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sasha_featherAs you probably know, I am one of a handful of people who run Access at WisCon. I've done this for a few years and learned a ton. Access initiatives at WisCon have largely been very successful and well-regarded.
Karen Moore recently went to WorldCon and was struck by the difference in the lack of accessibility there vs. at WisCon. She wrote us a letter to say so, and gave me permission to quote her letter in my blog. Excerpts from her letter follow:
----begin----
As difficult as it is to juggle 1,000 convention members through the Concourse Hotel’s [WisCon's event site] elevators, I have never seen a wheelchair or scooter user wait for 55 minutes to get onto an elevator at WisCon. I’ve seen that happen multiple times this weekend. It has never been necessary at WisCon to take one elevator to the ground floor, transfer to a second elevator to reach the below-ground floors, traverse a tunnel between two buildings to reach yet a third elevator in order to reach a different floor in the other building to go from one panel to the next. That is a frequent occurrence at WorldCon; in fact, one scooter user we spoke to had concluded that the best she could hope for was to be able to attend a panel in every other timeslot, because the lengthy waits at multiple elevators meant that it took her at least two full hours to navigate from one panel to the next one.
As much of a hurdle it was to move awareness of access into the forefront of people’s consciousness at WisCon, you achieved that very effectively, with announcements, signage, blue tape and multiple other means of communicating to the able-bodied that perhaps taking the stairs would not be a huge burden, and that it would be worthwhile to do so to free up elevator space for those who cannot move between floors in any other way. At WorldCon, there was nary a whisper of such messages, save for a brief blurb titled “Be Kind to your Wheel-Footed Friends” in the Saturday newsletter – and that was AFTER I buttonholed the con chair on Friday afternoon and gave him merry hell about it.
As challenging as it is to finagle a wheelchair/scooter parking spot in some of those oddly-shaped meeting rooms at the Concourse, you still manage to do so in every single one. There is absolutely NO awareness of the need for wheelie/scooter parking spaces at WorldCon. Wheelchair/scooter users are on their own to try to squeeze into space, move chairs around, and try to find a spot to settle.
And even though it is far from ideal for wheelchair/scooter users to have to use that little elevator to navigate the half-flight of stairs to reach the last two panel rooms on the first floor, at least there IS an elevator. There is at least one room in WorldCon’s venue that can ONLY be accessed if one can climb stairs, and they programmed events in that room in every single time slot of the entire con.
And finally, as much pushback as I know Access has gotten from within the committee over its mission, at least none of WisCon’s concom (that I know of) has ever seriously suggested developing an entire track of programming that doesn’t exist, located in a room that doesn’t exist, and then put the damn thing in the pocket program book, the online program and everywhere else. Evidently, someone in the WorldCon committee finds it immensely amusing to think of a convention member with no cartilage left in his hips struggling painfully down multiple escalators, across the tunnel, up more escalators, then searching through a maze of corridors for a program event, only to find a sign that essentially says “Ha, ha, gotcha, Sucker!” The con chair heard from me on that topic as well, by the way. His response? “Well, I’m sorry you don’t see the humor in it.”
-----end-------
WorldCon does have an accessibility department, but it sounds like it is not succeeding. It also sounds like, from this last paragraph, that the ConCom trolled its own membership.
I repost this here not to pick on WorldCon or to cause drama, but rather to say, here is a problem, at this covention and at others. What can we do to work on addressing this problem?
Initiatives at WisCon succeeded because of committed activists and allies. I suspect that each convention will need insiders on their con coms to bring initiatives forward-- that change will have to come from the inside.
At one convention that I won't name at present, I think that criticism around accessibility caused a very strong backlash, and that comparisons to WisCon only made the backlash worse. We were seen as condescending outsiders to their in group. My own perspective is that I have practical experience that I want to share, but, the criticism was not taken as constructive and relationships were damaged.
This is not my intention here. Better access improves things for everyone involved, and it is not as hard to implement as one might think.
Thoughts?
