1. Build capacity in accessible education practice, knowledge generation, and scholarship  

• The Journal will build the capacity of McMaster students, staff, and faculty to engage with disabled people’s knowledge, disability studies theory, and principles of accessible education, universal design, anti-ableism, and disability justice.  
• The Journal will develop an evidence-base for accessible education interventions by encouraging scholarly projects that engage in reflective practice, project evaluation, systematic inquiry, and/or knowledge exchange.  
• The Journal will publish examples of effective initiatives that might be diffused, built upon, connected, and scaled up across campus.  
• The Journal will witness feelings of burnout, exhaustion, inertia, frustration, fear, and isolation, and cultivate curiosity, creativity, companionship, excitement, energy, hope, and healing through the publication of narratives of accessibility work in teaching and learning.   
• The Journal will increase opportunities for disabled people to participate in and comment on accessible education initiatives at McMaster.  
• The Journal will enhance accessible education practices through a peer review process that fosters critical reflection and analysis. 

2. Provide low barrier infrastructure for the exchange of ideas, information, inspiration, and disability knowledge 

• The Journal will build on McMaster’s successful Annual (2017-2023) Accessibility and Disability Inclusion Update, Disabled Student Zine, and anthology, Where learning deeply matters: Reflections on the past, present, and future of teaching at McMaster University, by providing a home-grown, peer-reviewed, and accessible forum for diffusing local disability knowledge and accessible education initiatives.  
• The Journal will publish contributions from across the institution to increase visibility and recognition, acknowledge and reduce silos, and encourage interdisciplinary collaborations.
• The Journal aims to reduce barriers to engaging with academic literature and documenting accessible education work. This includes encouragement to experiment with new and creative formats.  

3. Support realization of strategic goals to improve accessibility in teaching and learning at McMaster 

• The Journal will contribute to the realization of the AODA PSE standard final recommendations through the recognition and celebration of efforts that support accessibility (recommendation #14), gathering stories on innovative accessible education practices (#15), incentivizing scholarship on accessible education (#20), and encouraging interdisciplinary collaborations (#20).  
• Work submitted to the Journal will inform, test, and respond to the development and implementation of McMaster’s 5-year Accessibility in Teaching and Learning Roadmap.  
• The Journal aims to amplify McMaster’s reputation as a leader in provincial accessibility work through addressing noted gaps in literature and practice related to disability, accessibility, and postsecondary education.

Work submitted to the Journal must relate to accessibility in teaching and learning for students with disabilities. 

By “accessibility in teaching and learning” or “accessible education” we mean: 

• A mindset and ongoing process of proactively planning, designing, and adapting learning environments to anticipate and respond to the needs of diversely situated learners with and without disabilities  
• The learning and teaching experiences of students, educators, and instructional support staff with disabilities  
• Work to address forms of ableism that get in the way of accessible and inclusive education, and/or  
• Engagement with relevant accessibility principles, models, theoretical frameworks, and/or methods and approaches, such as, but not limited to: 
  • Academic ableism and anti-ableism 
  • Community-engaged and participatory research with disability communities 
  • Critical Disability and Mad Studies scholarship 
  • Disability Justice principles 
  • The FAVE (Flexibility, Alignment, Variety, Explicitness) 4-principle approach synthesized in McMaster’s Forward with FLEXibility teaching and learning resource on accessibility and inclusion
  • Students as partners /pedagogical partnership with disabled students 
  • Universal Design for Learning and Universal Instructional Design 
  • User testing 
  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and digital accessibility practices

By “disability”, we mean:  

• Physical, learning, sensory, developmental, or mental health differences or disability, both those that are self-identified or medically diagnosed 
• Medical conditions, chronic illnesses, or chronic pain  
• Trauma (intergenerational or otherwise) and grief, with or without related and associated physical, emotional, spiritual, relational, and cognitive effects  
• The debilitating effects of ableism, capitalism, cissexism, colonialism, conflict and displacement, criminalization, ecological disaster, food insecurity, heteronormativity, medical violence, patriarchy, white supremacy, and other forms of intersecting violence and oppression  
• Personal identities or affiliations with communities that identify as D/deaf, B/blind, hard of hearing, Mad, neurodivergent, autistic, recovering/in recovery, chronically ill, self-advocates, and/or experiencing addiction  
• Use of academic or workplace accommodations (formal or informal), medical leaves, disability or mental health support services, or assistive devices and technology  

Submissions must also have a nexus to McMaster University, such as by focusing on initiatives taking place at McMaster, or work of McMaster students, staff, faculty, and/or alumni.  

