"Accessibility" Policies -- A Rant
Jul. 8th, 2013 02:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sasha_featherI hope you all know by now that language and its effects are an issue near and dear to my heart. Language can be hostile or welcoming, centering or othering. This is particularly on my mind as I look at various "accessibility" policies for conventions in the SF/F world.
I am creating List of such conventions for the Geek Feminism Wiki. (This was inspired by their List of cons with anti-harassment policies.)
First, why is it helpful to have such policies online?
Because information is good access. The more information you can provide to people, even if it's to say that there are barriers to access, the better people can plan for their trip.
Secondly, if people have to ask to receive information, that in itself is a barrier. As many of us with anxiety, fatigue, or other disabilities know, it can be difficult to make that phone call or send that email. A lot of us are used to dealing with people on the other end of the line who aren't our allies and might make our lives more difficult when we ask for information.
As and someone working access, do you really want to give out the information again and again? Why not just do it once, and then point people at your webpage or printed materials?
I know there are some conventions that have had good access but don't have their policies online. Open Source Bridge, I'm looking at you. :)
Other conventions have their policies online (good!) but then make all kinds of mistakes with language. They send signals that they really don't want PWDs to attend at all, that they think people are faking disabilities in order to get good seats or other services (no one does this! seriously), and otherwise hostile language.
Several of these pages use the term "special needs". I don't think very many people on this planet have special needs. Most people have the same needs, it's just that some of us need accommodation in order to enjoy the same events at conventions, like getting to the programming rooms in a timely manner, being able to move through the hotel, being able to understand what is going on, being able to visit with friends, etc. I realize special needs is an introduced PC term for disabled people, but I am just not sure that it fits or is accurate. It makes it sound like disabled people want "more" (like champagne) when what we really want is the same stuff as everyone else (water in a glass we can hold).
Whenever you want to say or write "special needs", I suggest you substitute "accommodations" instead.
Let's Break down some of the specific policies and why they are problematic:
DragonCon
"We will have the Con schedule in large print available (to be read at our table or we can email a copy to you to print or download to your screen reading device)
If you have low vision, you better have a device for reading the program. Otherwise, you have to sit at the registration table to read the program! It's apparently too hard for them to print off a few more copies for low-vision attendees. (Remember, this is a for-profit con.) I really don't know why you would want people clustered around your reg desk that way.
We offer 5 stickers for badges, based on needs:
Wheelchair seating: for our wheeled folk, of course.
Chair in Line/End of Row: for non-wheeled folks with mobility impairments.
Proximity/ 50 ft. to Screen: for visual/lip reading access.
Sightlines: for access to the interpreter, safe space for working animals, and certain other unique situations.
Medical: This sticker is merely a place to put emergency information if you have a medical condition that the EMT needs to know about before they put you in the ambulance. It does not entitle you to any other services.
A person has to out themselves in order to get any of these services. It's right there on one's badge: everyone you interact with at the convention then knows you are a disabled person. It also positions whoever gives the sticker as an authority. I know a lot of people with mild hearing loss who don't consider themselves disabled, but who might benefit from line-of-sight seating. Such people wouldn't want to get a sticker even if they might use an otherwise reserved chair.
One important thing to remember: we will do our best to make sure events are accessible to you, but that does not mean we guarantee you a front row seat, or head-of-the-line privileges. If you are going to a very popular event, you must get there extra early to get a good seat, just like everyone else. The accessible seating will not be in the front row.
I guess if you move slowly, are delayed by crowded elevators, etc., you are screwed. Several other websites said this. Maybe these conventions should put a cap on their membership? (Oh wait, DragonCon is for profit.)
Phoenix Comic Con This is the worst one.
You get a special badge! Lucky you.
But the badge doesn't get you:
· Early access to panels and special events
· Guaranteed access into special events, photo ops, autographs, or panels.
· The ability to skip lines
So fuck you I guess! Especially if you are someone who can't stand for a long time!
Service Animals are always welcome at the Phoenix Convention Center. Animals are sometimes questioned if the need is not apparent, so we suggest attendees carry documentation with them for their companion.
Does anyone know if this is actually illegal? It sounds illegal to me. [eta: it is, see comments] Then again, it's Arizona... I don't think "welcome" means what they think it means, also, to be pedantic, you won't get very far questioning an animal!
Some of the other policies are much better, including for ReaderCon, FogCon, and Arisia (and WisCon, but no need to toot my own horn--plus, I always want to improve.) Some suggested bits of activism for those involved with conventions, or even those who aren't but who can do emailing:
*Encourage Conferences and Conventions to develop Access policies and list them online. Professional and Academic conferences, trade shows, etc can be included here.
