Category: a11y

Published 2022/10/07

Creating a More Humane Social Order

Writer, disability-justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha knows that it’s possible for society to become more equitable. They envision a future in which “people are free to be, regardless of their ability to fit into capitalist institutions.”
‘The Future Is Disabled’ book review from Ms. Magazine

I’m excited by the work of activists like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. And their latest book that “lays out a bare-bones agenda for what is needed to make the U.S. more socially just: affordable, available and accessible housing; healthcare and pharmacare; a universal basic income for all residents; free, high-quality public education programs; and the elimination of punitive policing and incarceration.” A resounding YES PLEASE to all of it!

Unfortunately, the systems in place are resistant to change. Instead, those in power propose much smaller, incremental tweaks. For example, recently the State Department announced the finalization of their Five-year Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Strategic Plan. Don’t get me wrong, this more intersectional approach is a step in the right direction. But it will only protect federal employees. Only 20% of people with disabilities are employed, compared to 64% of non-disabled people, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a huge gap. Only 4% of DEI initiatives include disability and that’s just in organizations that even have a DEI initiative. Most companies don’t have their disabled employees or customers in mind. A perfect example came from the amazing Meryl Evans. Yesterday she posted about her experience with an Apple Watch, and more.

“People with disabilities can bring a lot more to your team than what you see on their resumes.

They have an uncanny ability to come up with innovative ideas and solutions. Feeling excluded has a way of driving people with disabilities.

For instance, I never wanted an Apple Watch. I hadn’t worn a watch in years. A friend convinced me to try it. It made my life as a deaf person easier!

How? It became an accessibility tool.

It buzzes when cooked food is ready. No more overcooked food! It buzzes when someone is at the door. No more packages sitting on the porch for stealing. No more leaving my sister stranded on my doorstep when she dropped by unexpectedly.

No one advertises these benefits. Apple never marketed it that way. If they had, they may have gotten more buyers and fans.

These are examples of how someone who is different from you can innovate and come up with creative solutions.

We don’t always click when we meet someone. This isn’t because of a bad interview. We tend to click with those most like us. You’ll gain more when hiring someone different from you.

The thought of creating a more accessible hiring process feels overwhelming. Just start. How can you get started?

– Ask every candidate what accessibility they require.
– Verify the online application process is accessible for keyboard-only navigation and works with screen readers.

These are starting points. Keep working on it and adding more pieces. Progress over perfection. Just start.”

Again, yes to all of these things! I’m neurodivergent and have an auditory processing disorder. I wear noise-canceling headphones a good portion of the day. The Apple Watch’s haptic feedback has made my life so much easier too. And I want that for others. There’s so much we could do, as a society, to improve the quality of life for our fellow humans. But the pace of change is moving too slowly. More people are being forced to survive with less…while profit margins are on the rise for those at the top. We could all be thriving instead.

Author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha on the left, a femme non-binary person with green hair, and the cover of their book on the right, The Future Is Disabled

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Published 2022/07/26

The 32nd Anniversary of the ADA

How We Got Here

On this day in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law. This historic civil rights legislation is intended to protect the rights of people with disabilities (like myself and my family members and many others I care about). The Administration for Community Living has a page with some backstory and a timeline of ADA milestones. Members of the disability community have been commemorating the anniversary in different ways. Too many to post!

Where We’re At

From Disability Rights lawyer Laney Feingold: “Let the ADA be a door opener and a powerful enabler, not a fear-producer. On today’s anniversary let’s recommit to the promise of the ADA in the digital space.”
Patrick Sturdivant of Deque put up a wonderful blog post about The 10 affirmations of good digital accessibility. I recommend bookmarking that one and sharing it with others.
Here are two video posts from Disability Advocate, Kelsey Lindell: “share this if you love disabled people” and “how to be an ally to disabled people“
LinkedIn put together a solid list of Top Voices in Disability Advocacy: The 12 creators to follow.
Listen to Judy Heumann’s podcast. Particularly an episode like “What does disability pride mean to you?“
Learn how to be a better ally to the disabled community, from Diversability.
Lastly, I’m attending a zoom session called “Honoring the ADA Anniversary: Reproductive Rights, Deinstitutionalization, and Disability Pride.” Hosted by the Organizers Forum and Senior and Disability Action, in conjunction with Diversability.

Where We’re Headed

As many have noted, the ADA was a hard-won victory and a great starting point. Unfortunately, the laws aren’t always enforced. Demystifying Disability author Emily Ladau shared a post about waiting for the ADA to be fully realized. We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation author and journalist Eric Garcia wrote an article about “how endangered disability rights are” and “why many people within the community are afraid the ADA is next on the chopping block.” Read the full piece: How this Supreme Court is setting back disability rights — without even trying. We need to keep fighting for our rights. Perhaps on this anniversary, more than any other.

