[77/365] this world of theirs

[cosmolinguist]

packbat shared something by a DeafBlind person titled "Against Access" the other day, which was intriguing enough to me but then the intro caught my attention in a completely different way: it's by someone who grew up in Minnesota and a baseball fan. I could barely read his description of the 1991 World Series, it's still something that gets me so agitated.

As Dan Gladden, a.k.a. Clinton Daniel Gladden III, a.k.a. the Dazzle Man, flew down the home stretch, the universe, the whole world, my very being rushed toward him. Nothing can do justice to the moment he leaped and landed on home plate except witnessing it with your own eyes. Any attempt to describe it is futile. Description can only serve a roundabout purpose.

Reading that last couple of sentences again now, having read the whole piece, is interesting.

The writer goes on to say that this kind of description hasn't been enough for him to continue being a sports fan. Gradually losing his vision meant he lost interest in sports.

At first, what I read or listened to live through an interpreter teemed with players I had worshipped with my own eyes. I knew their faces, their tics... As they faded into retirement, there was less and less poetry in what I gathered, replaced by new and strange and meaningless names. Direct experience goes a long way. It meant that sports did resonate with me for years after my last eloquent encounter. But without direct experience, I learned I couldn’t access the same life.

In a lot of disability campaigning, it's assumed that universal access is the goal, that with the right accommodations everyone can access everything and everyone should. Such access is not just possible but desirable...goes the unexamined assumption. I hadn't thought much about it either (not consciously, not on this level...but I'll get to that later).

The question I am asked most frequently by hearing and sighted people is “How can I make my [website, gallery exhibit, film, performance, concert, whatever] accessible to you?” Companies, schools, nonprofits, and state and federal agencies approach me and other DeafBlind people all the time, demanding, “How do we make it more accessible?”

Such a frenzy around access is suffocating. I want to tell them, Listen, I don’t care about your whatever.... The arrogance is astounding. Why is it always about them? Why is it about their including or not including us? Why is it never about us and whether or not we include them?

I found it most interesting when he described how ASL interpreters "habitually describe the whole of things. Upon entering a room, for example, they stop and say, 'This is a midsize room with a few tables, here, there, and over there. There are… let’s see, one, two, three, four, five, six, okay, six windows—' "

This made me sit up in recognition; this is how I feel about audio description sometimes! I think sometimes I've surprised diffrentcolours by asking him not to turn it on when he goes to look for it in the settings as we start to watch something on TV, or being glad something doesn't have it even while he is disappointed.

Because sometimes it's too much for me: if I'm tired, if I'm not really interested in watching the movie as much as I am in sharing a room with people I love, it's nice and restful to get a break from the constant deluge of information pouring into my ears. Audio description fits between lines of dialogue, so between the two there is pretty much always aural language happening at me for the whole two hours or whatever.

I used to find action movies very boring, I found it hard to follow fast-moving fight scenes, quick cuts disorient me, it's hard to keep track of what's happening. So I was really excited when audio description started being a thing -- the first movie I saw with AD was Deadpool and it just delighted me how much more I was able to glean from the movie than I could've expected to previously.

But after a while, I started to get fed up and tired. I went back to avoiding action movies again, or at least wanting to avoid AD with them. Describing a fight, describing as many jumps and kicks and punches and dodges and movements of every kind fight just takes so. many. words! It's still impossible for me to keep track of everything; I give up and zone out. I once joked that there should be a digest version of audio description for action movies that just tells you "They're fighting" and then a few minutes later tells you who won. (It made another visually impaired person laugh!) Or tells you whatever else you need to know: if some plot point was revealed in the fight or something, okay tell me that. But that's enough. I am never going to have the spoons to follow a verbose litany of every motion in a modern choreographed fight scene -- whether it's in visuals or audio. I've realized that movies or TV shows like that just are not for me and that's okay. Not everything has to be for me!