• While McMaster hopes to continue establishing itself as a leader in accessible education work, we realize the necessity of inter-institutional, provincial, and national university partnerships, in keeping with disability values of interdependence and collectivism.
• Coauthors and colleagues with non-McMaster affiliations are welcome.  

The Journal aims to publish work that addresses the following gaps in the literature (noted by Kimball et al., 2016; Madaus et al., 2018, 2020) and aspirations of the AODA PSE standard recommendations:  

Enhancing disability visibility and learning from disability knowledge 

• Teaching and learning experiences of students and educators experiencing disability, disablement, inaccessibility, and/or ableism who identify as Indigenous, Black, racialized, from a minoritized faith community, queer, trans or gender diverse, newcomers, first generation, working class, in a precarious employment role, and/or English language learners 
• Creative workarounds, alternative approaches, reconceptualizations, critical analyses, and/or priorities emerging from disabled people’s ways of being, moving, knowing, learning, and/or teaching in the university 
• Examples of what disabled and nondisabled McMaster students, staff, and faculty have learned from persons with disabilities and how this has informed education 

Disabled student learning experiences and initiatives 

• Initiatives led by disabled students 
• Effective learning strategies for disabled students 
• Impacts of accessible education interventions on diverse disabled students with intersectional identities 

Accessible education initiatives of faculty, staff, and disciplines 

• Faculty and staff experiences of teaching and supporting disabled students’ education and learning  
• Empirical evaluation of initiatives employing accessible education principles 
• Disciplinary-specific accessible education interventions  

The power of relationships for advancing accessible education 

• The various forms and functions of relationships in facilitating accessibility  
• Initiatives or scholarship that takes a coproduction, codesign, participatory action, community engaged or partnership approach to working with disabled students   
• Relationship building and collaboration within and across roles, units, departments, Faculties, and institutions to support accessible education at McMaster 

Theoretically-informed work that addresses academic ableism and reframes problems and solutions 

• Work explicitly informed by a (non-psychological) theoretical framework and conception of disability, such as engagement with theorizations of intersectionality, anti-ableism, disability justice, crip theory, and critical race theory  
• Work that analyzes the common/conventional stories we tell about disability/accessibility in teaching and learning and proposes different ways of framing and understanding related phenomena  
• Work addressing negative attitudes, emotions, behaviours, perceptions, and assumptions around disability, accommodations, and collective responsibility for accessibility 

Scholarly and strategic approaches to infrastructure development and institutional change 

• Work at the level of units, programs, Faculties, and across the institution to advance accessibility  
• Effective leadership approaches for gaining buy-in, resources, and collective engagement in accessibility work and managing significant change 
• Development of novel initiatives to strategically address a noted accessibility barrier, gap, need, or opportunity  
• Frameworks for evaluating accessible education initiatives and monitoring accountability 
• Integration of scholarly approaches to elevate accessibility work as evidence-informed practice, knowledge mobilization, and applied practitioner research  
• Strategies for building energy, excitement, and momentum to move access forward 

Visions for the future of academic accessibility and accessible education 

• Speculative and aspirational work that helps us dream big beyond bare minimum compliance with legislation

Editorial and Peer Review:  

• The Journal is led by McMaster staff, students, and educators with disabilities and critical scholars working in the areas of Critical Disability Studies and Mad Studies.  
• Material will be peer reviewed by at least two reviewers, including at least one student and/or person with a disability and someone with relevant disciplinary or accessibility expertise. 

Authorship and Research Participation:  

• Accessible education practice and knowledge generation is improved through engagement with lived experiences of disability and accessibility barriers.  
• Wherever possible, we encourage authorship groups to meaningfully integrate students and people with disabilities as full collaborators and named authors. 
• When full participation is not possible or appropriate for a submission, we encourage authors to consider how they might gather and incorporate meaningful feedback from students and persons with disabilities in some way, to engage with and cite the published knowledge of students and disabled people, and/or to reflect on how their positionality and relationship to disability informs and limits their intervention and analysis (to learn more, see Secules et al., 2021).  

Research Ethics: 

• If your project involves “research” with human participants, as defined by the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans, it must undergo review by a Research Ethics Board.  
• If you are not sure whether or not this applies to you or need support with an ethics application, please get in touch with the McMaster Research Ethics Board or the Hamilton Integrated Research Ethics Board (HiREB) (if you are in health sciences) for a consultation.  
• We also invite you to contact the Journal Editorial team (a11ytl@mcmaster.ca) for information and support.