Where is Every Body?

From H&D Publishing Wiki


Where is Every Body?

Hackers & Designers

A shift towards a more hybrid cultural sector has been demanded by the disabled community long before the pandemic opened up for this option but was not addressed with such importance. Yet, the developments that have led to — and continue to invest in – this "hybrid" reality, has not sufficiently considered crip and disabled bodies. The meetup Where is Every Body? – organized by H&D in collaboration with Framer Framed – was driven by the urgent need to intersect the developments of going hybrid with an open and honest inspection of where, how, and for whom a hybrid cultural sector is being made accessible.


Where is Every Body? aimed at unpacking questions of inclusivity and accessibility in hybrid cultural spaces, with a specific focus on the roles that technology can play in the development of safer and more inclusive spaces. We invited artists, designers, activists and technologists from the intersecting fields of public policy, disability justice, design pedagogy, and community organizing to explore questions of inclusivity, accessibility, and their socio-technical complexities through talks and moderated discussion.

The talks are available on the H&D website


Towards Access

While this contribution is an attempt to offer practical tips for others to consider working towards more accessible spaces and practices, there is also a risk of offering 'templates' or how-tos. Every situation is different. Copying access notes without a deeper (self-)reflection on the ways ableist structures are reproduced in the Dutch cultural sector would be a fallacy. We therefore recommend reading the following points as reflections and consider those as incomplete and specific to the context to which they refer. We nevertheless hope these learnings and proposed practices will be inspiring and useful for others and stimulate critical reflection and commentary.


Inclusive processes

In preparing the meetup H&D and Framer Framed reached out to sick and disabled folks, to invite them as speakers but also for consultation. We organized consultation sessions for instance with MELT (Ren Loren Britton and Isabel Paehr), Vasilis Van Gemert, Maloush Köhler and Eric Groot Kormelink. These sessions aimed at expanding our perspective on what it takes to make events more accessible. Each session taught us about the different sensibilities required to approach accessibility, for instance through open and honest curiosity, willingness to completely rethink modes of allocating resources and budgets, creating and practicing collective conditions and methods for creating safer spaces that take care of meeting every body's bodies access needs.


Anticipation

We broadcasted the event as an audio stream with live slides to The Hmm's livestream platform, which meets all web WAI-ARIA recommendations. It is assistive-technology friendly, has been tested with system screen-readers, and has an accessibility menu navigation.

The event was free and public, which meant that a majority of our participants would eventually walk in (or would open the livestream link) spontaneously without. With this in mind, we started preparations for our event with the goal to make it as accessible as possible. For instance we wanted to make the event more accessible to deaf/hard-of-hearing folks. We worked out a technical set-up that provided automated live english closed captions to people onsite as well as online.

Yet an important advice we received, which eventually proved to be the most complicated to think through, was that there is no such thing as a completely accessible space, only more accessible spaces. Folks have different access needs and access needs change all the time. We cannot presume someone's needs before asking them. We can try to follow accessibility practices to be as inclusive as we can apriori.


Scarcity of resources

In an attempt to create yet another point of access for deaf and hard-of-hearing people we initially wanted to hire an NGT (Nederlands Gebarentaal) interpreter for the event, We reached out to 5 different interpreters all of which were not available on the day of the event and some refused to do the job. Maloush Köhler, one of the interpreters we contacted, was kind enough to explain the situation, stating that currently, there is a very large number of cultural organizations attempting to open up their programming to deaf and hard-of-hearing participants by hiring NGT interpreters. However there are too few NGT interpreters to supply this demand. This situation extends beyond the cultural sector. There is a high demand of NGT interpreters in politics as well as emergency situations, which cannot always be met. In this kind of crisis, NGT interpreters in the Netherlands are faced with the confronting question of where and to whom to provide their labour-intensive services, and will refuse offers for small cultural events where it is not known wether or not someone that is deaf or hard-of-hearing will actually be present.


Leading up to this meet-up we looked critically at the cultural sector and our role as facilitator of public moments. We asked ourselves about our habits and organisational structures and how we may contribute to the exclusion of sick and disabled people as participants? How do we in a respectful manner contribute to creating safer and inclusive environments?


Inseparable questions of accessibility

The objective of working towards this meet-up was on the one hand to create a space to thematize accessibility within practices of organizing hybrid cultural events and simultaneously test methods and practices of organizing an event while actively considering the needs of sick and disabled people. However, it could not be a one-off attempt or instantaneous event but rather the event should be a starting point for an ongoing practice that strives for structural inclusion of sick and disabled people into our activities henceforth.


Our aim was to engage in a discussion and look for new ways of opening up and turning towards disability-justice in any future attempts of organizing our activities.