*Encourage those with bad policies to improve them.
Comments and suggestions welcome.
I am creating List of such conventions for the Geek Feminism Wiki. (This was inspired by their List of cons with anti-harassment policies.)
First, why is it helpful to have such policies online?
Because information is good access. The more information you can provide to people, even if it's to say that there are barriers to access, the better people can plan for their trip.
Secondly, if people have to ask to receive information, that in itself is a barrier. As many of us with anxiety, fatigue, or other disabilities know, it can be difficult to make that phone call or send that email. A lot of us are used to dealing with people on the other end of the line who aren't our allies and might make our lives more difficult when we ask for information.
As and someone working access, do you really want to give out the information again and again? Why not just do it once, and then point people at your webpage or printed materials?
I know there are some conventions that have had good access but don't have their policies online. Open Source Bridge, I'm looking at you. :)
Other conventions have their policies online (good!) but then make all kinds of mistakes with language. They send signals that they really don't want PWDs to attend at all, that they think people are faking disabilities in order to get good seats or other services (no one does this! seriously), and otherwise hostile language.
Several of these pages use the term "special needs". I don't think very many people on this planet have special needs. Most people have the same needs, it's just that some of us need accommodation in order to enjoy the same events at conventions, like getting to the programming rooms in a timely manner, being able to move through the hotel, being able to understand what is going on, being able to visit with friends, etc. I realize special needs is an introduced PC term for disabled people, but I am just not sure that it fits or is accurate. It makes it sound like disabled people want "more" (like champagne) when what we really want is the same stuff as everyone else (water in a glass we can hold).
Whenever you want to say or write "special needs", I suggest you substitute "accommodations" instead.
Let's Break down some of the specific policies and why they are problematic:
DragonCon
"We will have the Con schedule in large print available (to be read at our table or we can email a copy to you to print or download to your screen reading device)
If you have low vision, you better have a device for reading the program. Otherwise, you have to sit at the registration table to read the program! It's apparently too hard for them to print off a few more copies for low-vision attendees. (Remember, this is a for-profit con.) I really don't know why you would want people clustered around your reg desk that way.
We offer 5 stickers for badges, based on needs:
Wheelchair seating: for our wheeled folk, of course.
Chair in Line/End of Row: for non-wheeled folks with mobility impairments.
Proximity/ 50 ft. to Screen: for visual/lip reading access.
Sightlines: for access to the interpreter, safe space for working animals, and certain other unique situations.
Medical: This sticker is merely a place to put emergency information if you have a medical condition that the EMT needs to know about before they put you in the ambulance. It does not entitle you to any other services.
A person has to out themselves in order to get any of these services. It's right there on one's badge: everyone you interact with at the convention then knows you are a disabled person. It also positions whoever gives the sticker as an authority. I know a lot of people with mild hearing loss who don't consider themselves disabled, but who might benefit from line-of-sight seating. Such people wouldn't want to get a sticker even if they might use an otherwise reserved chair.
One important thing to remember: we will do our best to make sure events are accessible to you, but that does not mean we guarantee you a front row seat, or head-of-the-line privileges. If you are going to a very popular event, you must get there extra early to get a good seat, just like everyone else. The accessible seating will not be in the front row.
I guess if you move slowly, are delayed by crowded elevators, etc., you are screwed. Several other websites said this. Maybe these conventions should put a cap on their membership? (Oh wait, DragonCon is for profit.)
Phoenix Comic Con This is the worst one.
You get a special badge! Lucky you.
But the badge doesn't get you:
· Early access to panels and special events
· Guaranteed access into special events, photo ops, autographs, or panels.
· The ability to skip lines
So fuck you I guess! Especially if you are someone who can't stand for a long time!
Service Animals are always welcome at the Phoenix Convention Center. Animals are sometimes questioned if the need is not apparent, so we suggest attendees carry documentation with them for their companion.
Does anyone know if this is actually illegal? It sounds illegal to me. [eta: it is, see comments] Then again, it's Arizona... I don't think "welcome" means what they think it means, also, to be pedantic, you won't get very far questioning an animal!
Some of the other policies are much better, including for ReaderCon, FogCon, and Arisia (and WisCon, but no need to toot my own horn--plus, I always want to improve.) Some suggested bits of activism for those involved with conventions, or even those who aren't but who can do emailing:
*Encourage Conferences and Conventions to develop Access policies and list them online. Professional and Academic conferences, trade shows, etc can be included here.
*Encourage those with bad policies to improve them.