ADA 32 (1990-2022) Americans with Disabilities Act. Celebrate the ADA! July 26, 2022

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Published 2022/07/13

Giving, Receiving, and Sharing Information

Occasionally people outside of my field ask me to explain digital accessibility. I like to break it down to the basics. It’s about communication. About ensuring people can access information, unhindered. There’s a lot more nuance to it, of course. Especially with the minutiae involved in making that happen. But providing a few common examples usually gets the point across. For example, say you built a desktop web page. And users can only identify a link by hovering over it with a mouse or activating the link by clicking on it. Then people who use keyboards without a mouse will be unable to access the links. Likewise, for visually impaired and blind folks who use screen readers, an image on its own isn’t going to be useful. Unless that image is paired with a decent description of it.

Alt Text

A couple of things are on my mind today. First, alternative text on twitter. A while back, I started following the AltTxtReminder account. If you follow that account, you will automatically receive a direct message letting you know when you’ve posted an image without alt text. Twitter doesn’t allow editing published tweets, but one option is to quickly delete the tweet and recreate it with alt text. I think AltTxtReminder is a wonderful service but the account only has about 20,000 followers. A drop in the bucket considering there are close to 400 million twitter users. Today, Twitter officially began rolling out a similar feature. Twitter announced that this feature has been pushed to 10% of global users. Pretty neat.

Fun with Captions

First off, captions are designed for viewers who cannot hear the audio in a video. Subtitles are designed for viewers who can hear but do not understand the language being spoken in the video. I see these terms being used interchangeably. As in this fun write-up: Wet Writhing and Eldritch Gurgling: A Chat With the Stranger Things Subtitles Team. I’m a fan of the show and I’m glad other folks who enjoy it are getting a kick out of the captions. But sometimes less is more. I follow Deaf accessibility professional Meryl Evans on LinkedIn and Twitter and find her posts to be insightful.

If I notice the captions, it’s usually a sign that there’s a problem. I noticed them in Season 4, Chapter 5. There were too many sound captions. It took away from the show.
Imagine watching a baseball game and the captions show [thwack] every time someone hits the ball or [blip] when the ball lands in a glove. That would weigh down the viewing of the game.
Every sound does not need captioning. Just like when we describe images in alt text, the key is to describe them in context to the content. We don’t describe every single detail, only the key points.
The key is to answer: What sound is important to the story that may not be obvious from visuals?
Meryl Evans on LinkedIn

She has additional information on her site including a Captionioning Videos FAQ page and a Complete Guide to Captioning.

Representation

Lastly, a Twitter user posted a video of their latest Lego acquisition:

I got this minifig with a wheelchair and I was so excited like “ooh look at this representation” but turns out it’s also a representation of accessibility issues bc the wheelchair doesn’t fit through the door frames.
T.L. Pavlich

How bittersweet. But as Meryl Evans often says, this is about progress, not perfection.

A stone wall with a paper sign affixed to it with the text Examine what you tolerate

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Published 2022/07/06

Disability Pride Month Challenge

We’re nearly a week into July, but I’ve just found a great way to engage with Disability Pride Month. It’s not too late to join in! Visit Kelsey Lindell’s site to sign up for the challenge. She will email you a calendar of activities. These are things like listening to podcast episodes, watching the Crip Camp documentary, following disability activists, sharing information with friends and colleagues, etc. Below is information from her site.

Disabled people still don’t have our basic civil and human rights:

Due to a loophole in the law, there is no national minimum wage for disabled people. The average amount disabled people get paid is $3.34 an hour, versus the federal standard of $7.25.
83% of disabled women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
Disabled women are twice as likely to be unemployed compared to nondisabled women.
People with intellectual disabilities are 7X more likely to be victims of sexual assault.
When a disabled person is unable to work, then the maximum disability benefit is $841 a month, which is a quarter below the federal poverty line.

This continues because most people don’t know this is happening. So, we’ve created a bootcamp for you. Each day you’ll get a prompt or call to action that will help you learn about ableism, disability history, disability justice and how to be a better ally. We’ll send you lists of amazing disabled creators to follow, podcasts to listen to, free events to attend, entertaining and educational clips and films to watch and so much more!

A charcoal grey flag with a diagonal band from the top left to bottom right corner, made up of five parallel stripes in red, gold, pale grey, blue, and green Description ends

Lastly, I’d like to share the Disability Pride Flag along with what the colors represent.