Both leading up to, as well as during the event, we came to understand the perspectives of sick and disabled folks not as separate and isolated 'issues' but as relevant to every body and at all times. Practicing the articulation of access needs is a way of including able bodies into the world of disability. Such a practice turns around the notion of disability as separate – as "special need", towards accessibility as intrinsic part of any cultural programming.


Offering as much information as possible


Working towards access is an ongoing process and requires a form of ongoing as well as dynamic commitment. Prior to the meetup, Framer Framed had not yet formulated and published an access note. Thus part of preparing the event, which would actively invite audience members in (electric) wheelchairs, we needed to take measurements of the space including entrance, toilet and door plinths. We furthermore located disability parking spaces nearby and provided maps, measurements and images of the facilities. While including folks using wheelchairs in the process of writing up access information, it became clear that simply writing "wheelchair accessible" on our invitation, is not enough information. Disability tools are often custom made. Sizes and functions vary.

It was furthermore important to us that people who could not join the event would lateron have the possibility of re-visiting the event. Recordings of all parts of the event as well as speakers' slides were published to the event page afterwards as audio files and annotated pdfs.


Breaking the vicious cycle


The lack of availability of NGT interpreters has grounded our question "Where is Every Body?" in a very real crisis. For an NGT interpreter to help us make our event more accessible to deaf/hard-of-hearing participants meant that we needed to be sure these participants were going to be present. But their presence could not be confirmed if an NGT interpreter was not going to be there to accommodate them – a 'vicious cycle.' In discussions around accessibility, an argument that is often brought up is that the space could be made more accessible if there was in fact someone that actually needed it to be accessible. This form of argumentation sustains this viscous cycle, in which it is left to individuals to speak out about their needs for change to be put into motion. Changing things when there are individual cases is too reactive and not sufficient to become more inclusive spaces. It should be the responsibility of institutions, and it should become part of their policies and code of conducts to work towards access proactively. There needs to be a structural implementation of improving the accessibility of cultural spaces and practices and it needs to be obligatory that we only organize events in accessible spaces. If accessibility is the default, people would need to argue why they cannot provide access and then one can see how to find other means to allow for people with disability to join (additional livestream, audio recordings, transcriptions i.e.)


Generous timelines


The meetup and sign-up form was published three weeks in advance, which in our understanding of time, is long enough. However as we learned, some sick and disabled people have a different experience of time, and three-weeks notice for an event is short notice. More importantly, our event was communicated through channels that we ourselves have always used: our websites, newsletters and social media accounts.


Committing to an ongoing process

We learned from our consultation sessions, that creating a safe(r) environment in which accessibility can be discussed, means that an atmosphere of care has to be created and maintained throughout the event. Our guest moderator, Cannach MacBride started the event by introducing important points of the H&D Code of Conduct and repeatedly reminded people that they could always ask questions and make requests.


Working towards access can not be an afterthought; it's an ongoing discussion and practice that has to center chronically-ill and disabled voices. Events can be free and public, but "who is welcome?" is a question that has to be addressed at all levels of it's process, from the people invited to speak and involved in supporting the production of the event, to the languages that the live captions are generated in and the widths of doors in the physical spaces hosting the event. There is no complete checklist of requirements for making a hybrid event more accessible. In our experience the best approach is to ask openly and honestly everyone who will be involved what their access needs are, in order to move forward with creating points of access with them.


When organizing such an event, accounting for and including disabled people has to be addressed in every part of the process, from the ways a space is described for wheelchair accessibility on a website, to making sure the event photographer is aware of mis-representations of disabled people in the media, to asking speakers to make their slides readable and making sure documentation and recordings are available after the event. These were all new insights for us, and created a production process that is rather different from what we are used to. It takes time to also learn how to do these things and do them well, and we intend to continue and do better in the way we organize ourselves and organize our activities in the future.


Allocating resources


Working towards access is not a question of having more resources, it's a question of how resources are allocated. And when we say resources, we mean time, care, energy and money. The biggest challenges were also the simplest least expensive, such as choosing accessible off and online spaces to host an event, running automated live captions, and creating a form for participants to describe their access needs. The most resource-intensive tasks were making sure everyone's needs were met, listening, and giving particular attention to the formats built and used to make the event more accessible. Writing image descriptions takes time, editing closed caption files, consulting with NGT interpreters , etc..


With H&D we have started to structurally allocate budget for all our activities for making them more accessible. This follows many lessons we learned in the last year around accessibility and disability justice, namely in order to work towards access, it cannot be an afterthought. Accessibility must be thought about along with the process of organizing any activity, even if the process will take a little more time and resources. Such practices of accessibility vary per activity and may take several forms, for example: hiring a sign language interpreter, spending extra time and care asking participants about access needs in advance, setting up closed captions, hiring specialized hosts to aid in navigating spaces, etc...


Resources:



When thinking about accessibility, try to keep the questions small and contextual: ask people what they need to get access to space and information.

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