Where is Every Body?

Pasted From Report

This step in our project was an experiment in hybrid-event organization that centered our efforts and thematic focus on practices of making "hybrid" more accessible. It took the format of a so-called "meetup": Hackers & Designers (H&D) teamed up with Framer Framed (FF) to organize a public event that brings together artists, technologists, activist, and people in various fields to discuss topics, share projects, and learn together around a focused theme. Our meetup was titled "Where is Every Body?" and was geared towards unpacking questions of accessibility and inclusivity 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 asked the question, "Where is Every Body?", in a two-fold manner: On one hand, 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. On the other hand, the developments that have led to — and continue to construct – this "hybrid" reality, were never driven by a need to reach out to and include chronically-ill, sick and disabled bodies. There is an urgent need to intersect these developments of going hybrid with an open and honest inspection of where, how, and for whom a hybrid cultural sector will become accessible.

H&D and FF entered this question with little to no knowledge around practices of accessibility and Crip-justice, driven by a curiosity, eagerness to learn, and intent to include sick and disabled people who often are systematically excluded from participating in cultural spaces. This meant for us that, to start, we had to learn. We organized multiplle consultation sessions with several experts: Ren Loren Britton, Isabel Paehr, Vasilis Van Gemert, Maloush Köhler and Eric Groot Kormelink. These sessions expanded our perspective on making events more accessible, taught us the different sensibilities that a cultural organization needs to approach accessibility such as collective conditions, open and honest curiosity, willingness to completely rethink modes of allocating resources and budgets, and methods of creating safer spaces to ask questions and meet access needs, for organizers, speakers, and participants alike.

One of the most important advices we received, which eventually proved to be the most complicated to think through, was that there is no such thing as completely accessible spaces, only more accessible spaces. People have different access needs and access needs change all the time, and we cannot assume what someone needs before asking them. We can try to follow standard accessibility practices to be as inclusive as we can apriori, but the event was free and public, which means that even if we had a sign-up form for people to describe their access needs before joining the event, a majority of our participants would eventually walk in (or open the livestream link) last minute without having signed up. With this in mind, we started preparations for our event with the goal to create as many points of access to it as possible.

We wanted to make the event more accessible to deaf/hard-of-hearing people, so we worked out a technical set-up that provided automated live english closed captions to people onsite as well as online.

We decided to setup a "low-hybrid" model for conducting the event to care for participants who could not join on site. It took place at Framer Framed but was also broadcast as an audio stream with live slides to The Hmm's livestream platform, which in itself meets all web WAI-ARIA recommendations, is assistive-technology friendly, has been tested with default operating system screen-readers, and has a rigorous accessibility menu. One of the features of the livestream was that it could be experienced through 4 viewing modes that cater to different access needs and internet bandwidths: (1) varying qualities of video, (2) audio only, (3) thumbnails and a live transcript and (4) live transcript only. Participants onsite and online could all read the live captions and participate in the discussion through the online chat.

It was important that people who could not join online or onsite would still have the possiblity 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.

Most important was that people contributing to or participating in this event felt welcome and safe enough to engage with these questions explicitly. As we learned from our consultation sessions, this means that an atmosphere of care and an insistance on listening had to be created. Our guest moderator, Cannach MacBride was an expert at doing this. They started the event off by stating important points of our Code of Conduct and repeatedly reminded people that they could always ask questions and make requests. There were also several people of Framer Framed in the space assisting people and making sure their access needs were met.

The talks, presentations and discussions that took place are now available online here: https://hackersanddesigners.nl/p/Where_is_Every_Body%3F and provide incredible expert insight on experiences of disabled people in culture, politics and daily life, the efforts of making a cultural institution more accessible, some fun web-design exercises that center disabled voices as well as a talk on bio-hacking into one's own chronic illness. The event attracted around 70 people, both onsite and offline, many of which engaged in an hour long moderated discussion around the politics of accessibility in hybrid cultural spaces.

We wanted to hire an NGT (Nederlands Gebarentaal) interpreter for this event, in an attempt to create yet another point of access for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. We reached out to 5 different interpreters all of which were not available on the day of or even 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, but 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 that is not being met in politics as well as emergency situations. 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 most often, will refuse to do their job in the context of a small cultural event where it is not known wether or not someone that is deaf or hard-of-hearing will be present.

Leading up to this meet-up we looked critically at the cultural sector and our role within this 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 for all members of our society?