Sometimes, as a disabled person, I think there's an impulse to engage with everything you can: maybe to try to figure out what everyone likes about it, or maybe to show appreciation somehow. (Does Netflix keep track of how many of their viewers are using AD? I wonder if that influences their decisions at all. I wonder why I've never wondered that before!) But like how this writer could access descriptions of sports games, his interest in sports still faded. Sports aren't fun for him to follow any more. As a Twins fan that makes me kinda sad (though really, it's been all downhill since that 1991 World Series!) but I'm aware that's just my feeling about it. If it's not fun for him it's not fun. And it's certainly no fun to fake an interest in something for the sake of nostalgia or fearing change or feeling some sense of grief or loss.

One of the things this person tells ASL interpreters who are worried about having an undue influence on the people they're interpreting for, which this DeafBlind trainer is trying to train out of them,

if they’re so terrified of letting slip their own opinions, I tell them, then they should consider what I call “collective subjectivity.” Suppose a hundred sighted people see someone sauntering into a room. In that Gladwellian blink of an eye, they all come to a hundred slightly different conclusions based on their own life experiences. An interpreter may happen to be a fashion maven and know the person’s expensive-looking boots are knockoffs, for example. But nevertheless, there will be certain cultural signifiers that are recognizable to the majority of those hundred people, however correct they may or may not be. The question is: What is it that is being broadcast to the collective? We don’t have time to listen to a long deposition, the thousand words that a picture is rumored to be worth, for us to reach a reasonable conclusion—if we can even reach such a conclusion, since ours is not a visual world. It’s so helpful to have an aide de camp to tell us whether someone is receptive to us or if our charm is being wasted.

I had never heard of collective subjectivity as a term before but I really like the idea. Mastodon, the microblogging place where I spend most of my social-media time these days, has a fairly robust culture of describing images and it's interesting to see how people do descriptions differently. Sometimes people just put "mirror selfie" or the name of their cat as the description. Once there was a bad idea (I think from Tumblr) going around from someone who claimed to work with disabled people or something who said that the descriptions should never be subjective, that it was inherently universally better to just write down visible facts. I was horrified at this; so many of my photos of Gary include description like "his little paws are so cute!"...but they also include that he's a jack russell. I include whatever is making me post the photo (he's sleeping, he's looking at me, etc.) as a special focus of interest, but I also give some context so someone who doesn't know about my dog can glean something useful from almost any photo description I write about him which they happen to come across. I think I've been aiming towards some kind of collective subjectivity. And it's certainly what I like to get from others.

This writer goes on:

people who work around access cling to the concept of accuracy. This commitment to accuracy, to perfect replication, is a commitment to the status quo. We are expected to leave it untouched, or, if it must be altered, then to do so as little as possible. Access, then, is akin to nonreciprocal assimilation, with its two possible outcomes: death by fitting in or death by failing to fit in.

Later he says

Part of the fear many of them [sighted hearing people] feel when encountering DeafBlind people comes from the way we naturally decline so much of what they cherish. They seek relief from this anxiety by insisting that we take in their world. Then they ask us a rhetorical question: “It’s great, isn’t it, this world of ours?”

It is. It has many beautiful things in it, like that moment of Dazzlin' Dan touching home plate in 1991.

But it's not everybody's world. And we should be more okay with that.

Comments

[jenett]

John Lee Clark is such an amazing writer, and he's particularly good at articulating some of this. I've been thinking a lot about his comments on interpretation and how to do it well since I read this one.

(I also particularly like this essay of his on tactile art">.)

[packbat]

That was a wonderful essay - thank you for the link!

[angelofthenorth]

THank you, that's really helpful to think about.

[taimatsu]

This is a really thought-provoking post, thank you. The context in which I mostly deal with attempts to ‘make things accessible’ is at work (in a mostly office-type government agency) - so I think that changes some of the pressures on how things like AD could be done, but there will still be aspects of this that we should take into account.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I think it was a bit sneaky of him to include "state and federal agencies" in that list of people who want to make things accessible, because it is very different from making a play or exhibit accessible! Sometimes people do have to interact with the world beyond their preferences or their native culture.

But like you say, there are still going to be things worth thinking about I'm sure. :)

[packbat]

That article was super interesting, yeah!

And the whole thing about "Listen, I don’t care about your whatever" kinda ties in with how we've been dealing with art that's triggering for us or doesn't run on our computer or costs more than we can afford or whatever? Because we can deal with that because there's an unimaginable amount of art in existence. Like, if we started today with all the art today, we would not get through it all before more art was made tomorrow, and that's not even counting all the art made yesterday, day before, and all the way into the past.

