Small but important steps towards accessible publishing

Imagine a moment from a hypothetical music therapy session such as this: Following a shared musical experience, the music therapist gently takes note of their own sensations and seeks to better understand the experience of the participant. Perhaps the therapist asks something like “how are you feeling right now?” to guide their empathic approach.

At the heart of the therapeutic encounter is a sincere commitment from the therapist to understand the experience of the person they are working with. Empathy, respect, and genuineness are core features of person-centred approaches that seek “greater equality in the dynamics of power in therapy” (Brown, 2007, p. 258). Alongside this commitment, the therapist must also try to identify and understand their own biases and assumptions. However, trying to truly understand another person’s experience is challenging and fraught. Thus, a therapist’s empathy might be limited by biases that are not (yet) identified.

Improving accessibility in many aspects of society, from the physical environment to social interactions, involves a similar commitment to genuinely engage with people who have lived experience of disability. Quite simply, our own bias or ignorance makes it difficult to anticipate barriers that we don’t personally experience as limiting access. For example, as a sighted person with a job that demands I read frequently and quickly, I concede that I take my ability to read print for granted. As a music therapy educator, my students have increasingly highlighted the inaccessibility of printed materials, explaining that they rely on text-to-voice converters to support their engagement with published resources. The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled (World Intellectual Property Organisation, 2013) highlights that a wide range of people require improved access to printed material, including those with physical disabilities that restrict them from holding documents, as well as those with learning disabilities, and neurological differences (Jenson, 2022).

Aligned with our aspiration to improve accessibility, the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy will now include Alt-text (alternative text) for all figures and images in our published materials. Alt-text is a short text description of a figure that conveys the content and meaning of the image. Alt-text will also benefit non-print disabled readers, as the text will replace images in instances where the file cannot be loaded. As with many accessibility considerations, everyone can benefit from a more accessible format. We look forward to working with authors to build their skills in writing Alt-text and anticipate that this initiative will also raise awareness of the need to improve the clarity of figures, and even the clarity of written expression.

This issue includes four research articles that report on projects with participants who have a diverse range of lived experience, and one essay. Shulamit Epstein, Cochavit Elefant, Shmuel Arnon and Claire Ghetti’s research explores the experiences of parents from Israel who took part in a large clinical trial known as LongSTEP (p. 373). The participants shared their perspectives of receiving music therapy with their infants, first in the hospital environment, and then later in their home environments. The second article in this issue by Tali Gottfried, Cochavit Elefant and Christian Gold reports on a novel intervention called Music-Oriented Parent Counseling (MOPC) (p. 397). Applied with parents whose children are autistic, the findings suggest that MOPC sessions supported parents to include more music in their daily routines with their children and enhanced quality of life. Focusing on adolescents, the third article by Maija Salokivi, Sanna Salantera, Suvi Saarikallio and Esa Ala-Ruona examines music therapists’ perceptions of how their work can support the progress of emotional skill development with young people who have mental health conditions (p. 423). The authors navigate the complexity of this topic, and the findings indicate that progress can be determined through both music-based and non-music-based experiences.

The fourth article by Kerry Devlin and Anthony Meadows is an essay that discusses two contrasting approaches to music therapy assessment and treatment planning (p. 445). The authors note clear differences in the two processes explored (case formulation and decision-making) and offer a critical perspective of considerations for the way music therapists approach their work. The final article in this issue by Daniel Mazhari-Jensen, Stine Lindahl Jacobsen and Kira Vibe Jespersen is a research article reporting on music-listening interventions to support exercise performance with inpatient stroke survivors undergoing rehabilitation (p. 462). The findings from this pilot study indicate that music listening may support increased duration of exercise for people with low gait functioning. I hope you enjoy engaging with all the articles in this issue, and that the inclusion of Alt-text will enhance the accessibility of our published materials.