The objective of this meet-up was not directed towards a one-off event aimed towards sick and disabled people, but rather as a start of an ongoing practice of awareness that respectfully strives for 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 adapting to the voices of those who urgently need disability-justice as a means of navigating society. It was created as a stage for those who identify as Crip or work with disability-justice, to formulate methods and wishes for inclusion, joy and participation. We also created moments to talk about the violence of discrimination and the multiple way to dismantle ableism in the cultural sector as well as society as a whole. We touched upon subjects such as respect, responsibility and technical needs while listening to both personal stories as well as re-occurring structural issues.

Both leading up to, as well as during the event, we came to understand sick and disabled people not as a separate and isolated group of people, but rather individuals whos specific needs and a wishes are often overlooked. Needs are a human trait, where no-one is left out. Normalising needs, big as well as small, is a way of including able bodies into the world of disability. It turns around the notion of disabled people as a separate group with "special needs", an ableist perspective that we can all rather do without.

In turn we came to understand the importance of keeping our event structure and inclusivity tools highly diverse and constantly adaptable to cater for individuals rather than a "group of people". We see this as an ongoing process in the form of dynamic commitment and promises from ourselves as an organisation.

With our invitations extending to audience members in (electric) wheelchairs we researched the FF space, took measurements of entrance, toilet and door plinths. We also located disability parking spaces nearby and provided maps, measurements and images of the facilities. While doing this in collaboration with people using wheelchairs, it became clear that simply writing "wheelchair accessible" on our invitaion, is not enough information as disability tools are often custom made and sizes and functions often vary.

The lack of availability of NGT interpreters or their refusal to do the job 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 these participants themselves need to be present, but their presence in itself can not be confirmed if an NGT interpreter is not there to create a point of access for them. This brings us into the classic case of "the chicken and the egg" issue of accessibility.

Our event and sign-up form was published only 3 weeks in advance of the date of the event, which in our understanding of time, is long enough. Some sick and disabled people, as we learned, have a different experience of time, and 3-weeks notice for an event is most often not enough. More importantly, our event was communicated through channels that we ourselves have always used: our websites, newsletters and social media accounts. This definitely proved to be our biggest problem, as the communities these channels reach are mostly consisting of people who are not deaf or hard-of-hearing. Moreover, the expansion of our community often depends on the casual cross-pollination with other diverse groups of people and practices, through word of mouth or sharing of a post or message. However, we learned that the communities that engage with our activites rarely intersect with deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. We are describing this problem as a "cultural language barrier", and unfortunately, language barriers are hard to cross.

We need to build stronger relationships with deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, ensure a thorough circulation of our activities within their platforms, and create ways to have mutual exchange on topics that are interesting for all of us. To break this vicious chicken-or-egg problem is to invest time and energy in bridging the language barrier.

H&D's previous experience with organizing such meetups has employed a very open format: a date and location is publically announced and everyone is welcome to just show up; a rough agenda is made and all participats are free to suggest presentations, workshops or other activities.

For this meetup, however, H&D and FF wanted to focus on audiences that are outside of our communities, and specifically, have been previously systematically excluded from participating in our activites: people that are disabled, sick and/or chronically-ill. This is not to say that our activity programming is exclusive "by default", but to highlight that the inclusion of certain bodies is often overlooked or dealt with as an after-thought; hence the title "Where is Every Body?". So instead of an "anonymously open" approach, we created a fixed program of speakers, all of whom are disabled or work with disabled people in their practices. The format remained free and open, so anyone could join as an audience member. The program was split in half: an hour for talks from our guest speakers and another hour for a moderated discussion with a moderator experienced in the field, Cannach MacBride. Moreover, in order to stretch our reach into disabled communities, we also extended invitations to specific people that we might know in our communities that are disabled or work with disabled people.

Listening & being open to adjustments

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It's not an afterthought

Making accessible can not be an afterthought; it's an ongoing, non-presumptive discussion and practice that has to center chronically-ill and disabled voices. Events can be free and public, but "who is invited?" is a question that has to be addressed at all levels of it's proccesses and organization, from the people invited to speak and involved in supporting the production of the event the 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 checklist of requirements for making a hybrid event more accessible. The only rule is to ask openly and honestly everyone that will be involved what their access needs are, in order to move forward with creating points of access with them. The conversations and processes around creating more access points must include people wiith/for whom these access points are created.

It's not about having more resources, but of how they are allocated

Making more accessible 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 and cost us the least money, 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 takes time, consulting with NGT interpreters takes time, etc..

All our activities are granted approximately 5% of their total hours to make them more accessible. This follows many lessons we learned in the last year around accessibility and disability justice, namely that making more accessible can not be an afterthought, but must be thought of hand-in-hand with the activity being organized, even if it costs each activity 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...

It's in every part of the process

When organizing such an event, accounting for 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 readily available after the event. These were all new steps 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 normalize them in all our structural and organizational models for the future.