Karen Moore recently went to WorldCon and was struck by the difference in the lack of accessibility there vs. at WisCon. She wrote us a letter to say so, and gave me permission to quote her letter in my blog. Excerpts from her letter follow:
----begin----
As difficult as it is to juggle 1,000 convention members through the Concourse Hotel’s [WisCon's event site] elevators, I have never seen a wheelchair or scooter user wait for 55 minutes to get onto an elevator at WisCon. I’ve seen that happen multiple times this weekend. It has never been necessary at WisCon to take one elevator to the ground floor, transfer to a second elevator to reach the below-ground floors, traverse a tunnel between two buildings to reach yet a third elevator in order to reach a different floor in the other building to go from one panel to the next. That is a frequent occurrence at WorldCon; in fact, one scooter user we spoke to had concluded that the best she could hope for was to be able to attend a panel in every other timeslot, because the lengthy waits at multiple elevators meant that it took her at least two full hours to navigate from one panel to the next one.
As much of a hurdle it was to move awareness of access into the forefront of people’s consciousness at WisCon, you achieved that very effectively, with announcements, signage, blue tape and multiple other means of communicating to the able-bodied that perhaps taking the stairs would not be a huge burden, and that it would be worthwhile to do so to free up elevator space for those who cannot move between floors in any other way. At WorldCon, there was nary a whisper of such messages, save for a brief blurb titled “Be Kind to your Wheel-Footed Friends” in the Saturday newsletter – and that was AFTER I buttonholed the con chair on Friday afternoon and gave him merry hell about it.
As challenging as it is to finagle a wheelchair/scooter parking spot in some of those oddly-shaped meeting rooms at the Concourse, you still manage to do so in every single one. There is absolutely NO awareness of the need for wheelie/scooter parking spaces at WorldCon. Wheelchair/scooter users are on their own to try to squeeze into space, move chairs around, and try to find a spot to settle.
And even though it is far from ideal for wheelchair/scooter users to have to use that little elevator to navigate the half-flight of stairs to reach the last two panel rooms on the first floor, at least there IS an elevator. There is at least one room in WorldCon’s venue that can ONLY be accessed if one can climb stairs, and they programmed events in that room in every single time slot of the entire con.
And finally, as much pushback as I know Access has gotten from within the committee over its mission, at least none of WisCon’s concom (that I know of) has ever seriously suggested developing an entire track of programming that doesn’t exist, located in a room that doesn’t exist, and then put the damn thing in the pocket program book, the online program and everywhere else. Evidently, someone in the WorldCon committee finds it immensely amusing to think of a convention member with no cartilage left in his hips struggling painfully down multiple escalators, across the tunnel, up more escalators, then searching through a maze of corridors for a program event, only to find a sign that essentially says “Ha, ha, gotcha, Sucker!” The con chair heard from me on that topic as well, by the way. His response? “Well, I’m sorry you don’t see the humor in it.”
-----end-------
WorldCon does have an accessibility department, but it sounds like it is not succeeding. It also sounds like, from this last paragraph, that the ConCom trolled its own membership.
I repost this here not to pick on WorldCon or to cause drama, but rather to say, here is a problem, at this covention and at others. What can we do to work on addressing this problem?
Initiatives at WisCon succeeded because of committed activists and allies. I suspect that each convention will need insiders on their con coms to bring initiatives forward-- that change will have to come from the inside.
At one convention that I won't name at present, I think that criticism around accessibility caused a very strong backlash, and that comparisons to WisCon only made the backlash worse. We were seen as condescending outsiders to their in group. My own perspective is that I have practical experience that I want to share, but, the criticism was not taken as constructive and relationships were damaged.
This is not my intention here. Better access improves things for everyone involved, and it is not as hard to implement as one might think.
Thoughts?
no subject
Date: 2012-09-03 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-03 07:19 pm (UTC)Stagg Field track
Date: 2012-09-06 05:53 pm (UTC)Re: Stagg Field track
Date: 2012-09-06 07:59 pm (UTC)Re: Stagg Field track
Date: 2012-09-06 08:43 pm (UTC)Re: Stagg Field track
Date: 2012-09-06 09:35 pm (UTC)Re: Stagg Field track
Date: 2012-09-07 04:45 am (UTC)At least 10%, probably more, of the members present were cosplaying throughout the entire con.
