over phone or video call puts people with mutism at an extreme disadvantage.
Every single one of those factors applied to me this semester. I had to beg friends to help me contact librarians to interview because I couldn’t just walk into my local library and ask. I had to find one who was willing to communicate via a text-based medium because listening is hard and speaking is often impossible. And it had to be remote for a host of reasons that happen to be the same ones for which I chose a remote MLIS program to attend. I had to make my case to the professor and the accessibility team that my disability warranted exceptions to these requirements as the deadline clock ticked down. The day before the deadline for finding an interviewee, I finally connected with someone who met that criteria and was willing to work with me. If any one of a thousand things hadn’t fallen into place at just the right time, 33% of my grade would have evaporated and I would have failed the course.
I had to put in additional work to secure exceptions, additional work to find an interviewee, additional work to conduct the interview (setting up text chat, explaining how to use it). The school points at my success and says “look how accessible we are!” But as I’ve written about before, this is still ableism. These accommodations don’t make the assignments easier for me than for my peers; I still have to do significantly more work than they do. They simply make it difficult instead of impossible. Accessibility needs to provide equity, not equality. I should be able to put in the same amount of work and reap the same benefits as my peers. That is what accessibility should provide.