Comments and suggestions welcome.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-08 11:31 pm (UTC)I found money for ASL at WisCon (we also have a limited budget) by applying for a grant through the Wisconsin Dept. of Health Services. Something to consider. In order to prep the ASL interpreters and the CART person, I sent them a list of jargon terms and names. I got the Guest of Honor speeches ahead of time from our liaisons and sent them to her. Hmm, maybe I should make another post about this!
Waiting until there is "significant need" is problematic in my view. Why would Deaf or hearing impaired people come to a convention where there are no interpreters? On the other hand, if we start providing interpreters, captioning, etc, we may attract Deaf/HoH folks to our spaces, in a "If you Build it they will Come" way. For a very small convention this may not be fiscally possible, I know. I might post again about interpreters. Some cons (Convergence) use volunteers.
Thanks for your comments!
no subject
Date: 2013-07-09 12:16 am (UTC)We're also in the weird place of having the stuff that people might particularly want ASL or CART for being spread out across our weekend, which doesn't help at all. (We've tended to have one keynote, and the last two years, two guests: two years ago, the second guest did a performance, this last year our second guest preferred other formats.) We're also still low enough on things like volunteers for badge checking and keeping an eye on the hospitality suite and so on that we've been wary of adding more volunteer tasks, no matter how much we'd like to do some other things, because we have core stuff we're still trying to fill.
And again, to put in perspective: we don't have a single guest liaison : three separate people are involved in handling specific stuff from our guests but also have a bunch of other duties, and our guests have also tended to be people who do not necessarily pre-plan speeches well (Notes, yes. Excellent workshops, yes. Full blown pre-written speech, only the first time, and we posted it as soon as we had a copy when he was done) and... lots of specific sub-group cultural stuff that can get tricky to negotiate sometimes about assumptions.
(One of the complications with working with people who treat teaching as a religious commitment and vocation, and who believe that the deities may touch them on the shoulder and say 'this thing needs saying tonight' or the energy of a particular space lending itself to one thing and not another is that, well, they go off script. Often in really awesome ways, but learning to run with that presents some accessibility challenges in a bunch of directions.)
This is also a "take care of your own air mask before helping others" sort of problem: we also care a lot about making sure that the communal spaces like the hospitality suite have someone friendly there, partly so that if there's an issue of safety or harassment, someone knows how to get a board member *fast* if we ever need one (i.e. the hospitality person has the board chair's cell, my cell, a couple of other people's, so we can deal with any major issue quickly if it comes up - central point of contact even if you can't find anyone useful anywhere else) and badge checkers - we only have one, at the entry to the function space - also do a lot of friendly meet+greet and "The bathroom's over there" stuff that's pretty necessary on its own. Obviously, some people might volunteer for transcription who might not volunteer for anything else, but...
(Erm. Run-on paragraph. Sorry.)
And we *know* that a bunch of people are going to need directions to the bathroom, and we know that a bunch of people will need or really want a friendly person in the hospitality suite who can help them out. (And we hope a lot that we won't need to summon people for a crisis, but it's better to plan for the possibility). So the energy goes there first. I'm hoping that in the next year or two we get enough bigger and make that next jump to another layer of volunteers that we can do a lot more. 250's still a bit tricky size-wise.
(500 would still work in our current spaces, or adding space in the hotel that would not cost us a lot more, and obviously give us something like twice the budget to work with, which would make a lot of things more feasible. There's some stuff we can't afford to hire out now because the budget's tight, and in a world where we were less worried about the budget, it'd free up some volunteers or volunteer energy for other thing too.)
I'm doing a workshop at my sorta-local Pagan Pride even next month on Chronic Illness and Pagan Practice, and one of the things I'm planning to talk about there is communicating in advance when you can. (A lot of modern Pagan stuff takes place in private homes, or rented spaces where you're picking and choosing which things matter the most to you.)
The footnote I left out earlier was me pondering about a seeker (someone checking out the group I worked with - series of short public classes that also let you be invited to appropriate new-person friendly rituals in a private home) where we'd asked several times (both in person and in writing) for people to let us know if they had any food limitations (because, private home, we wanted to make sure we had suitable stuff handy or could discuss.) And I still remember someone *not* telling us and then being surprised when it bugged us.
I know asking's really hard for a lot of people, but *not* asking is also really hard on a lot of people (especially when you're talking limited people who can solve a problem.) In that case, we were stuck with "do we start this ritual late, because someone runs to the store, or do we leave this person out of a formal ritual meal?" Neither is a great solution, and because of energy/sleep/etc. needs, starting late is problematic too, on the access front.
I just keep hoping there's a middle ground somewhere that mostly works, and yet keep feeling like I'm not there yet.