And the thing about perspective is really important. Like, we've never read or watched a single review or summary of "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare", because we don't care ... but we watched the Innuendo Studios video about the game, the conversation around the game, and the videogames industry. It doesn't matter that I don't care about Call of Duty, because Ian Danskin's discussion of it has its own value.

I don't know. I really got caught up in that article because it reframed the question of how to help strangers. Like, we'd used that one Wordle Accessibility tool to generate image descriptions a few times, but why would anyone care exactly what squares are colored and what are not? It'd be more interesting to say, idk, "A couple lit squares in the first guess and none in the second, then four out of five with three of those in the wrong place before winning on guess four", and if someone wants to break down every tiny detail, they can ask. Don't describe every atom, tell the story, idk.

It's a really good article and it's still sticking with us.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah that Wordle accessibility thing was exhausting for me. It's such a great example of access being Too Much. The colors are not important! Take a step back and look at what they convey.

But also I think it's about what the player wants to see versus what an observer wants to see. If I'm going to see a bunch of these on social media, I'd be content with knowing how many tries it took or even just whether my friend won at all -- but I don't play Wordle; it might be different if I did. I know a friend who plays "with" her mom, they text each other their emoji results every day and in that kind of situation it might make sense for an accessible version to get into the granular details of which letters were in any way correct in which line.

Again, I think it makes sense to have a digest version and a more verbose version.

[azurelunatic]

When I'm posting my Wordle results, I like to say things like "and with 4 letters figured out, I confidently guessed exactly wrong for the middle letter" because it helps convey the fun of why I was playing the game to start with.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah when I used to read them on Mastodon (where people mostly put them behind tags, like we have here on DW), I was only looking for stuff like "I'd have gotten it in three tries except for that one thing!" or "I nearly didn't guess it at all this time!" or whatever little narrative people have about it. That is much better for me than the details of the colored squares.

[packbat]

We've played that move in games of Wordle a lot. Sometimes three or four times in a row!

[rugessnome]

This is, as many others have said, thought-provoking. Even as a sighted person, I think I often have trouble following what's happening in some action sequences, especially the very poorly lit ones now common.

But it's also curious regarding the intro that the few times I've found myself almost interested in baseball (not generally being a sports person), I feel like radio has been a part of it. Maybe it's related to why I do badly at following action sequences.

[cosmolinguist]

I think radio is a good intro to sports you don't know/follow very well. I was just telling my boyfriend the other day about how I got into cricket largely by just accidentally happening across it on my radio. It definitely is easier to do that way because the radio commentators know they have to explain more than the TV ones would; they know we can't see what they're seeing and in describing it they end up including more context and other stuff that might help make sense of what's happening.

[meepettemu]

As a sighted person with aphantasia, I find descriptions of things I’m not there for are useless and usually detract from what is happening because I’m just trying to remember a list of worthless facts in addition to trying to hold on to the reason I’m getting all the worthless stuff. But there is something to be said for the linking of the emotional self to the environment, which is what you/the article are saying I think.

Do you care if the room seats 250 or 350 people? Probably not. Would it be useful to have an understanding of the *sense* of those people? Yes. That gives you the emotional connection that informs your next move

[cosmolinguist]

Linking of the emotional self to the environment, yeah that's a good way to describe what I also think this article is saying. :)

[barakta]

I could just reply to this with "yes".

John Clark is SUCH a good writer on so many things.

I've heard some VI people say extensive visual descriptions are annoying and they prefer either none or a much more concise version. I recently found Judy Heumann's YouTube and have been skipping the too-lengthy audio descriptions in the video for that reasons. It would be much quicker to say "Judy is a 72yr old white dark haired woman with a huge smile and she's in the foyer of her apartment" than the 3-4x length of that. Sometimes race does matter cos Judy talks with disabled people of colour a lot. I think that's one of those things that will hopefully evolve to a shorter more useful thing when people settle down from being over-zealous in starting at all.