The Disability Pride Flag was a collaborative design effort by Ann Magill, a disabled woman, with feedback within the disabled community to refine its visual elements:
Having All Six “Standard” Flag Colors: signifying that Disability Community is pan-national, spanning borders between states and nations.
The Black Field: Mourning and rage for victims of ableist violence and abuse
The Diagonal Band: “Cutting across” the walls and barriers that separate the disabled from normate society, also light and creativity cutting through the darkness
The White Stripe: Invisible and Undiagnosed Disabilities
The Red Stripe: Physical Disabilities
The Gold Stripe: Neurodivergence
The Blue Stripe: Psychiatric Disabilities
The Green Stripe: Sensory Disabilities
Ann Magill, creator of the updated Disability Flag

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Published 2022/07/01

July is Disability Pride Month

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law on July 26, 1990. This was decades in the making. For those unfamiliar with the history, one great starting point is the 2020 documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution. Growing up, I didn’t have any summer camp experiences (we were too poor). But I sent my son to a summer camp with an autism inclusion program. He wouldn’t have been able to attend otherwise. This program was in place thanks to the work of those who came before us. Disability Pride Month has been celebrated in July since 1990, along with the ADA victory. The disabled community isn’t a monolith. But members come together to support one another. Disability justice movements advocate for intersectional approaches to meet the needs of people with disabilities. The “nothing about us without us” mantra was born from this movement, expressing the conviction of people with disabilities that we know what is best for us.

Disability Pride Month looks to celebrate disability as an identity by sharing the experiences of the disabled community. The reason behind the month is a chance to share the joy and pride that disabled people can bring to their local and global communities. The disabled community is a vibrant part of society and makes up 15% of the population, and we are proud of that.
Caroline Casey for Forbes

This is the perfect time to remind folks about the anthology, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong.

One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.

From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.
Disability Visibility at Penguin Randomhouse

And Alice Wong is at it, again. This time with a memoir! I’ve pre-ordered my copy from my favorite local bookstore, Moon Palace. You can support local bookstores too!

Book cover for Year of the Tiger An Activist's Life by Alice Wong depicting a red tiger on a yellow background

This groundbreaking memoir offers a glimpse into an activist’s journey to finding and cultivating community and the continued fight for disability justice, from the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project

In Chinese culture, the tiger is deeply revered for its confidence, passion, ambition, and ferocity. That same fighting spirit resides in Alice Wong.

Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer. From her love of food and pop culture to her unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic ableism, Alice shares her thoughts on creativity, access, power, care, the pandemic, mortality, and the future. As a self-described disabled oracle, Alice traces her origins, tells her story, and creates a space for disabled people to be in conversation with one another and the world. Filled with incisive wit, joy, and rage, Wong’s Year of the Tiger will galvanize readers with big cat energy.
Year of the Tiger at Penguin Randomhouse

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Published 2022/06/14

Hold My Bag

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, my childhood was chock full of microaggressions and microinvalidations. At school and at home. Most often related to my ethnicity, gender, intelligence, physical appearance, etc. Some classmates called me “Qaddafi’s daughter” for years, despite my family coming from a completely different country — Lebanon — a continent away from Libya. Often there were outright slurs too. Directed at me, but also bandied about so casually in day-to-day life and in pop culture. It’s appalling. I cringe when I attempt to rewatch many movies and television shows from my youth. We have come a long way but there is still so much work to do. We can and should strive to learn and grow. Which Lizzo has done recently and done well.

Following criticism that her new single, “Grrrls,” included the word spaz, Lizzo announced on Monday that she has released another version of the track with the offending lyric removed. “It’s been brought to my attention that there is a harmful word in my new song,” Lizzo wrote in a statement accompanying the rerelease. “Let me make one thing clear: I never want to promote derogatory language. As a fat black woman in America, I’ve had many hurtful words used against me so I overstand the power words can have (whether intentionally or in my case, unintentionally).”
Lizzo Releases a New Version of ‘Grrrls’

Photo of Lizzo by Arturo Holmes at the Met Gala

Nothing About Us Without Us

When situations like this come up, as they often do, I share one of my favorite resources.

What is self-defined?

A modern dictionary about us.
We define our words, but they don’t define us.

Self-Defined seeks to provide more inclusive, holistic, and fluid definitions to reflect the diverse perspectives of the modern world.

With the foundation of vocabulary, we can begin to understand lived experiences of people different than us. Words can provide us with a sense of identity and allow us to find kinship through common experiences.

selfdefined.app

Ableism and Implicit Bias

Unfortunately, ableism continues to go unaddressed in too many diversity initiatives. Kelsey Lindell has some excellent suggestions on how to avoid situations like these in the future:

Take personal responsibility for your own growth
Educate your teams
Hire Disabled People (For more information: It’s time for a culture shift where disability inclusion is concerned)

Read Kelsey’s entire post for more.

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