SOA 2020 Annual Meeting: Digital Helen Keller Education Project: Teaching Fully Accessible Collectio
Channel: The Society of Ohio Archivists
Date: 2020-06-19

The Digital Helen Keller Education Project: Teaching a Fully Accessible Online Collection
Elizabeth Neal and Helen Selsdon, American Foundation for the Blind. 
The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), has publicly launched the free, fully accessible digital Helen Keller Archive at https://www.afb.org/HelenKellerArchive. More than 185,000 collection items are now available via an accessible interface that has been tested extensively with users who are blind, low vision, hard-of-hearing, and deafblind. AFB is also digitizing Keller's press clippings and scrapbooks and is creating curricula for middle and high school students--including a lesson plan focused on Helen Keller's role in the American movement for women's suffrage. The first pilot lesson plan was tested in a technology-enhanced classroom with middle schoolers at MS447 in Brooklyn, NY in December 2019. Our presentation will demonstrate the digital Helen Keller Archive and its accessibility features, and discuss the creation of free, educational lesson plans that can be used in classrooms and other learning venues to teach history through a disability lens.

Day 2, Session 5, of Society of Ohio Archivists Annual Meeting (Virtual) June 16-17, 2020. #soaam20 See more, including speaker slides, at https://ohioarchivists.org/annual_conference/