I've got a plugin "Alt or Not" for Twitter webpage in the browser so I can read ALT text. Which is SO interesting as I can see who does ALT at all, and how different people use it. I sometimes don't really understand people's images (dunno why, my visual acuity is fine, but I am aphantasic) but the ALT helps me work out what THEY intended by the photo. Some people get SO hung up on perfection that they won't even try which pisses me off. I'd rather people tried and then eavesdropped on VI folk talking and tweak as they go. I like that when you ALT Gary you explain WHO he is cos that is as important as what he's doing in a pic, cos he's an immense part of your life. Whereas if you had a Random Dog it'd be a different ALT tone.

I think this not interested also a bit similar to some deaf people and music or birdsong. Hearies go on about "oh but you can't hear the birds" and it's a big joke in the deaf community that many of us don't like the sound of birds - I think they sound like squeaky hinges and go on and on! A CI using friend, completely deaf from birth was eventually able to hear birds and his reply was "shoot the fuckers" which of course cracks us all up! Hearies are appalled and horrified.

I can't really do films, I find them very tiring to watch even with captions and tend to miss visual information cos I can't process it and captions fast enough. I am terrible at remembering what happened afterwards so I will have zero memory of films I have definitely seen. Being aphantasic may also not help here. I don't fight cinema captions access stuff for this reason cos I can't bring myself to care enough to use the activism spoons I have.

I can hear music, and many deaf people love it but I think my experience is fundamentally different to that of hearing people. I have discovered that while I can enjoy music if I've had a LOT of repetition, my "memory" for it is AWFUL so I can't recreate most of it in my head easily. I have however discovered I love properly BSL signed music by very competent deaf signers and indeed a few of the highly qualified/experienced interpreters. Same for poetry, in English text is does nothing for me 90% of the time, but in BSL it gets me every time... I'm not even fluent or native as a signer, but I think anything in English is brain whereas BSL is definitely an emotive heart language.

Clark's comments on ASL interpreters is also interesting. I don't know enough about UK interpreters to know if they have the strict accuracy things here to, but I do know there's research that shows that deaf people having preferred interpreters correlates to a higher quality access to the relevant information. Aka deaf people aren't just being picky, but it's critical that the interpreter is really good for them. I do know there is official debate on strict accuracy vs other modalities and that a lot comes down to how the interpreter/others engage with one another. Especially after some high profile BSL terping fails which I personally witnessed and actually raised as formal complaints with NRCPD.

I've only recently used interpreters enough to get a comparative sense of quality and reading Clark's comments about what was conveyed correlates to my sense of which interpreters "read the room" and could "read me" while doing hydro so were able to pick up when I was "watching the physio speaking/demoing", then usually watching them for a consecutive interpretation and when I was concentrating on physio and when they should interrupt e.g. physio was interrupting. Two or three of the interpreters grokked this structure without explanation, some didn't and needed to be told, and some couldn't seem to grok that they needed to focus and that just cos I was watching the physio talk, didn't mean I could understand it all, or understand accurately and that they still needed to pay attention to the physio and be ready to terp when I asked for it. I reckon after familiarity I got to 50% understanding of physio through guesswork/visuals alone but I usually got the BSL as well to be sure as sometimes I missed finer details like "put all your weight on badleg" etc. Alongside that I also noticed which interpreters followed my CLEAR instruction given at the start for BSL not SSE (signed supported English - signs in Englishy word order)... Despite my own sign being SSEish, I prefer BSL to be signed TO me - which some terps grokked and some did not. I rejected 2 terps to the agency, 1 for SSEish sign I couldn't understand at all and 1 for not paying attention and bad attitude so not signing stuff properly).

Or thinking of the day when there was a loud BANG! and everyone flinched and that day's interpreter (whose sign name should be 'Am I bovvered?...') didn't even convey what had happened to me. I had to work out that someone behind me DROPPED something and made a big noise... I had to find out from partner later the details (wtf grammar here - the details later - is BSL mashing my English again!)... Compare to excellent terp where there was a kerfuffle or something happening and I wasn't concentrating too hard, she'd just cue me in.

I wonder if in disability space, that while we sometimes get it a bit wrong (excessive visual descriptions) there can be an element of people knowing they're not a professional terp/describer/etc so if helping one another, will ask "what do you want/need?" and seeking feedback and views to know the range of likely. And that we need to keep talking about these things like "not interested kthx" and recognising it will differ between people with ostensibly similar impairments.

