Where is Every Body?

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

In preparing this event H&D and Framer Framed reached out to sick and disabled folks. We organized multiple 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 different sensibilities required to approach accessibility, for instance through open and honest curiosity, willingness to completely rethink modes of allocating resources and budgets, creating collective conditions methods and practices of creating safer spaces taking serious the responsibility of meeting access needs.

One of the most 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.

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.

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.

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

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 be created and maintained throughout the event. Our guest moderator, Cannach MacBride started the event by stating important points of the H&D Code of Conduct and repeatedly reminded people that they could always ask questions and make requests.

The talks, presentations and discussions provided generous insights into the experiences of disabled people engaging with culture, politics and daily life, including considerations of cultural institutions who have worked on making their programs and practices more accessible, some fun web-design exercises that center disabled voices as well as a talk on hacking proprietary medical devices to gain more insights and agency over chronic illness.

Post event reflection

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 for all members of our society?

Inseparable questions of accessibility

The objective of working towards this meet-up was on the one hand to thematize accessibility within practices of organizing hybrid cultural events and furthermore tested methods and practices of organizing such an event while actively considering the needs of sick and disabled people. However, it was clear from the beginning it could not be a one-off attempt or instantaneous event but rather as a starting point for an ongoing practice that respectfully 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 activities.

It was created as a stage for those who identify as Crip and support the disability-justice movement, to formulate methods and wishes for inclusion, joy and participation. We also made space to talk about the violence of discrimination and multiple ways to dismantle ableism in the cultural sector as well as society as a whole.

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 but as relevant to every body. 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 needs", as an ableist way to approach towards accessibility.

Providing as much information as possible

Working towards access is an ongoing process and requires a form of ongoing and 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 doing this in collaboration with people using wheelchairs, it became clear that simply writing "wheelchair accessible" on our invitation, is not enough information as disability tools are often custom made and sizes and functions vary.

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 these participants themselves needed to be present. But their presence could not be confirmed if an NGT interpreter is not there to accommodate them – a 'vicious cycle.'

Generous timelines

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.

Notes:

• tips, reflections, not templates or formulas (the risk of generalising when its about accessibility)
• reflection on 2022 report about H&D accessibility
• notes on budget (adding accessibility as a structural element with every activity we organzie.. not as a subject)
• H&D's collected notes on access (from MELT) https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/hd-access

• closed captions & violent technologies
• other tools, recommendations, processes (add Staci's document, they made for/with Casco )

From: https://etherpad.hackersanddesigners.nl/p/2022-meetups-1-report