Project Team & Advisory Board (Max Airborne, Moya Bailey, Gracen Brillmeyer, Susan Burch, Mara Mills, Corbett O’Toole, Bess Williamson, Jaipreet Virdi, Hannah Zeavin)
The Remote Access Archive is a digital collection created by disabled scholars and community members. It shares how disabled people and communities have used technology to connect, participate, and organize remotely—both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project is community-led and crowdsourced, built from contributions by disabled people themselves.
The Remote Access Archive is a valuable resource for exploring accessibility, community-led technology, and disability justice in digital media. It documents how disabled people developed and relied on remote participation practices well before they became widely accepted. For many years, institutions dismissed or denied requests for remote access, even as disabled communities were already using the internet to build networks, share knowledge, and organize. These practices only gained broader recognition when remote tools became necessary for non-disabled people during the COVID-19 pandemic. The archive makes it clear that disabled people were not simply adapting to digital spaces, but actively shaping them.
As a disability-led project, the archive challenges dominant ideas about who drives technological innovation and whose digital histories are preserved. It pushes back against institutional models that often erase the contributions of marginalized communities, especially those of disabled people. Instead, it centers disabled individuals as the creators, curators, and stewards of their own digital practices and cultural records.
Preserving digital history in this context means recognizing that access is not only a technical concern but also a cultural and political one. It means valuing the ways disabled people have used past internet tools like forums, mailing lists, video chats, and early social platforms to create community and navigate exclusion. The Remote Access Archive highlights how these overlooked histories are vital to understanding the evolution of digital access and participation.
Now that remote access has become more normalized, how can I make sure it doesn't fade away as an "emergency measure," but remains a consistent, well-supported option shaped by the needs of disabled users—not just the convenience of institutions?