I also loved the discussion around protactile, a language by and for deafblind people and how they've adapted games totally rather than partially. I don't know how prevalent protactile is here at all. I must ask around.

[cosmolinguist]

Sometimes race does matter cos Judy talks with disabled people of colour a lot.

Yeah I've seen arguments in blindie facebook groups about whether a person's race (or even apparent-gender) should be included in image/audio descriptions. There are arguments to be made on either side and I think it's hard for a bunch of white gender-normative people to be informed enough to make good choices on that. Because there isn't going to be one blanket answer, always/never do this. It's going to be situational and contextual, and the relative privilege that's likely to exist in the people doing the describing is going to hinder their ability to assess those situations. It's one of the things that I hope to see improvement on; this stuff is still so new and patchy that there aren't really cultural norms about it yet, not consistently anyway.

Some people get SO hung up on perfection that they won't even try which pisses me off.

Yeah, me too... I used to be a stronger advocate for "just try," but then you get these image descriptions that are just like "my cat" or whatever and I'm like ...okay try a little harder. Fail better, haha. I used to not mind bad image descriptions like this and now I wonder if they aren't worse than nothing. But like I say, it's still evolving quickly.

I like that when you ALT Gary you explain WHO he is cos that is as important as what he's doing in a pic

Exactly! I am also effusive about describing dogs I just happen to see in the park or whatever, but in a very different way. It's all superficial stuff then, how they look and how happy they seem to be to be going for a walk in the park or whatever. With Gary it's like "He's trying to look innocent but I know he's just sulking because he's been naughty" or whatever, I'll tell that kind of story in the alt text because that's honestly what I see when I look at him in that situation! And I don't have that kind of story to tell about a random dog I see in the park.

I will have zero memory of films I have definitely seen.

I always found that too, audio description has helped to some extent but sometimes even then...if I'm tired or the film wasn't particularly to my tastes, I will remember nothing even a short time later. I don't know if I technically have aphantasia or if I just am no good at visual imagery for impairment reasons but the result seems to be similar (Andrew has aphantasia and we seemed to be the same in how we thought/perceived things etc.).

I think anything in English is brain whereas BSL is definitely an emotive heart language.

This makes so much sense, it's even related to some stuff I learned in linguistics: a lot of people have different language for different functions/purposes, either literally different languages like you're talking about here, or even different varieties (what other people might call dialects or accents, linguists call varieties) of the same language. And that doesn't need you to be native or fluent, it's just about the contexts and the connotations the language has for you.

my sense of which interpreters "read the room" and could "read me" while doing hydro

Yeah I remember you mentioning this and I found it interesting from a crip/language level but potentially so frustrating and exhausting for you that it isn't something I'd wish on my friend! It seems really obvious to me that a person might use SSE but want BSL signed back to them, like so many of us are different in our language perception and production. And it didn't have to make intuitive sense to them, they could just follow your clear instructions! How frustrating that it proved so unreliable to get this basic stuff you needed. Especially when you might need fine detail -- stuff like which leg to put weight on is really important and they need to be getting that information to you in a way that lets you respond properly to a clincian's instructions!

Not telling you about a loud bang does sound like the ASL terps not mentioning 9/11, like you're just going to be aware of really weird energy in the room so you should be clued in to that! Just because it isn't language spoken by the person they're there to interpret for you doesn't mean they can ignore it.

later the details (wtf grammar here - the details later - is BSL mashing my English again!).

Just for the record, it is always fine to use BSL word order with me. I don't know BSL but I know a little of how the structure works and it's easier for me to parse that than it is for you to worry about getting your words back in Englishy order. Especially when you're talking about BSL, your brain is inevitably going to think in more BSLy ways! (This also happens to everyone; if I'm talking about Minnesota or my family or whatever, I can't help but talk in a more Minnesotan way.) So if it ever saves you spoons, please feel free to not worry about grammar and word order in conversations with me.

I also loved the discussion around protactile

I did too! I initially tried to write about that here but it was too much with everything I was already trying to say. :) And I know so much less about it, but everything I've heard about it makes it sound great.

