Approach
Access work is everyone’s work.
Most people perform access work in their daily lives, whether that includes holding the door open for someone, adding captions on social media videos, or any other task that puts someone else’s needs into consideration.
For organizations, including accessibility and disability inclusion as integral to large-scale strategic plans, hiring practices, and employee training is an essential part of setting everyone up for success. Emma is passionate about providing her expertise to guide access initiatives, both long-term strategic plans and short-term success projects.
Emma understands disability as a spectrum of lived experience.
This is inclusive of neurodiversity, chronic illness, mental health disabilities, and invisible disabilities, as well as disabilities that affect mobility, sight, hearing, and other senses.
Disability is also a political identity. Understanding how the deep history of disabled political movements within the United States affects today’s diversity of disabled experiences is crucial to producing effective and constructive accessibility initiatives.
Emma’s approach centers on building knowledge, shifting perspectives, and modifying behaviors to equip everyone with practices that embody the principles disability of disability justice and liberatory access. With these tools, organizations can create conditions that empower everyone, including disabled people, to thrive.
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Conduct a thorough analysis of internal practices, accommodations, resources, and both physical and digital environments to provide accessibility recommendations.
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Workshops and training focused on accessibility, inclusion, and disability culture tailored to the specific audience and existing knowledge of an organization.
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Enhance the accessibility of your organization’s events by implmenting reccomendations for improving your current planning and implementation processes, or by serving as an accessibility coordinator.
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Creating custom resources designed specifically for disabled individuals opens up exciting opportunities to create tools that address accessibility needs, support your mission, and enhance the experience for all customers.
Services
Emma believes that accessibility and disability inclusion are not just goals—they are essential to creating environments where everyone can fully participate and contribute.
Emma’s approach is collaborative, educational, inventive, and comprehensive because she understands that true accessibility requires a holistic effort across all aspects of your organization.
Emma works alongside you to create tailored solutions that address your organization’s unique challenges and opportunities, ensuring that your spaces— physical, digital, and social—are welcoming to all.
Whether you need help to develop inclusive policies, train your staff on disability inclusion, ensure your events and physical spaces are accessible to everyone, or enhance in-person and digital resources, Emma offers expert support throughout the process.
Strategic Advising
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Interested in creating a Disability Action Plan but don't know where to start?
Accessibility projects can be daunting, especially if your organization is new to explicitly thinking about disability inclusion and accessibility.
Through an auditing process, fully analyze internal practices, public and private accommodations, resources, and physical and digital environments to make accessibility recommendations.
This process will culminate in a comprehensive recommendation plan that includes resources and prioritization of realistic implementations tailored to your organization’s scope of work and staff capacity.
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Have questions about an existing accessibility project or disability inclusion initiatives?
Standards for accessible design, disability language, and accommodations change rapidly within disability communities. It can be difficult to know what current practices are.
With her experience as a Public Anthropologist, Emma translates evidence-based research into functional practices.
Provide your organization with user/expert assessments and recommendations through disability advisory groups, feedback sessions, and community-based research projects.
Book a consultation to discuss ideas, roadblocks, and questions you may have about the effectiveness of your organization’s projects.
Training
Emma provides training and workshops on accessibility, inclusion, and disability culture that are catered to an individual organization’s audience and pre-existing knowledge. Training can have a range of topics, such as ableism/anti-ableism, disability identity, disability justice, disability history, accessible event planning, accommodating disabled people, the models of disability—or any combination of the aforementioned. You can choose from the curriculum topics below or you can propose a whole new training, specific to your organization’s needs.
Disability Inclusion 101
Learn the basics of disability inclusion and accessibility. This training is ideal for organizations looking to ensure all staff has understanding of disability equity.
Customer Service: Accessible Practices
Learn ways to welcome people with various disabilities in a way that prioritizes the agency, autonomy, and independence of the customer.
Accessible Event Planning
Learn to apply the principles of universal design, scale accessibility features, and how to budget for access work with an Accessible Event Checklist.
Accessible Workplace: Management Training
Learn how to foster a workplace environment, managerial relationship, and hiring practice that is accessible to and inclusive of people with disabilities.
Event Accessibility
Emma is excited to assist your organization in integrating accessibility throughout every phase of event planning and execution. Whether you want recommendations about how to best conduct your event or need an accessibility coordinator, Emma is experienced in scaling accessibility to your organization’s capacity.
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Emma is a dedicated access worker with experience coordinating accessibility holistically for events.
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A quiet space is a safe place for event attendees to decompress and regulate their senses when they feel overwhelmed by the event environment.
Emma’s approach to quiet rooms is
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Wonder how you might improve accessibility for your event ?
Resource Creation
Resources tailored to your organization provide an essential level of consideration for your event, organization, or experience. The need for resources designed specifically for disabled individuals opens up exciting opportunities to create tools that address accessibility needs, support your mission, and enhance the experience for all customers.
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A social narrative is a manual that describes social situations and socially appropriate responses or behaviors with visuals and plain language. This resource often is used to understand what social situations may occur in a new environment and to learn appropriate social responses to that environment.
Work with Emma to create a social narrative for your public spaces.
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A sensory map highlights quiet, low, medium, and high sensory areas using symbols to identify sensory experiences and key information, such as elevators, seating, restrooms, light levels, noise levels, and more.
Work with Emma to create a sensory map specific to your needs and audience.
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Emma uses precise and engaging language to convey the experience of images, videos, art, performances, or wayfinding.
Work with Emma to write alt text/image descriptions, verbal descriptions, visual descriptions, sound descriptions, audio guides, plain language guides, and more.
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Work with Emma to build your organizational voice inclusive of disability. Together, you will create a language guide with best practices, resources, and examples for future projects.
Emma also provides thorough sensitivity reads on a wide range of projects in order to avoid representational errors.
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Have an idea for something new or different? Emma is open to creating resources custom to your audience and organizational needs.
Not sure where to start?
Book a free 30-minute consultation to determine how you might best begin implementing accessibility initiatives.