Given those two facts, plus the fact that I lacked any prior awareness of Chicago-area fandom's fondness for fake program items, what precisely would lead me to conclude that the program about the Higgs Boson was phony?
When I read the description of that panel, I assumed that the panelists would be cosplayers with a lot of science cred to carry off an interesting/amusing imagined discussion between Hawking and Einstein. I mean, after all, it's WorldCon, and they do all sorts of way cool stuff, far more ambitious than a local or regional con - why would I conclude that was someone's lame attempt at humor rather than an actual program item?
The point is that "universal access" means SO much more than just wheelie parking spaces and big-print programs - it means examining every aspect of a con and asking hard questions about whether or not EVERY convention member can and will experience it as intended.
Humor doesn't play the same everywhere; what a Midwesterner finds funny will baffle someone from the east coast, and something that tickles a southerner's funnybone might leave a northerner totally stone-faced. So expecting convention attendees from around the globe to understand local humor is asking an awful lot.
Re: Stagg Field track
Date: 2012-09-07 08:28 am (UTC)In a balloon debate, a bunch of people are assigned characters - may be fictional, may be historical - and have to argue for an audience why they shouldn't be thrown out of a hypothetical sinking balloon. And people get really into it - for example a Harry Potter one where people dressed as their characters. I once chaired dressed as Death, and someone else chaired several times as Anne Robinson.
So especially at a con, with the amount of cosplay, I'd just assume they'd got someone who could do a decent costume and would be appearing in-character rather than as themselves.
Re: Stagg Field track
Date: 2012-09-07 05:58 pm (UTC)Re: Stagg Field track
Date: 2012-09-07 06:03 pm (UTC)Re: Stagg Field track
Date: 2012-09-10 01:34 pm (UTC)Re: Stagg Field track
Date: 2012-09-10 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-07 01:47 am (UTC)At Convergence, it's typically a very specific track and they say in the program book that it's fake (you have to spot that notation, though). Some of the panels sound totally awesome, though, and really SHOULD be real, dammit.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-06 04:50 pm (UTC)As con chair, I was adamant that the program items be absolutely ridiculous, and in non-existent locations, so that no one could possibly be confused. I think one item was, "The currently-dead Fritz Leiber reads from his brand-new work, written postmortem." Another was, "Ann VanderMeer tells you the six magic words that will automatically get you published in any magazine you want." All items were scheduled in clearly non-real places; I forget what they were, but I remember insisting the programming-writer change some places so no one could be confused.
It helped that these were all listed on the same page, and set off as "special time-change programming" (or something like that) so there were no problems at all, and everyone appreciated the joke.
I'm horrified by the con chair's response to Karen's concerns. :(
--Vylar Kaftan, FOGcon chair
no subject
Date: 2012-09-06 05:35 pm (UTC)And are you *sure* that no harm is being done? Are you *sure* that "everyone appreciated the joke" and that there were "no problems at all"? How can you be sure of this?
Jokes like this rely on cultural knowledge. What "everyone knows", or "doxa" is probably not something that everyone at your con actually knows. Do you have non-native English speakers at your con? Do you have newbie con attendees? Do you have teenagers or children attending?
If you badly want joke programs, why not make a fake newsletter, a la the Onion, and put them there, instead of in the program book?
no subject
Date: 2012-09-07 06:31 am (UTC)The cultural knowledge that Fritz Leiber is dead was quite clear, because he was Ghost of Honor. (We always have a posthumous honored guest.) But again, this is something seriously worth thinking about -- and asking con members about.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-08 05:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-08 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-09 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-09 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-09 04:20 am (UTC)(I should say that I have not myself had anything to do with FOGcon, so I'm only going by the accounts above. FOGcon's joke seems to have been accompanied by some reasonable amount of effort to minimise the harm done, but I'm still dubious about the whole idea of fake program items in principle.)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-09 10:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-08 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-07 06:25 am (UTC)