[barakta]

100% agree about "try better" cos as you say "A cat" is a useless ALT whereas "My tortie cat sitting and looking cute/smug/naughty" is hardly any more effort and much nicer to read.

No worries about the BSLish, I left it in with a comment cos it amused me, I don't generally worry about it despite the doomongering about SL damaging people's other language. It's more translanguaging really. I thought you would be amused/interested at that cross over.

The 9/11 and Covid situations are both interesting. And very much signify how deaf, blind and deafblind people are left out, especially the deafie ones. My first BSL tutor stressed that as hearies/oralies with access to information that we had a DUTY to inform our deaf acquaintances... But that didn't work so well when 3/4s of the class were "vaccines cause autism" "slapcheek is mild measles therefore MMR doesn't work" and when Kim and I explained IN BSL that Measles is an RNA virus and 'slapcheek' is a DNA virus therefore NOT the same thing the class just whined that it wasn't fair that we signed better than them so the tutor had to ban debate about MMR/measles/autism... Duty to share info relies on people having the info having clue in the first place... But, I think that stuck with us about deaf people and seeing how deaf orgs reacted to Covid to make sure deaf people were included... But does that work for deafblind who perhaps can't access video anymore... Did all of them do transcripts? How did we do f2f contact during pandemic?.... Do we even have a solid deafblind community here in the UK? All the deafblind folk I know have some hearing/sight enough to use BSL or hearing of speech with varying levels of success.

Aphantasia is an interesting one cos you have quite a lot of vision for a blind person while clearly not having typical vision. So hard to know if aphantasia is incidental or correlated to your vision impairment. Or if you and I are neuro-atypical in that we grew up with our sensory impairment which we assume has not greatly changed at a biologic level in our lifetime and that that has some effect on inner braininess - a type of neurodivergence as it were (and there is a model of neurodivergence that takes a very wide view on what is ND including stuff like impairment, migraine etc etc - but can't bloody find the article!). For all you or I know, while you can see some stuff, you can't see easily enough for your brain to hold it properly... Maybe my weird image stabilisation balance shit is the same cause of aphantasia. Not enough research error!

I shared Clark's articles in a few places online for some interesting discussions.

[silveradept]

I'm not seeing as much of it covered in media, but occasionally something pops up about a person who is doing interpretive work in their interpretation, rather than striving to replicate something for another person accurately. Before this, I think it was an ASL interpreter doing work in describing the musical experience for concerts instead of simply signing "music," which is pretty clearly anathema to what someone wants to experience at a musical concert. And then, as band folks, we usually watch something like Mr. Holland's Opus, and the ways that the music teacher tries to showcase his love of music for a child that can't hear. I'm not sure they held up well when the movie was new, and I'll bet they don't hold up all that well now, either.

I like the piece and the way that even in a textual medium, there's very clearly things I'm supposed to get as feelings or experiences out of it, so I think it's being made accessible to me, a sighted and hearing person.

[davidgillon]

Interesting. I think I'm going to have to let my brain ponder for a while about whether the having to work to access the accessibility carries over into physical access such as ramps etc. Though the ableds expecting us to do the work for them certainly does.

I had an interesting thing wrt alt text descriptions this week. I was using twitter (well, actually tweetdeck) and noticed the Twitter access team posting that they were about to go live for a quarter of the twitterati (as a test, IIRC they said it goes live for everyone in May) with some changes to make the existence of alt text more obvious when someone tweets a picture with an alt text description, and would like to hear people's opinions. I commented that I thought they should actively remind people that using pictures of text is inaccessible in the picture loading functiomn, and got a reply from them saying roughly "That's a good idea, we'll have to think about something like it" within about 30 seconds of posting. Obviously I just happened to catch someone actively logged into the account, but it's still encouraging.

[otter]

I sent this essay to the team I work with for the Autism Mentorship Program. Kind of as a kick in the ass for the university researchers. Because I'd already written them an email earlier today. Perfect timing. Thank you!!!!!

[cosmolinguist]

I'm glad this was there to help! I just read your email and I think it's so powerful. I hope it works.

[otter]

Thank you. It feels good to know that I'm in a place to push for change and people listen because I'm the "expert" at being autistic.