[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

[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. :)