While developing the site and submission portal for materials to be hosted on The Social Justice Classroom, I have been occupied with issues of accessibility. Teaching in only one institution has given me the luxury to dismiss the ethics of assuming everyone has a google account because this particular institution grants all enrolled students access to their university-affiliated google drive. Because of educational protection and privacy, I always ask students to access any material, uploads, forms, sheets, docs, etc., through their university google account. However, now that I am working across institutions and hopefully one day, across countries, I can no longer rely on this assumption. To make this website as committed to its objective as possible, it needs to be built with this commitment in mind in regards to every detail.
Currently, I am struggling to create a completely open submission form through Google so that users
a) do not need to have a google account
b) do not need to upload their files from their own google drives
c) do not need to provide their emails
While I hope to use google simply as a neat, automated storage space until I can upload the submissions to the site with their associated links, a few issues have arisen from the kind of optional privacy and anonymity I would like to allow to users. While at first, a colleague informed me that Google only asks users to sign in to their google account to track the number of submissions, I noticed it also asks for your google account to receive a confirmation email and to upload from your own drive as the first option. I found that I can deploy a script to bypass all these issues and even include a signed consent agreement but with the caveat of (an albeit affordable) price tag. The issue is not so much that I have to pay (although it does raise questions on the accessibility of accessibility models) but that the moment I step out from the insularity of my own academic life, I am suddenly confronted with issues over which I never before mused. Every day that I commit to building this project hits me with a dilemma that signals my privilege, forces me to take a step back, and asks if I am being as faithful as I can in its development to match its aim, especially as an able-bodied, financially stable (for the most part), technocratic individual.
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